Originally cast in the lead was boxer Archie Moore, but when he couldnt keep up the pace casting director John Erman replaced him with Ivan Dixon, whom he had seen on the New York stage. Dixon, unfortunately best known as a regular on Hogan’s Heroes, is an extremely talented actor, and he turns in a delicately balanced performance of both strength and vulnerability. Also excellent is Steven Perry as Henry, the little boy. His is an agonized performanceand it is a performance, not just a bland recitation of lines, as is so often the case with child actors.
The director of The Big Tall Wish was Ron Winston, and he was met with problems here far removed from those he had encountered on The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. One of these was one shared by every television director whos ever had to stage a prize fight: how to give the feel of a crowded arena without being able to hire several hundred extras. To overcome this, in The Big Tall Wish the camera comes in close. We see the hands of the spectators as they react in various ways to the fight. One man eats popcorn, a woman peeks out from behind spread fingers, a mans fists mimic the blows he sees falling in the ring. Through these few shots a composite impression is formed of a larger reality.
Winston was particularly skilled at dealing with fragile, intangible emotions which are at the heart of this piece notably the hope, love and faith of the little boy. Says Buck Houghton, It was sentimental and he was sentimental. He was very good at extracting sentiment without getting sugary about it, very restrained.
A NICE PLACE TO VISIT (4/15/60)
Written by Charles Beaumont
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: John Brahm
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: stock
Cast:
Rocky Valentine: Larry Blyden Mr. Pip: Sebastian Cabot Policeman: John Close Croupier: Wayne Tucker First Beautiful Girl: Sandra Warner Dancing Girl: Barbara English Crap Dealer: Peter Hornsby Midget Policeman: Nels Nelson Parking Attendant: Bill Mullikin
Portrait of a man at work, the only work he’s ever done, the only work he knows. His name is Henry Francis Valentine but he calls himself Rocky, because that’s the way his life has been rocky and perilous and uphill at a dead run all the way. He’s tired now, tired of running or wanting, of waiting for the breaks that come to others but never to him, never to Rocky Valentine … A scared, angry little man. He thinks it’s all over now, but he’s wrong. For Rocky Valentine, it’s just the beginning.”
After being shot to death by a policeman, petty thief Rocky Valentine revives to find himself unhurt and in the company of a seemingly good-natured, white-haired fat man named Pip. Pip explains that he is Valentines guide, and that he has been instructed to supply him with whatever he wishes. At first, Valentine is suspicious to the point of shooting Pip point-blank in the head. But when Pip isnt harmed at all by this, Rocky concludes that Pip must be his guardian angel, and he must be in Heaven! Accordingly, he goes on a good-time spree filled with gambling and beautiful women. The only problem is that everything is too good: Rocky wins at every game, and any woman he wants is his for the asking. All of this very quickly becomes insufferably stifling. Rocky pleads with Pip to be sent to the Other Place. With a gleeful ferocity, Pip replies, This is the Other Place!
A scared, angry little man who never got a break. Now he has everything hes ever wantedand hes going to have to live with it for eternity … in the Twilight Zone.
Charles Beaumonts fourth and final first-season entry was his weakest. Its basically a prolonged oneliner. However, as regarded the casting of the lead, Beaumont had something truly original and bizarre in mind. He wrote Serling: Ive had an absolutely screwball idea. Your first reaction will be one of dumb astonishment, followed by rapid blinking and fantods. If for any reason we cant get Mickey Rooney for The Other Place [the scripts original title], why dont you essay the role of Rocky yourself} (Dumb astonishment? Rapid blinking? Fantods?) When I mentioned it to Helen, she said, Swell, now hell think you consider him the cheap crook type. I cuffed her lightly about the ears, explaining that if I know writers, its a good bet Old Rod has the same secret ambition I do … to wit, to act. Were all hams, in our own ways, each of us planning to write himself into a part some day; is it not so? My opinion is that it would be a lot of fun all around, that if you can indeed act youd be keen in the role, and that the concomitant publicity would be unbad.
Serling passed on the idea, instead casting Larry Blyden. Unfortunately, Blydens performance seriously mars the episode. Although he is likeable, his broad portrayal of Valentine comes across like a third-rate composite impression of James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and George Raft.
