Brief Passages - Twilight Zone (The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine)

As probably described by others who watch this episode, it really is to me Sunset Boulevard given a Twilight Zone treatment and twist (and as others might tell you, it really only goes the TZ route with the twist at the end, a wish fulfilled, and I’m quite positive would have been more than Gloria Swanson could ever hoped to be gifted herself) without the dead writer floating in the swimming pool outside an aging silent star’s Hollywood estate, instead featuring a forlorn agent played by Martin Balsam smirking about how his 30s era former movie lead actress, a haughty and narcissistic Ida Lupino, was granted a desire to be where she was most happy. The episode is really very much Lupino’s showcase, pinned by Serling with some harsh tones and exchanges in it. Living in the past, Lupino can’t seem to escape this projector room where she rests in a chair, the room darkened, daylight to dark, watching her old starring pictures. Balsam, to his credit and endurable patience, tries to get her a part, but she’s still naively considering herself top billing. Her visit with Ted de Corsia, head of a picture company, sees her in a bit part as a mother. She is immediately course, ready for a fight. Let’s just say that de Corsia wasn’t as gentle as DeMille to Swanson. Balsam even locates and talks to an old male lead (Jerome Cowan) of Lupino’s, much older (he didn’t age well) and owner of grocery stores outside Chicago. Lupino, still seeing him with matinee idol looks, rejects him. She wants those old picture times back, to relive those experiences with the actors as they once were. That Lupino, still quite beautiful in ’59, is considered some relic, was laughable to me. And while she was a star for some time before television, I always felt this kind of character was actually not fit for Lupino, who I considered a trailblazer for women, not some dreary prima donna making demands and bellyaching about the movie industry to a Balsam clearly in love with her. Still, she gives it her all…I just didn’t like her character, to tell you the truth. I found her just as harsh as de Corsia, although he clearly saw her as a particular kind of actress while she saw her name at the top of the credits…being dressed down by him and later reminded that her leading men were mostly dead by a frustrated Balsam, the only path to happiness for Lupino was by will “into a picture of the past”.

--Brian

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So just for 2020, along with my other ongoing projects for the horror genre, I thought it would be fun to build towards my [now annual] self-created 4^th of July Twilight Zone Marathon with a “brief passages” series for the first season. I thought it would be a neat sort of 2020 episodic footprint and the point of the “brief passages” part is to try and limit myself to just a “mini-review” five-to-six line paragraph for each episode of the Twilight Zone (and some Universal Monster films as well) in the first season. My marathon for Independence Day will not be as extensive as it was in 2019…ten episodes, five from the third season and five from the fifth. Because I have written big reviews for many of the first season episodes in the past, this “brief passages” format won’t be as difficult while those certain few that might not have gotten a more elaborate, detailed treatment, it should be quite a challenge to limit myself.