And
When the Sky Was Opened
The Twilight Zone
Three astronauts
“leave home” for a day and return. Two go into a bar, the first
calls his parents and doesn’t exist. The second
is berated by his girl and doesn’t exist. The third, in his hospital bed,
hears the tale and doesn’t exist.
“Justify
our leaving home,” says André Breton, who doubtless has his critics.
There’s a girl at the bar, and a nurse at the hospital.
The three Air
Force test pilots are two or one or none at all, finally, it’s like a
countdown. Each remembers a past that isn’t there suddenly, each vanishes
in torment. As in Albee’s Tiny Alice, there is a span of time
missing, the better part of a day in this instance. The experimental
interceptor X-20 is gone from its hangar.
The first
disappears in a phone booth at the bar. The second, who alone remembers the
first, follows outside a room in an Air Force hospital. The third, who
remembers the second, leaves Room 15 empty.
The inspiration
might have come from Eliot, citing Shackleton with reference to Emmaus (and
tacitly Daniel 3:25).
Rod
Taylor’s shattering performance conveys all the degrees of fear and
trepidation, even to roaring panic, as well as other and more amiable
qualities. His finest effect reveals a secure technique in a momentary doubt
over the truth of his own knowledge in the split second after the change of
circumstances following the disappearance of his colleague is reflected in an
altered headline on the day’s newspaper in front of his face. Charles
Aidman and Jim Hutton second him in blank terror and anguish.
Heyes also is
most proficient with another shot, a close-up in profile that follows a curved
tracking pan to full face and cranes down slightly for an up-angle of Taylor in
the throes, against an outside window and then, a monumental head or John the
Baptist’s, alone with ceiling and corner for background.
Col. Harrington
(Aidman) calls home, his parents don’t know him, gone. Lt. Col. Forbes
(Taylor) sends a telegram to his girl and calls the commanding general at
Anderson Air Force Base, they don’t know Harrington either, gone. Maj.
Gart (Hutton) witnesses Forbes’ disappearance and sinks in horror below
the frame, an Air Force doctor and nurse prepare the empty room for malaria
patients.
There is not, nor
was there ever, an X-20 interceptor under the tarpaulin in an Air Force hangar. Tennessee Williams has,
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Those that go on through time not meant
to admit them are the most valiant explorers. |
Elegy
The Twilight Zone
A truly visionary
work, the inspiration for Crichton’s Westworld, and just
anticipating Richardson’s The Loved One. Astronauts
land on a cemetery asteroid in 2185, two hundred years after total war. The
place is divided into Medieval, Roman, Egyptian and Western areas, etc. The
dead are immortalized in their dearest wish, as mayor, for example, surrounded
by imitations and tended by a robot.
The monumental
groupings are virtuosically handled, and the really ultimate precision of the
satire is decisive.
The spaceship
comes from Cunha’s Missile to the Moon
or Fritz Lang’s Frau im Mond, the
machine terminating the human menace is turned off in Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey.
The Chaser
The Twilight Zone
Deceptively
simple as the construction is, it has pulled the wool over some eyes. This is a
tour de force by Heyes, who devised the giant bookcase set and then a
suite of camera movements within its walls.
The
whole thing pivots on George Grizzard, who deftly dances between a monstrously
good performance by John McIntire and another by Patricia Barry, whose
characterization of a femme fatale is a balanced adversary.
Doubtless
this was the inspiration for Richard Quine’s How to Murder Your Wife.
The After Hours
The Twilight Zone
Heyes’
ability to create a surface for Serling’s inwoven style is well-suited to
this monumental composition. The structure is derived from the Divine Comedy
for a disquisition on femininity in the ninth circle of Paradise where the department
store shopper is Queen, the hellish realm of prostituted shopgirls, and the
Purgatorial limbo of manikins.
This formal
division lays the basis for an imagistic unity and a narrative one. The
month-long sojourn among the “outsiders” is the pivot of the image,
and the yachtsman/elevator operator is the key to an occluded version of Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle (filmed by Michael Powell three years later).
