Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Bullet for Baldwin

A clerk in an investment banking firm is fired for incompetence after an insignificant lapse, and kills his boss.

The following Monday morning, everything is as it was before, the boss is alive and smiling, the other partner in the firm even gives the clerk a raise. Stress is thought to have caused his hallucination.

But the partner really is dead, replaced by an actor at the other’s behest, with the idea of floating spurious stock and joining the widow elsewhere.

The clerk is thought to be a loose end after all, and is fired. Exactly as before, he takes a revolver from his desk and shoots his boss, this time the other one. But now he doesn’t face the prospect of a weekend racked with guilt, persuaded as he is that it’s all in his mind.

The great performance by John Qualen is ably seconded by Philip Reed as the polished schemer, and Sebastian Cabot in a dual role (his American accent as the actor is rare). The scene is laid in “San Francisco, 1909”, to accommodate the revolver.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Nightmare in 4-D

Jane Austen might have written this, in the sour frame of mind with which she regarded Georgie Porgie. It is, relative to her acerbity, enormously detailed, but it comes to the same thing.

The husband in 3-D helps the struggling actress in 4-D with her groceries. She’s just won her first Broadway part, she has champagne, a friend is coming over.

At two a.m. she knocks on his door. Her friend is dead, shot from the fire escape. They carry the body down to the basement.

His wife is wise to his flirtations. The police learn she’s been seeing the friend in her loneliness. The husband reads crime novels, they give him nightmares. He was watching television at the time.

The police know this because the lady upstairs called down to complain. The wife is innocent, she took the call.

Amid the mad intricacy, it’s the husband who slipped out the window and down the fire escape to kill his rival. Next morning, it all seemed a dream to him, a nightmare in which he had to go a second time to recover the sash of his robe where he dropped it, under the body in the basement. But the sash isn’t stuffed in his robe pocket, it’s right through the loops where he left it. And when he goes downstairs to look, the body is gone. There’s a police lieutenant standing there instead.

The Twilight Zone: The Odyssey of Flight 33

The absolute surrealism of this episode is a continuous narrative. A stewardess enters the cockpit and jocularly announces that her colleagues are eager to land, some having dates, one going to the opera, and one available if there are any takers. The captain feels a sudden surge, a tailwind carries the plane forward at a fantastic pace, they experience a “sound shock wave”. Out of radio contact with the ground, and flying above the clouds, they descend to observe landmarks. New York is denuded of buildings and people, only the forest primeval being sampled by an ithyphallic brontosaurus.

They regain altitude to repeat the experiment. The first stewardess tells the operagoer that a real Valhalla is looming, and she is to maintain a “coffee, tea or milk” demeanor. A second descent reveals the city, and radio contact is made with Idlewild, which denies all knowledge of the airline, of radar or of jets, but invites the crew to land according to the demands of fuel. The runway is short, they prepare to land anyway, and below them see the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 World’s Fair. They regain altitude to repeat the experiment.

The script is related both to Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” (in Histoires Extraordinaires) and the television series The Time Tunnel as well.

The Twilight Zone: The Rip Van Winkle Caper

Homage to a great American author from another. Washington Irving’s story is about a man who goes to sleep in a colony belonging to the Crown and wakes up in a state belonging to the Union.

Serling combines the parable of the talents to create a future in which hoarded gold is worthless because the commodity has become a manufactured article.

The construction is based on identifiable models such as Stroheim’s Greed and Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Kubrick was evidently struck by the upraised arm and the automobile of the future, two pivotal images in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Thematic interrelationships among the various Twilight Zone episodes are many and profound, often to a surprising degree. An idea is developed or considered from another angle, or given a comic reversal, which obtains here by comparison with “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim”, for instance, or “I Shot an Arrow Into the Air”.

Combat!: The Quiet Warrior

Lt. Hanley is advancing through woods at night in the rain. Shells land nearby, he flings himself face-down in the mud. Battalion HQ has orders for him, his face caked with mud he sits on a transport plane, showers and sips a drink in the cocktail lounge of the Hotel Savoy, London.

He is to accompany an OSS man on a secret mission to extricate a French physicist, on the strength of a youthful acquaintance. There is a similarity to Lang’s Cloak and Dagger.

J.D. Cannon provides the portrait of an agent. He is calm, natural and cheerful, with a working London cover as a brash American journalist. In France he is a careless villageois or a hatchet-faced German officer.

One of his Maquis associates is a traitor, he gives each of them a different rendezvous point, then explains to all at once what he has done, they will climb the belltower together and see where the Germans have gone to meet them. “OK,” he concludes, “let’s go to church.” The traitor bolts and is shot by a German sentry.

Hanley knows better than to volunteer, he accepts the assignment for an old college chum, the physicist’s son, an exchange student killed by the Gestapo in a previous unsuccessful attempt at escape.

Levitt’s teleplay introduces two recondite terms of use in this branch of service, “exfiltration”, which simply means getting back out once you’re in, and “authentification”, looking like you belong there.