The Silent Partner
The Untouchables

Eddie Paris, comic at the Club Tunisian, tips Ness off about the proprietor’s scheme to move into alky financed by “a nameless, faceless somebody known only as the partner,” formerly with Capone et al., the top man.

Eddie’s taken for a ride. The chanteuse at the club was his girl, Eddie had a chance at George White’s Scandals on Broadway, the proprietor refused.

This anonymous power that be now moves to cover his tracks. Bert Convy is the comic, a very young and brunette Dyan Cannon the chanteuse, Charles McGraw the proprietor, Allyn Joslyn a crooked lawyer and hit man.

The Whitey Steele Story
The Untouchables

Joe Kulak out of New York and Gregory Pindar out of Singapore and Shanghai take over and establish a nationwide system for transmitting horse-racing results, and plan to distribute heroin.

The system involves a telescope and a signal from the track. Pindar prints up scratch sheets with a special code indicating the arrival of goods from his Asian dealers.

Beecher Asbury reluctantly persuades Ness to go undercover as “Whitey Steele” in San Francisco, working for Pindar and known by Kulak’s wire operator, whose Trans-Pacific News Service has been taken over.

Mobsters from 24 cities gather on Geary Street for the opening ceremonies, Ness is told to verify their identities at the door.

The Dummy
The Twilight Zone

Some of Serling’s best inspirations (like Shakespeare’s) come from adapting other material, as here. The poor fool of a ventriloquist thinks inspiration is his enemy, which is why he turns in his dilemma to his other dummy, Goofy Goggles.

The real situation is portrayed in the last scene. The artist is the dummy, whether his poem is dictated by Apollo or the Holy Ghost, the muse or his unconscious (Borges says this somewhere). It was for want of understanding this that Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending was derided as silly and idle.

Those expressionist angles of Biberman’s are not used better anywhere else, the camera turns toward its side to convey the ventriloquist’s shock, and he is thrown back against a wall upward like a Fred Astaire with two left feet.

The Incredible World of Horace Ford
The Twilight Zone

He’s a bore with his childhood memories, until the children they were beat the child he was unconscious for not inviting them to his birthday party.

A designer at the toy factory, who won’t stint and is fired.

He lives with his mother and an indulgent wife, both of whom he supports.

On Randolph Street, it’s just as it was.

Number 12 Looks Just Like You
The Twilight Zone

With a script as acutely personal as this, a personal response from the director can be expected. Richard Long’s strange double performance as Dr. Rex and Prof. Sig certainly reflects Biberman’s Scottish Chinaman in Salome Where She Danced (with an anticipation of The Producers).

At nineteen, one is given a range of body types to select for the transformation, which is obligatory. In order to quell unfairness, all are beautiful and durable. When one young lady objects, citing Shakespeare, Keats and Shelley, she is greeted with shock and surprise, those books having been banned years before. She continues with Aristotle and Dostoevsky, to which the reply is, “the introduction of smut into this interview will not help your case.”

All this is somewhere between She and The Stepford Wives, and ends with the young lady choosing No. 8, exactly like her friend. “Portrait of a young lady in love,” Serling says over the last shot of the girl before a mirror, “with herself.”

I Am the Night—Color Me Black
The Twilight Zone

The significance of the title is that there are persons who conceal the truth. The sheriff of this “remote little Midwestern village” conceals evidence in a murder investigation because, as he ruefully admits, he wants to be re-elected. The newspaper editor doesn’t print it because he wants to sell papers. Even a minister of the gospel accepts the man’s guilt at face value, finding it more convenient to preach a sermon against hatred than to see the truth brought to light. This is figured dramatically as literal darkness on the town at nine-thirty in the morning when an innocent man is hanged.

Serling lends himself to the mystification by echoing the sermon. This is a device not uncommon in the earlier seasons to give a magician’s patter at the end for the prestidigitation in the teleplay. The fact that the murder victim is “a cross-burning psychopathic bully” has no particular bearing, and similar instances of darkness by daylight are reported in Dallas, Texas, a prison in Moscow, a portion of the Berlin Wall, all of North Vietnam and part of Chicago.