Brief Passages - Twilight Zone (The Hitch-Hiker - The Purple Testament)

The Hitch-Hiker 

My Top 10 Twilight Zone episodes of all time sort of have an alternating change after the first two or three. Numbers 1 & 2 are firmly entrenched in my personal favorites, being “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” and “Walking Distance” (the former coming up not long from now and the latter just revisited yet again not long ago), but I do have a tendency to second guess after them. But after another strong showing—like the past hundred times didn’t already!—tonight, I have to say that “The Hitch-Hiker” will stake its claim in the #3 slot. I sort of eeny, meeny, miny, moe between “The Hitch-Hiker”, “The Masks”, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”, and “Nick of Time” all the time when I start to think about a proper list of my favorites, and could make the case for any of them at the #3. But the combination of Inger Stevens’ performance which always keeps me glued to the screen (there is always something intrinsically haunting about it, as if no other person but her could play it and I can never not think of the actress and her own fate in real life), the “shabby scarecrow man” (Leonard Strong) and how the director will squeeze his face into the whole frame sometimes (afar off other times, and in mirrors, in front of Nan Adams’ car and the back), the “neverending road trip” where Nan tries to keep driving nonstop in order to keep her distance although we all can try to outrun “death” but it comes for us all (this is a theme that Twilight Zone explores, too, again), and the decision to feature a lot of narrative thoughts going on from Nan’s perspective. And there are shots in her car which I thought was an atmospheric touch. The cross-country trip, where Nan drives and drives, but by the end she accepts that there just is no escape. I will never not talk about this episode.

The Fever

You can definitely tell that Rod Serling had a bone to pick with Las Vegas. And Everett Stone is so outrageous and the FRANNNNKKKKKLLLLLLIIIIINNNNN “one-armed bandit” slot machine from hell that calls him I can’t help but consider this a guilty pleasure. This is more or less chock full of Franklin hysterics as Stone knows no subtlety as his forehead is sweaty, sleeves rolled up, barking mad by the time his “dollar is taken”, having lost his savings to it (his saint of a wife, Flora (Vivi Janiss) tries to convince him to stop after “three checks are cashed”). I cracked up when Franklin talks of putting the change “back into the machine” because it was stinking up his pockets with its “tainted” stench! The slot machine “chasing” Franklin, trying to “get him”, while Flora is left confused and bewildered at his breakdown always has me actually giggling aloud. This one of the TZ episodes that features the notorious “flight out of a window”. I think this is supposed to be taken seriously but I just can’t. It’s just a riot to me. The slot machine spitting out a coin that falls at the hand of Franklin at the end, a “monster with a will all its own”, is just too silly…I had this vision of Rod at his typewriter with a smile on his face. But following “The Hitch-Hiker”, a masterpiece in my mind, and afterward, “The Last Flight”, a sleeper in the first season (that takes on the time travel theme, one of my favorites of The Twilight Zone), “The Fever” falls way, way short and sticks out not just like a sore thumb, but a thumb with the nail cut to the quick and bleeding.

The Last Flight

The time travel theme wasn’t as of this point in The Twilight Zone all that used. “Walking Distance” sure knew how to spin quite a timeless plot about “going back”, but in “The Last Flight”, the time travel “rift in the clouds” that unfurls quite a twist at the end (and opens a dialogue/discussion about “how going forward in time can shape how the past unfolds”) where “Old Leadbottom” (Robert Warwick) is asked about Flight Lt Robert Decker (Kenneth Haigh) of the 56 Squadron Flying Corps during a particularly fateful day in 1917, WWI, in the sky in a fighting battle with German fleet that seemed to outnumber them. It was important for Warwick’s Mackaye to survive although Decker, after landing in March of 1959 on an Air Force base in France, assures Major Wilson (Simon Scott) and General Harper (Alexander Scourby) that he’s dead. What haunts Decker is that he left Mackaye, “going high”, seemingly right into a time rift that sent him forward to 1959. Decker believes, after conversing with Major Wilson, that if he can find that same rift in time, perhaps it will return him since Wilson and Harper insist that Mackaye is alive, coming to visit them on the airbase. Okay, so, yes, the plot offers some conveniences/contrivance but I think if you can go with it, this will work. I loved the idea of time travel as a thought-provoking storytelling device that proposes a “what if?” and believe Haigh is quite good as the tormented Decker, admitting to Wilson that he’s always “running away”, a coward, scared, wanting to impress his fellows in the corps all the while harboring concerns that at some point during the first World War he’d have to eventually face the enemy in the sky. Haigh, I think, is especially adept at getting us, the viewer, to hope he can make good on his mistake of “fleeing” by escaping his holding cell, getting back to his Nieuport biplane and back to where he belongs…but doing so would come with quite a heavy price. I got chills when General Harper looks out the window into the sky after Wilson refers to a stunned Mackaye by his nickname (a private joke shared between Decker and Mackaye) while Decker’s possessions (dogtag, identification) were left behind as “time mementos”. The offered spin that Decker must go into the future in order to make sure the past goes according to plan (Mackaye is rescued so he can be a war hero and save countless lives in the Blitz) is why I love time travel plots so much.

The Purple Testament

Serling’s experiences in war, in the military, provided quite a lot of material for him to vent, to explore his soul, to work out the trauma, and through The Twilight Zone, he could spill all those torments of the mind into a creative form, and with science fiction as a filter we get the likes of “The Purple Testament”. I think you can watch this and just feel Serling freeing himself of those experiences, inventing a storytelling device—in this episode’s case, Lt William Fitzgerald’s ability to see what soldiers will die soon by a glow emanating on their faces—in order to comment on what war can do to those on the front lines, on soil foreign to them, wondering if that next trip out will be their last. Some survive, many others—such as York’s Captain Riker, who won’t give in to “Fitz” but when told he won’t come back from a mission, he leaves behind his wedding ring and family pictures—don’t. Casting for this show consistently hit homeruns time after time. I mean Reynolds (Fitz) isn’t necessarily a face many might recognize (but neither was Haigh as Decker from “The Last Flight”) but he sure knocks this performance right out of the park, into the streets, through a parked car window. He’s fed up, with shoulders slumping because of the burdens of war, tired of the soldiers dying around him, and here comes this terrible skill of actually seeing others who will die (with an equally horrible experience at the end of the episode when he looks into the mirror adding a rotten irony to this so-called gift) further saddling him with an extra weight. Barney Phillips and Warren Oates, both of whom would later have other more lucrative parts on The Twilight Zone, are officers in the story (Phillips is Gunther, at a medical camp, worried about Fitz cracking while Oates is unfortunately the driver of a jeep going over a mindfield bridge), as is future director, Paul Mazursky, as a soldier who finds Fitz unconscious after fainting from seeing a good friend with a glowing face in one of the beds.

***The Hitch-Hiker, an episode that is on my mind now even after watching other episodes Tuesday night, features a question that continues to linger for many, not just me...was this limbo or are those folks she met throughout real?***

The Twilight Zone is my favorite show because despite talking about the same episodes over and over, I can continue to find something introspective and contemplate on not just the entirety of whatever the episodes' themes are but individual performances and scenes that stick in the mind and register and evaluate the meaning, the richness of the words, the depth of the characterizations. This is a special show. I can write and write about it with no fade to black, it seems. To me, there is no greater endorsement.