Nervous Man in a Four
Dollar Room
The Twilight Zone
Generally
speaking, this owes a debt to Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm
(not counting the one to A Christmas Carol) that is repaid in the
resemblance of William D. Gordon to Darren McGavin, as presented, and that
having been said, the work is divided equally between Joe Mantell in a dual
role as craven and mensch, and the camerawork establishing his dialogues
before a mirror. This is where a great actor in the toils extricates himself
masterfully, and it remains to be said that Cassavetes may have found his
inspiration here for The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
The Howling Man
The Twilight Zone
A bit of what
Welles would call “sidearm snookery”, in that a pungent satire is
presented in the form of “an age-old mystery”.
John Carradine is
costumed, wigged and bearded as DeMille’s Pisgah Moses, with Frederic
Ledebur as Brother Christophorus, having corralled the devil himself in the
Hermitage of the Brotherhood of Truth, after the Great War. H.M. Wynant is a
naïve American who looses the demon innocently, and captures him again after
“the Second World War, the Korean War and the hideous new weapons of
war,” only to let a housekeeper remove the Staff of Truth barring the
door of his confinement.
The
transformation sequence is well-remembered by Huston in The List of Adrian
Messenger (and the omnipresent devil by Stevens in The Greatest Story
Ever Told). The opening anticipates Beckett’s mirlitonnade,
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sitôt sorti de l’ermitage |
The Private World of
Darkness
The Twilight Zone
Beauty is treason
in this Orwellian world, because Truth is Beauty. Heyes’ direction is famously
remarkable for its somber starkness as much as its shocking homage to 1984.
Serling
obfuscates the Keatsian key with an impossible feint toward “the eye of
the beholder”, which only intensifies it. The original title is
“The Private World of Darkness”.
His script opens
with a speech by the leader deriding the open nonconformity of former times as
a laughable impossibility that has now been done away with once and for all.
Heyes sketched
the facial designs himself, for William Tuttle.
Dust
The Twilight Zone
Heyes filming
outdoors does a trick for the viewer, accustomed as one is to his inventions on
the sound stage, by finding in his Western set precisely what is needed.
The truculence of
the script proffers Thomas Gomez as “a pig who sells trinkets at
funerals,” and John Larch as the sheriff who says so. Vladimir Sokoloff
is made to all but whine in his keening, and falls in the dust outright.
Serling’s legerdemain equates the scoffer and mountebank with the
shoddiness of his goods, even if it be a brand-new rope of “five-strand
hemp”.
Jerry Goldsmith
introduces a bass twang later heard amidst the works of Ennio Morricone.
The Invaders
The Twilight Zone
Here we have the
nursery rhyme writ large,
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Four
and twenty tailors Went to kill a snail, The
best man among them Durst not touch her tail; She
put out her horns Like a little Kyloe cow, Run,
tailors, run, Or she’ll kill you all e’en now. |
—a
rhyme that also figures, come to think of it, as the ending of
Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point—unless here we have to do with
“Three Blind Mice” and an allusion to blind doctors and elephants.
Matheson’s
terse poetry describes this failed expedition of U.S. Air Force Space Probe No.
1 as “a bill stamped paid in full.”
Jerry
Goldsmith’s score is varied and remarkable.
The Dead Man
Night Gallery
A companion piece
to “Whisper”, from a theatrical point of view. A hypochondriac and
the son of hypochondriacs is treated by a physician with suggestion, achieving
a state of complete health and something more, an ability to reproduce the
symptoms of any disease whatsoever, instantaneously upon command received by a
prearranged signal.
Might not one
conquer death? The young man is rich, the physician’s wife maintains his
interest. “I’ve created the perfect
rival,” says her husband.
He
forgets the signal that raises the dead, the patient is buried. A colleague
finds the mistake in his notes, the frantic wife pounds on the crypt in code,
the coffin is open when the colleague arrives, the
body locked in death-struggle with the physician on the ground, motionless.
Who Says You Can’t
Make Friends in New York City?
Man from Taos I
McCloud
McCloud
goes to help a lady in distress, but gets caught in a shootout that sends him
back to Taos on Chief Clifford’s orders. At the last minute, the Chief is
kidnapped to force McCloud to act as a courier to Paris.
