Concluding the First Season of Twilight Zone

A word of warning: This goes on a bit long.

• A Stop at Willoughby
• The Chaser
• A Passage for Trumpet
• Mr. Bevis
• The After Hours
• The Mighty Casey
• A World of His Own

I have to cop to an admission: I didn’t watch the final episodes of the first season of The Twilight Zone in exact order as I had prior to “A Stop at Willoughby”. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for Willoughby during a Monday run of episodes later in the evening, so I started with the lesser three, “The Chaser”, “Mr. Bevis”, and “The Mighty Casey” because they weren’t as intense with such results that often left me really thinking about things. I took off this Friday for a four-day Memorial Day weekend, and because of the current economic climate, where I think now more than ever (a tag line a tone of advertisers use ad nauseum) we can completely feel a connection to Gart Williams (James Daly), an executive pelted and pummeled excessively by his demanding and overbearing boss, Misrell (my nickname for him is “Miserable” Misrell), played with ferocious blustery gusto by Howard Smith—PUSH! PUSH! PUSH! DRIVE! DRIVE! DRIVE!—for producing results, such weight and pressure stressing him so, he grabs his stomach, seemingly gaining wrinkles in his face before our eyes, and inadvertently lashes out at the blowhard with a “shut up, fatboy” that gets most employees fired. But Gart has produced for this company in the past, has brought clients/accounts to Misrell, so his work has been successful. Problem is the boss expects Gart to continue producing at an exceptional standard that those in the boardroom even realize is probably impossible. The weight of that all is so produced by Daly’s performance, I think many a viewer can not only relate but actually feel that stress while watching him. Not only the job pressure but an unsympathetic wife (played with ice cold bitchiness by Donahue, renting her husband apart, emotionally unavailable to him, totally detached by his plight) without the sensitivity to understand his pain, retorting that any makebelieve Willoughby that might be manufactured by him won’t be enough to draw any care or attention from her. So Willoughby becomes very real to Gart because it offers a quaint, picturesque, hospitable, sunny, accommodating, welcoming, simple, inviting alternative to the dregs and drama of real life in 1960 as opposed to 1888. Granted the 1888 Willoughby is probably more of a fantasy as there were still expectations even in that town, work that needed to be done, product to sell, but within the manufactured fantasy inside Gart’s mind it didn’t wear that demand, request so much, deplete and deteriorate every last bit of energy and effort until nothing was left. Its tragedy, in TZ Serling tradition, surmised as release for Gart, a “way out”, whatever Willoughby actually was, but it was a price paid with a life. Some believe this ponders suicide as an option to escape the pressures of life, but I like to think Gart didn’t voluntarily dive from a train in death because he just couldn’t take it anymore. I think the fantasy was so vivid, so real, so attractive, Willoughby was Gart’s “stopping place”, not purposely throwing life away for death…I think he thought at the end that Willoughby was his destination, and leaving behind the life he had for that seems like a fair trade-off. It’s always up for debate, and Willoughby was definitely presented as quite a substitute for the life Gart had. How many of us, not necessarily contemplate suicide, as much as, imagine a fantasy that filters out all the harsh realities of life, envisioning a relief that expects nowhere near as much and offers something far more idyllic and warm?

 