Buck Houghton feels that the material dictated Blydens approach. You had to do something extravagant to keep it from just laying there. If he had just gone for it and said, Gee, thats a great broad. You mean shes mine? it would have been about as interesting as yesterdays fish. But he said, Hoo boy! Really?! Ha ha!! It may not have been the right thing to do, but it was something to do.
If there is a saving grace in this episode, it must surely lie in the cultured and malevolent performance of Sebastian Cabot as Pip, Valentines guardian angel. This part demanded a great sacrifice of Cabot, though. His black hair and neatly groomed black beard were among his trademarks but they just wouldnt do for a character presumed to be an angel throughout most of the show. His hair would have to be white.
That was quite a chore, Buck Houghton remembers. Its very hard to whiten hair. What they usually use is thinned zinc oxide and it looks like thinned zinc oxide. Its bad. And yet this fellow had to have white hair, it really made a big difference. And what they do to really make it white is they bleach it and it aint very good for your hair. We really had to talk Sebastian into doing it, because then he had to be white-haired for three months, until it grew out. That was a major task, to get him to do that.
NIGHTMARE AS A CHILD (4/29/60)
Written by Rod Serling
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Alvin Ganzer
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Jerry Goldsmith
Cast:
Helen Foley: Janice Rule Markie: Terry Burnham Peter Selden: Shepperd Strudwick Doctor: Michael Fox Police Lt.: Joe Perry Little Girl: Suzanne Cupito
Month of November; hot chocolate, and a small cameo of a childs face, imperfect only in its solemnity. And these are the improbable ingredients to a human emotion, an emotion, say, likefear. But in a moment this woman, Helen Foley, will realize fear. She will understand what are the properties of terror. A little girl will lead her by the hand and walk with her into a nightmare.
Coming home from work, schoolteacher Helen Foley encounters Markie, a strangely-serious little girl, on the stairs outside her apartment. She invites her in for a cup of hot chocolate and finds that the child seems to know herand is particularly insistent on jogging her memory about a vaguely familiar-looking man she saw earlier that day. This does not seem important until the same man arrives at Helens door. Frightened, Markie runs out the back way. The man is Peter Selden, who worked for Helens mother when Helen was a child and who claims to have been the first to find her mothers body after she was murderedan event Helen witnessed but has blocked from her conscious mind. When she mentions Markie, Selden remarks that this was Helen’s nickname as a child and shows her an old photo of herself. She and Markie are one and the same! After Selden leaves, Markie reappears. She is Helen, and shes here for a reason: to force Helen to remember her mothers death. Just then, Selden returns. He confesses to the murder and explains that he has tracked Helen down in order to get rid of the sole witness to his crime. He lunges at her, but she manages to get out to the hallway and push him down the stairs to his death. Thanks to the intervention of Markiewho was, in fact, no more than the part of herself that did remember, trying desperately to save her Helen survives.
Miss Helen Foley, who has lived in night and who will wake up to morning. Miss Helen Foley, who took a dark spot
from the tapestry of her life and rubbed it cleanthen stepped back a few paces and got a good look at the Twilight Zone.
Immediately on the heels of A Nice Place to Visit came two original fantasies by Serling, one dealing with confrontation, the other with escape.
The story of Nightmare as a Child, when stripped to its essentials, seems compelling, but in execution, the episode falls flat. Part of this must certainly be attributed to poor casting. The character played by Miss Rule (who, incidentally, was named Helen Foley, after one of Serlings favorite high school teachers) seems hard and unsympathetic, and the child is little more than harsh and irritating. Neither Serlings script nor Alvin Ganzers direction do much to bring the story alive, either.
But then perhaps a major part of the trouble resides in the fact that the story isnt really much of a fantasy. If you assume that the appearance of the child is a hallucination on Helens part, manufactured by her subconscious in attempt to bring her to a realization about the identity of the killer, then the episode isnt fantasy at all. Like Where Is Everybody? Nightmare As a Child is totally rational. And for The Twilight Zone, anything that remains so grounded in reality must be considered a disappointment.