We
begin with a flashback and voiceover as Chris Coughlin remembers meeting Sam
McCloud in Taos, returning the following year, and finally inviting him to New
York (her cousin is a police commissioner who presumably has some pull with the
department).
So
there he is, Deputy Marshal McCloud, riding the range in Central Park of a
Sunday, meeting Chris for dinner (they quarrel briefly, and she refers to his
home town as “Tacos”), then returning to his hotel (fifth floor)
where he hears a fight going on in the room across the hall. Later, it becomes
so heated he has to intervene, six-shooter in hand, shirtless but wearing his
hat. (“I’m just bunking across the hall there.”)
No
trouble, say the couple, but she telephones him later for a rendezvous
at—a deserted alley, it turns out. A hit man takes a few potshots at him
with a silencer, McCloud kills him, and there you are.
The
press call it frontier justice, and Chief Clifford has no choice but to pack
his cowboy off to Taos (JFK-Albuquerque). Sitting on
the plane at the terminal, McCloud is paged and sent to the locker room of the
Freight Terminal Building, where the Chief is being held at gunpoint (this is
where McCloud’s boss introduces him as a “trainee”). Object:
force McCloud into delivering an attaché case past customs to a Mr. Recent, as
McCloud pronounces his French name, in Paris.
The
greatest glory of Part I, aside from some New York exteriors (especially a shot
from Central Park that anticipates the Parisian second unit footage in Part
II), is Saarinen’s JFK, maneuvered in with a distorting lens to emphasize
the harmoniousness of its lines.
The
Million Dollar Round Up
McCloud
The history of The
Saracen Horse, a fabulous objet d’art worth “twice a million”,
is related by Mr. Jason, given to Richard the Lionhearted after the Third
Crusade as a peace offering by Saladin, lost to Leopold of Germany, later in
the collection of Adolf Hitler, from whom it passed to a Russian general named
Khemidov who was murdered in his bed, finally coming into the hands of Signore
Cimarosa, who bequeaths it to whoever can steal it.
He does so in the
presence of his rivals, whom he describes as “unscrupulous.” They
are presented briefly as an Arab, an Englishman, a Chinaman, a German, and an
American (Mr. Jason). The skylight crashes, a gas canister fills the room, a
cat burglar slides down a rope, the horse disappears.
The script
applies astringent foreshortening in a rather satirical abstraction. An antique
dealer in New York, whose name is Cicero, has hired a professional to filch the
dingus. Cicero is double-crossed and murdered. One of New York’s finest,
a sergeant thrice wounded in the service, takes possession of it on a sudden
impulse. It’s snatched by a petty thief, “seven or eight years
old,” masquerading as a shoeshine boy, who lives in a warehouse.
The little
towser, whose name is Tobe, has also lifted McCloud’s .45, to defend
himself against his rivals. “It’s like having an H-bomb,” he
says, “if you’ve got one you don’t have to use it.”
Cicero’s
pro is still on the trail, and so is Mr. Jason, as well as the others.
The Hotel Dick
Magnum, P.I.
Leder makes you sit up and take notice in the honeymoon
suite at the Hawaiian Gardens, a cat burglar (“the Cat Man of
Kauai”) interrupts the guests, the title character pursues but pauses at
a roof ledge (Vertigo).
Magnum has been
hired to catch the fellow, he is rebuked by the manager for interrogating a
hooker over drinks in the lounge. She hides in his
room, menaced by two thugs. She tried to pick a mobster’s pocket in the
penthouse suite.
Rick, T.C. and
Higgins help out as staff at the 7th Annual International Convention
of Jewelry Designers to catch the manager and the mobster rifling the display
cases, which but for Magnum might have been hit by the Cat Man of Kauai, who in
the end is pursued across the gap.
Heyes has what
this takes. A gag from Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange has Magnum and
the girl temporarily ensconced at the King Kamehameha Club, Rick walks in for
no apparent reason and asks, “are you ready?” She
turns, vexed, to loudly reply, “no, get the hell outta here!” The confab continues, then
the pair return to the Hawaiian Gardens as conventioneers.