Ice
from Space
Tales
of Tomorrow
A single image
covers the ground of a desert air base, spoiling the aspirations of a
general’s son in command.
The unmanned
rocket brings it back, a freezing blast under a blazing sun. All human life is
threatened, the commanding officer goes up himself to dispel it.
Edmon Ryan has
this role, against Raymond Bailey as an auditing congressman (Michael Gorrin is
a resident scientist, Paul Newman a sergeant). The tale is closely related to
“The Case of the Misguided Missile” (Perry Mason).
I’m a Fool
General
Electric Theater
A Midwestern
roustabout (Eddie Albert) regales the camera with the greatest folly of his
youth, the time he played up to a girl as someone else and lost her forever.
Behind him is his
childhood home, his younger self (James Dean) walks on and says goodbye,
he’s off to Sandusky.
There he gets a
job at the race track as a stable hand for Burt (Roy Glenn), a groom.
On the town,
he’s dressed to the nines but discombobulated by a swell. He meets the
girl (Natalie Wood), fobs himself off as a racing scion. They watch a race and
walk by the river in the moonlight.
She catches a
train, promising to write to his nonexistent person.
Older and rueful,
he laments his mistake, the very worst of his life.
One of the
miracles of live television.
Triggers In Leash
Alfred
Hitchcock Presents
The Cold War is
represented as two gunslingers out to do each other in because of a quarrel
over a game of cards, an act of God prevents them, it is seen to be
providential wisdom in a woman who cooks their breakfast at her eating house on
a rainy day.
A comic
masterpiece well-directed by Medford, acted by Gene Barry and Darren McGavin
like Calaveras frogs on a griddle while Ellen Corby tends kitchen.
Into Thin Air
Alfred Hitchcock
Presents
Tragic and dismal
in the last degree, carefully distinguished from Fisher &
Darnborough’s So Long at the Fair, a terrible loss on the
Continent from which Hitchcock can only expect to make a comeback, as he puts
it.
The exquisite
detail is that the missing person’s room has been entirely redecorated so
that memory may not serve for a witness.
Hitchcock
mentions his own earlier version, The Lady Vanishes, Polanski has
another, Frantic, and there is The Man Who Knew Too Much, Foreign
Correspondent, North By Northwest, etc.
A Passage for Trumpet
The
Twilight Zone
A Baudelairean
theme is presented in the guise of an elaborate memory of Capra’s It’s
a Wonderful Life. A jazz trumpeter abandons his life because of his
unsuccess, the angel Gabriel himself appears to set him right about a few
things.
As in
Matheson’s “A World of Difference”, the main theme is taken
from “The double room”, and here another prose poem is brought
technically into play to develop the form.
“You’re
the one that’s alive,” he isn’t heard because they’re
all dead and don’t know it. “Get drunk,” the poet said,
“on wine, on poetry or on virtue, as you please!”
The specific
point at which Serling meets Capra is the selling of the trumpet. Job’s
family in Blake have hung their instruments on the wall, only later do they
take them down and play, a symbol of prayer.
The Man in the Bottle
The Twilight Zone
Into Arthur
Castle’s shop of Antiques & Curios there steps an old woman, a
regular client, who has a family heirloom for sale. Actually it’s a wine
bottle she found in an alley. She’s desperate, he gives her a dollar for
it.
Castle and his
wife are months behind with their bills, the shop is on the verge of
bankruptcy. It killed his grandfather and his father, and has become “a
shrine to failure itself.”
The bottle has a
genie in it. He fixes the display case, showers them with money, endows Castle
with absolute power and takes it back. These are the four wishes granted once
in “a century and a year”.
The tax man takes
the fortune, Castle is Hitler in the bunker, the flask of cyanide he flings to
the floor in renunciation becomes the wine bottle in shards on the shop floor.
Sweeping them up, he breaks the display case again.
The Underground Court
The
Untouchables
The S.S. Morro
Castle burns, a mob collector jumps ship with a million in his money belt.
A henchman is grilled by the title characters, who shine flashlights at him in
the dark. “Judge” Foley turns on the light. “I’ve heard
you’re psycho,” says the witness. “The word is
psychic,” the judge replies.
The henchman is
tailed to the collector, who escapes by answering an ad to share a ride with
Mrs. Wagnahl on her annual trip to commemorate her honeymoon. She kills him en
route and buries him next to her husband and all the other men who’ve
made the trip. She dies shot by Foley after an interrogation and a fiery
shootout with Ness and the squad, having memorized the collector’s list
of mob names but too weak to repeat it for Ness.
Richard Devon
plays to Joan Blondell’s “devil-worshiper”, a slight
exaggeration of her cheeriest demeanor. She’s fantastic, but as Judge
Foley says, “we’re big business”, Devon hews the line of
admiration and annoyance. Blondell’s death scene in a hospital bed moves
from exhaustion to a Mae West archetype and a unique expression of beauty.
The Lily Dallas Story
The Untouchables
Lily was brought
up by Jack “Legs” Diamond, she’s a mastermind of sorts
(“not smart enough to stay out of prison,” Ness observes) who makes
her world into an image she keeps fresh, like the clientele at her Fleur de Lis
Beauty Salon. Her latest husband is her own creation, a Tommy-gun expert called
“Blackie”, really a mild man with a manufactured reputation, once a
bootlegger.
Her gang kidnaps
a millionaire and then kills him on her orders. The ransom money is marked.
They rob a bank and kill their own inside man to silence him.
