The Twilight Zone - Jess-Belle

Overlong Twilight Zone episode of witch’s spells and lost souls appealed to me basically because of the casting. If this were just fifteen minutes shorter I probably would have rated it 3.5/5 instead of 2.5/5. The cast salvaged this for me. I just didn’t take to it much. I liked how Serling’s opening introduction for it tries to paint this as a folktale paw would tell his grandkids around a campfire, but I personally never found Jess-Belle too compelling. Jeanette Nolan, as the witch, Granny Hart, steals the episode easily and effortlessly. Anne Francis is just an eyeful of beauty. Always was. As Nolan’s ultimate patsy, falling prey to her overwhelming love for local farmboy, Billy-Ben (the recently departed, James Best), Francis’ raven-haired, Jess-Belle, is tricked into giving up, mind, body, and soul. At midnight, Jess-Belle turns into a “wildcat”, an absolute threat not just to all the locals but especially to Billy-Ben as well. So desperate to attain Billy-Ben’s love, considering he is betrothed to “Elly” (Ellwyn, played by Laura Devon), Jess-Belle goes to Granny Hart for a love potion she must gulp. Once Billy-Ben locks eyes on her at a local shindig, held to celebrate a good crop season/yield, Elly loses him to Jess-Belle. Most of the remaining episode is Jess coming to terms with what she lost in order to gain total dedication, attention, and affection from Billy-Ben, eventually so much a witch she is exclusively any number of creatures trying to do away with Elly, no longer completely her human self. Granny Hart fails Jess, unwilling to offer her a solution to her problem, leaving Jess-Belle to fully develop into an evil shape-shifter, trying to get at Elly, eventually even possessing her, leaving Billy-Ben (once he shoots her in wildcat form, the spell is lost and he returns to normal) to try and rescue the woman he truly loves from the woman he once fooled around with throughout the rural parts of wherever mountains Appalachia the y find themselves. 

I did cringe a little at the Mountain Folk Poetry Jess-Belle dolls out when speaking highly of Billy-Ben. Some samples:

• Remember the night we clung together in the sweet night grass down by the Eagle Rock Mountain? The moonlight made us see a silver mist on the fog below.  

• The day we ran through the scotch broom field, and the sun was blazing hot, and we fell together... and you touched me? The fire in me burned as hot as the white sun.

I get the point of Hamner’s script. He was called on to provide TZ with plenty of folksy mountain live-off-the-land types, to cover a certain demo. You get the likes of The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank (also featuring Best) and The Hunt (also featuring Nolan as “old woman”) as companions with Jess-Belle, focusing on cabin-dwelling, crop-growing, tenders-of-the-land, with witchcraft just added spice to this particular offering. Nolan is clearly just having the time of her life as the witch, while Francis ably portrays the head-over-heels and naïve titular character, begging for Billy-Ben’s love until it proves to be too heavy a price to carry around as a burden. There is a scene where Nolan cackles with a flaming fire in the fireplace behind her after Jess drinks the potion, knowing what she has sacrificed, that is my favorite moment in the episode. Her posing in front of a mirror or egging on those that visit her; Granny Hart is available to grant certain favors, totally understanding the risks involved, willing to provide, even as she knows that when taken the results often end tragically. Virginia Gregg (you see her pop up in different parts in “Dragnet” and her daughter in the popular TZ episode, The Masks, gets a face from the mask to display her true ugly soul) appears as Jess’ grieving, plain-faced mother and George Mitchell (the grim-faced asshole who wouldn’t get Stevens gas in The Hitch-Hiker) is Elly’s pops.