“The Mighty Casey” isn’t as bad to me as many other TZ fans. I think it is a fun look back for baseball fans and historians, and there are some name drops that regale us with a time long past…60 years ago. But that time was very real then, and I get a kick out of dropping a TZ plot within America’s Pastime. It’s a really simple “come back” story for a struggling team with a manager (Jack Warden, having also starred in the first season episode, “The Lonely”) badly needing his “Hoboken Zephyrs” to eke out some kind of success before he’s canned. Enter a robot named Casey (Sorrells), created by a scientist (Sofaer) for “the worst baseball team in the league” as a chance to help the Zephyrs. Casey is a blank slate, really, an empty shell with a soft, boyish face, given orders and carrying them out. He’s like a child with advances many human pitchers could only dream about, but because he’s a robot, demands are eventually made by the league to give him a heart so that he would be technically listed as a man. But the heart, in a twist that costs the Zephyrs a pennant, gives Casey a humanity that morally condones throwing bad pitches that result in home runs for the opposing team! I think some fans just felt this episode didn’t have much value beyond just being a baseball romp with a sci-fi twist. But not every episode will carry the dramatic gravitas of “A Stop at Willoughby”. That is also the case for “Mr. Bevis” featuring a fun-loving and loveable Orson Bean, as the titular Bevis, a fan of zither music, stuffed animals, and children. He drives a beat-up car that “coughs”, likes to build ships, flirts with a neighbor, has backed up rental debt, wears eccentric suits that clash with the “proper decorum” of his workplace, plays football with kids on the street, arrives late to work (one of six jobs he’s had that year!), and has a hard time moving throughout his apartment without tripping over items scattered. He’s very unique, colorful personality and when he loses his car to a mishap traffic accident, apartment to the unpaid debt, and job to his reckless disregard for arriving on time (not to mention, his desk is cluttered by the very things he treasures that would leave bosses quite aggravated), a guardian angel (Henry Jones) steps in to help him out. But in order to fit in with the “redo” of the past day, Bevis must give up the many things that define who he is…and no nice sportscar, paid (clean) apartment, and high-paying job can quite satisfy such a free spirited goofball. The light-hearted episodes seem to backload the first season, as “A Mighty Casey”, accompanied by “The Chaser” and even the delightfully clever “A World of His Own” seemed to help balance the many other more tragic, intense episodes. I don’t care much for “The Chaser”, not particularly interested in either Grizzard’s Shackleford or his muse, the petty, narcissistic, pucker-lipped Leila (Barry). Grizzard having to slip a love potion in the champagne of Barry just to get her dear devotion seems quite ill-advised a plot trope. I remember Serling, at the end of Willougby, appearing in the very “library” of McIntire (the sheriff in “Psycho” (1960)), the Professor Daemon, introducing it as the next episode, mentioning how a “slip of a Mickey” might help Shackleford land the woman of his dreams!!! Bill Cosby has sort of put the kibosh on anything the least bit humorous about slipping a drug in a woman’s drink to “get something from her”. And that she becomes so “in love” that it now borders on obsessive affection, where Shackleford can’t get a moment’s peace, needing another potion from Daemon (that would kill her!) to diffuse what he brought on himself just rather left me feeling a bit icky. But “A World of His Own” hits the spot with me in terms of going for humor over dark material, because I just thought it was so clever in execution and even offers food for thought. Keenan Wynn (son to Ed) gets to play this different side to the usual roughly-hewn types that get all bent out of shape and barking mad, as a writer (I couldn’t help but think of Serling) who speaks into a recorder the stories and characters he creates from mind…it’s been said that Serling dictated into a recorder his own screenplays and stories. What makes this so extraordinary is that Wynn’s writer, Gregory, creates such vivid characters they manifest into reality! Gregory’s suspicious wife, Victoria (Phyllis Kirk; “House of Wax” (1959)), arrives to find him in the comforts of another “woman”, Mary (LaRouche, the TZ episode, “Living Doll”). This is when Gregory confesses that Mary is a recreation from a character he brought to life by his imagination, hoping Victoria will stop her fuss about getting him sent to the booby hatch. And but a snip and burn (in the fireplace) of the tape with the character’s description on it, destroying the character created by him, completely removes him or her from reality. I like this cleverness of the idea that what an artist creates can take on a life of its own. And what one creates could very well destroy. What many might also pick apart about “A World of His Own” is how creator has control over the creation. That if Gregory isn’t approving of what his characters offer once they are manifested from the void he can just eliminate from existence. Does someone who creates a being have the right to obliterate the creation if he or she doesn’t behave as the creator so chooses? I don’t think the episode was necessarily written seeking to provoke such profound topical discussion. But I nonetheless think it is available for evaluation. The twist regarding Victoria, as she just won’t “cooperate” and Rod Serling himself even (this is just brilliant!) calling the episode we just seen “nonsense” with Gregory putting the stop to both is pure TZ. In The Twilight Zone, there was just so much room to go in creative places no other show at the time could (or maybe would) allow.

 

“A Passage for Trumpet” & “The After Hours” were so much better to watch today, rather than during the work week. I needed a nice rest and proper mood these episodes deserve. While I could easily breeze through “The Chaser” or “The Mighty Casey” in whatever frame of mind, I always think “A Passage for Trumpet” deserves my full undivided attention as Klugman first TZ episode proved, just like Burgess Meredith, he was the ideal actor for a show that needed real complexity and dramatic brevity. The trumpet, alcoholism, and end-of-your-rope feeling of hopelessness, as well as, the rejuvenated spirit to embrace life, full-throated with the right return when given the option to by “Gabe” (John Anderson, also a TZ regular) to leave limbo (he throws himself in front of a van when he had to see his trumpet and was visibly soused)  to rejoin the land of the living, instead of choosing to serve a type of death that allows him to exist in a state he was accustomed to in life: Klugman could bring all of those emotional shifts. And “The After Hours”, the episode I ended TZ with instead of the ordered fashion I had previously intended, was the fitting way to conclude my moving through the first season. While I think “A Passage for Trumpet” is a strongly acted episode deserved of much praise, “The After Hours” was one of the icons of the first season that fit right in with the classics early on. You remember Francis’s Marsha among the creepy mannequins at night in the locked department store (back when department stores were larger than life), her name called in the dark, the camera approaching the painted faces, the shadowy disquiet without too much music, the frustrated “store employees” such as the “saleswoman” (Elizabeth Allen) and “elevator man” (John Conwell) quite visibly bothered by Marsha (the gold thimble is damaged and she fails to recognize her “time is up”) later revealed to have every reason to be, humans as “outsiders” and those in the store getting a chance once a month to be “among them”, the episode completely exclusive to the store, as it is indeed the setting that matters more than the outside world, and Francis gradually awakening out of the fantasy of being human, accepting that she must rejoin her peers as mannequins in the store, her trip with the outsiders now over. Why I can’t stop writing about the show and individual episodes is quite obvious: despite some hiccups that many other fans find favorable, many of the episodes just enchant me in all sorts of ways, leaving such an impression because they replay in the mind and leave me contemplating the past, present, and future. And, on top of that, the show could twist and turn what we take for granted, everyday life, and ask what if? I kind of need that so I return to the show, over and over and over…