Blackie
won’t do in a recalcitrant fence, Lily takes the Tommy gun and blasts him
herself, then a toy merry-go-round in his shop because it reminds her of the
daughter she neglects.
She dumps her
husband for a bank robber, and dies when the worm turns.
The Nick Acropolis Story
The Untouchables
Nick’s
flower shop is a front, he’s got the book in six states, from horse
racing to cockfighting. But he has a brother-in-law who plays and loses with
the proceeds, and a henchman who wants to be big.
The
brother-in-law kills another bookie to pay back Nick, his sister won’t
let Nick kill him. The henchman wants Nick dead, he says, and kills the
brother-in-law when he tries it. Nick makes him a partner.
Nitti wants half,
Nick threatens war, Nitti takes a quarter. The partner sends two hoods to Nitti
from Nick, they’re gunned down after a warning from the man who sent them.
Nick is about to
go under, he reasons it out. Armed with a pair of shears, he goes after his
partner in the flower shop (“I’m gonna cut your heart out”)
and is wounded. Ness and the squad pull up and shoot it out with the partner,
who is killed.
“Truly loved,”
was Nick. His wife walks out after her brother’s death, but
wouldn’t abandon him for her brother’s sake. Their marriage
survives his imprisonment.
Ness has a time
with Nick’s cryptic books, an expert has to be called in, leading to a
fortune kept in a safe deposit box.
“You are
me,” says the overthrown dictator to the victorious rebel, “we care
for no-one but ourselves.” His magic mirror shows the face of his
assassins.
And sure enough,
there they are, among the new government, more quickly dispatched even than the
thousands of prisoners executed round the clock.
This is a
summation of “Mr. Denton on Doomsday” and “A Game of
Pool” on the subject of faith and works, and briskly posits a state of
war between man and God “through a glass, darkly,” suggesting the
game is up entirely without a state of grace supervening.
Deaths-Head Revisited
The Twilight Zone
A dramatic
representation of the witness borne by such places as Dachau, and therefore a plea
against the simple desire to see them effaced.
The Kommandant of
Dachau returns for a visit. The drama has precisely two events. Oscar Beregi as
the Kommandant exults in his reminiscences, turns and sees Joseph Schildkraut
in a prisoner’s uniform. The ghosts of all the inmates pronounce
sentence, and the Kommandant is struck mad.
Serling’s
formulation on the madman’s previous state is simple, he and his fellows
“walked the earth without a heart”, the master race followed
orders. The entire work is a variant of “The Obsolete Man”.
Death Ship
The Twilight Zone
Even in the
future, Mallarmé’s shipwreck, a perennial item.
Scenes from home,
that is to say Earth, people the thing.
The planet has no
name, thirteenth in its star system, semi-tropical, freezing at night.
The question is
begged ad infinitum with an allusion to the Flying Dutchman in
“the darkest nightmare reaches of the Twilight Zone.”
To Trap a Spy
The new Western
Ntumban premier is a tool of WASP.
U.N.C.L.E. is
under the impression that he is targeted for assassination, his War and
Economics ministers are, in Maryland, at the Global Chemical Corporation plant
run by Andrew Vulcan, an investor in Western Ntumba, synthetics are the main
product.
“The Vulcan
Affair”.
Inspired score by
Jerry Goldsmith.
A common American
housewife is inveigled into it as an old college chum of Vulcan’s,
gussied up for Washington society.
Luciana Paluzzi
is a WASP agent, Patricia Crowley the American materfamilias, Fritz
Weaver the schemer.
The Hunting Party
Stroheim’s Greed
is ultimately the key to the all-encompassing satire of Medford’s film,
as revealed in the final scenes. Tycoon and outlaw and borrowed bride die in
the desert after a long pursuit (Stroheim has a mule stand in for the girl).
Critics could not
wait, despite a screenplay signed by the author of Pollack’s The
Scalphunters and Laven’s Sam Whiskey, and did not see this,
which left them at a disadvantage. “Seldom,” said Variety,
“has so much fake blood been splattered for so little reason,”
which is an ironic observation quite close to the meaning of the film. Roger
Greenspun (New York Times) found only “a really stupid
movie”. Halliwell similarly has “crude, brutish and repellent
melodrama”, which is pretty much how Mordaunt Hall saw Greed in
1924 without missing the point.
The Organization
The basis of the
screenplay is Robert Wise’s Executive
Suite. The technique and style reflect Medford’s extensive work on The Untouchables.
These points have
evidently been lost on critics. The chase and gun-battle in an unfinished BART
station is later moved down south for the MTA in Donner’s Lethal Weapon 3, however.
The
“domestic asides” complained of as immaterial in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! are even more
concentrated, and now mirror the action even more obliquely as brief but solid
increments of the main story looked at another way.
Century
Furniture, a manufacturer that also imports from Hong Kong, is a front for
heroin smuggling via Paris and
Istanbul (an expressive range of metaphor with San Francisco). College kids, a
Marine vet, a preacher, a former dealer (the collegiates are in track &
field at San Francisco State, one works in a sporting goods store by day and
studies law at night) rob the place of its latest heroin shipment in the
film’s opening sequence. They blow up the factory gate upon leaving, to
bring in the cops.
A Century
Furniture executive is found shot to death, they didn’t do it. Det. Tibbs
takes the case personally.
A very wealthy night
watchman has a beautiful wife in a posh condominium, she professes ignorance of
his activities but turns out to be the carrier. Two executives of the
organization silenced the victim and are themselves assassinated before they
can testify.
The screenwriter
is James R. Webb, the score is by Gil Mellé.