The Lone Survivor
Night Gallery

An image of fear, the mirror up to nature on a scale grand enough to scare away the boogey man.

Mortal fear, a crewman on the Titanic. He mans a lifeboat by putting on a woman’s dress, the cable parts, he drifts alone.

The Lusitania stops to pick him up, impossibly, and is sunk. Then the Andrea Doria.

Levitt directs this for the mirror of fear in John Colicos as the crewman. Staid English officers attend him, calm French officers.

Serling addresses material previously examined for The Twilight Zone under another guise as “Judgement Night”. Here again, the ships are unreal, and a damnation is described.

The Concrete Jungle Caper
McCloud

The Rhigas family interests extend to Beirut, Lebanon and the French Riviera. DDT (“The D ain’t for Dolores!”) wants the market, Harry Hague is merely a cutthroat entrepreneur out for himself.

The NYPD leans on pushers to force the Rhigas hand, buy from McCloud (disguised as the now-arrested Hague) or do without. DDT perishes of his own greed, the Rhigas concern is neatly folded up, and the now-escaped Hague (“I bought off half the gendarmes in France.”) is nailed for cutting one throat too many.

The final deal goes down at a Skid Row Mission, where the Rhigas paterfamilias emerges from retirement because both sons are in prison. McCloud pursues him in a commandeered garbage truck as he flees in a car belonging to the Mission.

The second deal goes awry in France when the police bungle the bust and shoot down Hague’s helicopter, apparently killing his accomplice Madge and destroying the million dollars McCloud has signed for (“but I gave you a million dollars worth of heroin,” he tells a French police official, who insists on repayment, “that was contraband! This is cash!”).

The original deal takes place at night somewhere in France. A drogueur addresses a strangely familiar figure as “Cowboy”, and the fellow quietly draws a switchblade (Harry Hague).

The script is so brilliant (with its gags like the sign in the prison library, ALL BOOKS MUST BE SEARCHED BY CORRECTIONAL OFFICER) that Levitt has only to take it all in, savoring a bit of the acting, and controlling gags like the shot of a go-go dancer’s swinging hips, which pulls back and tilts up to reveal Teri Garr undercover.

This is a rare example of a screenwriter rather than a director (or production unit) taking on the burden of composition, so that Victor Jory can appear satisfactorily in a bit part, for example.