The Twilight Zone: The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

A psychological study of the American middle class from the vantage point of the agitator. The basis of this is doubtless Fritz Lang’s Fury. Winston has an eloquent device, the hammer in a close-up of the handyman’s overalls, masquerading as a means of identification when he returns from his walk to Floral Street.

The Twilight Zone: The Big Tall Wish

“The Big Tall Wish” is answered in the Psalm by the Lord unto my Lord, on enemies and footstools. The boxer to whom this applies cannot believe his luck, and wishes it away through a “strange and perverse disinclination to believe in a miracle.”

Surely there are preaching ministers of the Gospel even today who spare not the rod when it comes to inculcating the needfulness of faith in regeneration, and the efficacity of the Savior’s intercession.

Winston has a stark technique of freeze-frames, a glass floor representing the mat and an up-angle through it on the unconscious boxer left and the referee above him counting right, with the arena lights behind him, like a magician’s counterindications, so that it takes a moment to grasp the transition.

The Twilight Zone: Stopover in a Quiet Town

The distaff side of “It’s a Good Life”. In this version, a gigantic little girl from another planet toys with two New Yorkers in a playland called Centerville, where everything is false and empty and it’s quite like the speech on virgins in Michael Ritchie’s The Candidate.

Winston misses nothing. After the kitchen drawers are found to be false fronts, the phallic handle of the refrigerator is seen in the foreground, before the refrigerator is opened to reveal props for food.

Outside, “there’s not even a bird singing.” They dub the place Hicksville, imagine the inhabitants peeking out from curtains at them, and prefer the big city, “at least there you know when you’re being stared at.”

At the church, where the signboard memorializes M-G-M’s set decorator Keogh Gleason, they ring the bell but no-one hears it. The trees and grass are fake.

The train takes them back to Centerville again (“a real nice place to raise your kids up,” as Frank Zappa said).

The subject of Rev. Kosh Gleason’s sermon is “Parishes”.

“There isn’t a thing or a person alive in this town, and yet we’re being watched.”

Hawaii Five-O: A Matter of Mutual Concern

There’s a young crime boss in Hawaii who has what the French call an American uncle known as Big Uncle, in Miami, on whose authority the other three crime bosses are eliminated, or rather the middle-class one is murdered by the upper-class one (self-defense) who goes to jail, and the elderly one (whose nephew sells him out) goes to McGarrett for protection and receives (after the young crime boss is slain) a one-way ticket to Taiwan.

Alvin Sapinsley’s script is full of great jokes on the surface, too (the Hawaiian crime bosses are, in the order mentioned, Korean, Japanese, Samoan and Chinese). Winston gets great acting from everybody, to the extent that David Opatoshu’s maddeningly pedantic Chinaman is thought by some fans to be too much so.

Manu Tupou as the Samoan, for instance, has a very fine delivery of this line as he opens a decanter, referring to the squeamishness of the other bosses toward killing Big Uncle’s emissary, French McCoy, “like young girls about to go [swift sniff of the stopper] skinny-dipping for the first time”.

There is an evident relationship to Richard Thorpe’s Vengeance Valley with its little “kicker” theme.