The Twilight Zone: The Long Haul - The Four of Us Are Dying

 

So for the remainder of the year, I'm taking a break from much else (besides most of my reviews are now beefing up my Letterboxd account, since I have really loaded up this blog with a ridiculous amount of content, the most productive year in the blog's history) and just adding Twilight Zone until January 2nd, 2022. Concluding with the marathon at the end, and I hope I get it out of my system. So what I've been doing is going in order from the very first episode up until now with some breaks in between. Since I've already written about films and specials in the past of the holiday season, I'm adding those to my Letterboxd diary. Anyway, I'm up to the 13th episode, "The Four of Us Are Dying", not one of my favorites. It is a bit too episodic for my tastes, though, I think the plot would make for quite an interesting movie. This inconsequential cad who has the ability to change faces just by looking at posters or pictures "goes on adventures" in some neon sign city, taking the identities on a few people, pushing himself closer and closer towards danger, too close to the edge he's eventually burned. Beverly Garland has had one hell of a career. She has this really small part as a piano singing bar act who suffered the loss of a lover, a band musician with Ross Martin's face. I continue to love The Twilight Zone because you see some talented actors and actresses appear and reappear on the show, with some of the episodes better than others. Martin was really great in a fourth season episode, "Death Ship", where he just wanted to "go home", but Jack Klugman wouldn't let him. In "The Four of Us Are Dying", Martin is but in one single dialogue scene with Garland, preparing her to meet him for a trip out of the city...an appointment he would never make. But this guy, whoever he is (I'm not sure the first face we see, played by Harry Townes, who would return for "Shadow Play", is who the actual person is, to be honest), just adopted Martin's face in order to inhabit his life to know what it felt like to be loved and adored (and missed). It is like slipping on disguises for a bit. But when he takes on the face of Phillip Pine (he would return for the fourth season episode, "The Incredible World of Horace Ford"), a mobster who was dropped in a lake and found drowned, intruding on the domicile of a former associate for some money he was supposed to be paid, that lands him nearly in a bind. Going into an alley, seeing a poster of a boxer, he takes on Don Gordon's face. Don Gordon, who I just recently saw in "Lethal Weapon" (1987), was also in "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross". The Gordon boxer destroyed the lives of his mother and girlfriend, taken to task by his father, so the Arch Hammer guy who adopted him as a means to escape mobster gunmen and a detective (who eventually caught up to him probably for any number of crimes) didn't realize the ramifications of his stealing of identities (identities that never belonged to him, seemingly undisciplined and not wary of what consequences might come with doing so). This father, played by Peter Brocco (who would also return as an alien in "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby"), had an ax to grind and seeing his son's face sparked a rage in him that couldn't be quieted...seeing that face initiated a need to get even for those two women he lost due to a son he now hates. So Arch Hammer, failing to recognize how adopting the faces of people might become a detriment to his health, pays a heavy price. So it wasn't a mobster or cop, some equally low profile degenerate he might resemble or feel akin to that put a bullet in him...it was a father operating a newspaper stand on a street corner.

Regarding Garland, her sad face, with such beauty, really works for the episode's first story. How she perks up when Hammer shows up at her table with Martin's face, so ready to toss everything else aside in order to be with him, as if granted a second chance, has this tragic quality to it, I thought. But I could look into her face all day. The camera loves her, it seems. I get that. I reiterate: she had a hell of a career, all the way to the end of her life. Quite astonishing, really.