A STOP AT WILLOUGHBY (5/6/60)
Written by Rod Serling
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Robert Parrish
Director of Photography:George T. Clemens
Music: Nathan Scott
Cast:
Gart Williams: James Daly Jane Williams: Patricia Donahue Mr. Misrell: Howard Smith Conductor #1: Jason Wingreen Conductor #2: James Maloney Helen: Mavis Neal Boy One: Billy Booth Boy Two: Butch Hengen Trainman: Ryan Hayes James Maloney and James Daly Man on Wagon: Max Slaten
This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’s protection fell away from him and left him a naked target. He’s been cannonaded this afternoon by all the enemies of his life. His insecurity has shelled him, his sensitivity has straddled him with humiliation, his deep-rooted disquiet about his own worth has zeroed in on him, landed on target, and blown him apart. Mr. Gart Williams, ad agency exec, who in just a moment will move into the Twilight Zonein a desperate search for survival.”
During a meeting, Mr. Misrell, Williamss boss, savagely dresses him down for losing an important automobile account. Riding home on the train, Williams has a dream in which he is on a very different train in July of 1880, entering a restful little town named Willoughby, a place (as the conductor tells him) where a man can slow down to a walk and live his life full measure. He realizes that he isnt made for the competitive life, that Willoughby is where he belongs. But when he tries to explain this to his wife an acquisitive woman who sorely regrets her choice of husbandhe receives only ridicule. Ultimately, the pressure of his job causes Williams to crack. When he calls his wife to tell her that hes quitting and to beg her to wait at home for him, she hangs up. On the commuter train, Williams feels devastated, his life a shambles. Miraculously, he suddenly finds himself back in Willoughby, where the townsfolk greet him warmly by name hes home to stay. Meanwhile, the commuter train has come to a full stop. It seems that Mr. Williams, a regular passenger, shouted something about Willoughby, then jumped off the train to his death. Thebody is loaded into a hearse. The sign on the back Willoughby Funeral Home.
Willoughby? Maybe its wishful thinking nestled in a hidden part of a mans mind, or maybe its the last stop in the vast design of thingsor perhaps, for a man like Gart Williams, who climbed on a world that went by too fast, its a place around the bend where he could jump off Willoughby ? Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity, and is a part of the Twilight Zone.
A Stop at Willoughby can be considered a companion piece to Walking Distance. Like its predecessor, it concerns a middle-aged advertising executive near the breaking point. What differentiates this episode from Walking Distance, and what allows the ending to be happy instead of melancholy, is the fact that Willoughby, unlike Martin Sloans Homewood, is clearly a fantasy. Gart Williams doesnt travel into the past. Instead, he escapes into a dream. This point is made clear by the fact that everyone in town knows Williamss name and that the entire place seems oriented specifically to him (as a nice touch of irony, when he returns to Willoughby to stay, the band in the park strikes up Beautiful Dreamer).
A Stop at Willoughby is one of the most enduring episodes of The Twilight Zone, but not so much due to specific characters or situations. In And When the Sky Was Opened and Mirror Image, Serling had tapped into a universal fear. Here, he did the opposite. In creating and defining Willoughby, he stumbled upon an area of universal desire. Virtually all people find themselves in pressure situations at least sometime in their lives, times when they feel ill-equipped to come up to the demands
Gart Williams and boys from his Willoughby past placed upon them. Who at these times wouldnt like to escape to a paradise with no pressures or demands?
THE CHASER (5/13/60)
Written by Robert Presnell, Jr.
Based on the short story The Chaser by John Collier
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Douglas Heyes
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: stock
Cast:
Roger Shackleforth: George Grizzard Prof. Daemon: John Mclntire Leila: Patricia Barry Homburg: J. Pat OMalley Blonde: Barbara Perry Fat Lady: Marjorie Bennett Bartender: Duane Grey Tall Man: Rusty Wescoatt
Mr. Roger Shackleforth. Age: youthful twenties. Occupation: being in love. Not just in love, but madly, passionately, illogically, miserably, all-consumingly in lovewith a young woman named Leila who has a vague recollection of his face and even less than a passing interest. In a moment youll see a switch, because Mr. Roger Shackleforth, the young gentleman so much in love, will take a short but meaningful journey into the Twilight Zone .
Desperate to win his Leilas affections, Roger obtains a love potion from an enigmatic professor named A. Daemon. Visiting Leilas apartment, he manages to slip her the potion in a glass of champagne. It worksbut too well. After six months of marriage, Roger is so sick of Leilas nauseatingly intense devotion that he resolves to do her in. Returning to the professor Roger pays a thousand dollars for a dose of his guaranteed glove cleaner (no trace, no odor, no taste, no way to detect its presenceand its sure). At home, he slips the liquid into Leilas champagne. But upon hearing that she is expecting a baby, his shock is so great that he drops the glass. Outside on the patio, Prof. Daemon reclines on a deck chair, smoking a cigar. He blows a heart-shaped smoke ring and disappears.
Mr. Roger Shackleforth, who has discovered at this late date that love can be as sticky as a vat of molasses, as unpalatable as a hunk of spoiled yeast, and as all-consuming as a six-alarm fire in a bamboo and canvas tent. Case history of a lover boy who should never have entered the Twilight Zone.
Very little distinguishes The Chaser other than the fact that it was the only episode of the first season not written by Serling, Beaumont, or Matheson. Adapted by Robert Presnell, Jr., from a superior and much shorter story by John Collier, this script was originally written for and aired live on The Billy Rose Television Theatre in 1951. Colliers story, in its entirety, consists simply of a dialogue between two men one young, one oldin a tiny, sparsely furnished room. The young man has come to buy a love potion. The old man sells it to him for a dollar, darkly hinting that in years to come, when he is more prosperous, he will no doubt return to buy the five-thousand-dollar spot remover (… quite imperceptible to any known method of autopsy).
In enlarging this piece for television, a number of scenes between the young man and the object of his affection, both before and after administration of the potion, were added. This had the unfortunate result of obscuring and trivializing what is essentially a beautifully conceived vignette. However, the final shot of the episode, Professor Daemon blowing a heart-shaped smoke ring that rises into th
e night sky as it dissipates, is not without its charm. This shot was accomplished by first filming John Mclntire pretending to blow a smoke ring and then superimposing a shot of a smoky-looking heart airbrushed on a black card. The card was moved back and forth in front of the camera and made to appear to dissipate by simply taking it out of focus. A clever bit of camera magic in an episode with little magic itself.
A PASSAGE FOR TRUMPET (5/20/60)
Written by Rod Serling
Producer: Buck Houghton
Director: Don Medford
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Music: Lyn Murray
Cast:
Joey Crown: Jack Klugman Gabe: John Anderson Nan: Mary Webster Baron: Frank Wolff Truck Driver: James Flavin Pawnshop Owner: Ned Glass Woman Pedestrian: Diane Honodel
Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, whose life is a quest for impossible things like flowers in concrete or like trying to pluck a note of music out of the air and put it under glass to treasure… . Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, who in a moment will try to leave the Earth and discover the middle groundthe place we call the Twilight Zone
Convinced that hell never amount to anything never even have a girlfriend Joey has taken to the bottle, with the result that he cant get a gig anywhere. Deciding to commit suicide, he throws himself in front of a truck. When he regains consciousness, he finds himself alone on the street at night. Visiting several of his regular haunts, he is unable to locate anybody he knows, and the people who are there can neither see nor hear him. When he notices that he casts no reflection in a mirror, Joey concludes that he must be a ghost. Reflecting back on his life, he realizes that, contrary to what he previously believed, it was actually filled with any number of small joys. Drawn by the sound of a trumpet being played, Joey meets a tall, elegant man in a tuxedo who, surprisingly, can see and hear him and knows his name. The man tells him that it is the other people who are dead, that Joey is in a limbo between life and death, and the choice of which way to go is his. Joey opts for life. As the man departs, Joey asks his name. The answer: Gabriel. Joey finds himself back on the pavement, just an instant after being hit by the truck, alive and unharmed. That night, while playing trumpet on a rooftop, he meets Nan, a newcomer to the city, who shyly asks if Joey could show her the sights. Enthusiastically, he accepts the offer.
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