Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (7 page)

Directed crisply by Bert Leonard (the only time he directed for the series), this is a brooding story of shame, isolation, responsibility, and redemption. Buz and Tod serve as narrative catalysts more than story participants, but the balance works as the character drama escalates.

“Somehow It Gets to Be Tomorrow” (airdate: February 15, 1963):
Driving through Corpus Christi, Texas, a solo Tod is latched onto by a conniving orphan, Joby Paxton (Roger Mobley, the go-to child actor in the 1960s), who wants Tod to help him and his annoying kid sister, Susie (Leslye Hunter), escape their foster home with social worker Evan Corelli (Martin Balsam) in pursuit. More specifically, they want Tod to be their adoptive father.

A wise script, part bleeding heart and part hard truth, it touches all the emotional bases in honest ways. The engaging Balsam may spout aphorisms (“You know, Stiles, there’s a saving grace about a dilemma: you can’t get tossed on more than two horns”) and teach gentle lessons, but in the end reality wins out and nobody gets off easily in this bold, downbeat episode directed by David Lowell Rich.

“The Stone Guest” (airdate: November 8, 1963): Cited elsewhere by Silliphant.

“Kiss the Maiden, All Forlorn” (airdate: April 13, 1962)
Fugitive embezzler Charles Clayton (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.) returns to America to see his daughter, attracting the law and involving Tod and Buz in a kidnapping (by Michael Tolan, Elena Verdugo) contrived to throw the police (James Brown,
who starred in Bert Leonard’s Rin-Tin-Tin TV series) and press (Walter Hill) off the scent. He cannot understand why his daughter, Bonnie (Zina Bethune), is becoming a postulate nun.

Silliphant admitted that he wrote the show to work through his concern over his daughter Dayle’s decision to go to convent. It’s an emotionally complex script, starting with Fairbanks, who is no crook with a heart of gold but a cynic who even tries to buy off Mother Superior (Beatrice Straight). 
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Is Bonnie atoning for her father’s sins? Or does she indeed have the calling? It’s Fairbanks’s show, and his scenes with Bethune will tear your heart out. In the end, it’s Silliphant’s understanding that makes it ring true. Once again, Tod and Buz are mostly along for the ride.

“Between Hello and Goodbye” (airdate: May 11, 1962):
Tod gets involved with a troubled woman, Chris (Susan Oliver), not knowing that the destructive blonde is a dual personality with her repressed, dark-haired sister, Clair.

Although the condition is obvious to anyone who had seen
The Three Faces of Eve
(1957) or read
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
Silliphant and director David Lowell Rich do an effective juggling act that gives Oliver a vivid showcase for her character’s psychosis. One especially riveting scene has Chris launch a tirade about the social and financial pressures that befall married couples (given the torment building in Silliphant’s own marriage, it’s a doubly remarkable scene). But because the words came from a mentally ill person, nobody noticed its subversiveness.

“A Fury Slinging Flame” (airdate: December 30, 1960):
Scientist Mark Christopher (Leslie Nielsen) leads a community of families into Carlsbad Caverns, California with every intention of living there until World War III, which he says will start in two days, subsides. Tod and Buz are drawn in because Christopher gave them his house trailer en route, and a newspaper science reporter, Paula Shay (Fay Spain), latches onto the story as the press gathers to await zero hour.

The Cold War comes to prime time the same year that Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev sank the Paris summit peace talks, U.S. flyer Francis Gary Powers was shot down during a spy mission over Russia, and John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon for the Presidency. Although America wouldn’t start building home fallout shelters until the October, 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, this episode reflected the public’s growing nuclear paranoia. Director Elliot Silverstein objectively keeps a lid on what could have become farce, and Nielsen relishes a prolonged monologue that’s a model of controlled insanity. James Brown appears as the stern park ranger trying to quell the whirlwind. Actual reporters Larry Barbier, Bill Fiset, Marlin Haines and Bob Lardine appear in publicity-inspired cameos. The title comes from a poem by Tennyson. Spoiler Alert: The world didn’t end.

“Mon Petit Chou” (airdate: November 24, 1961):
Lee Marvin appears as Ryan (ID’d as “Glenn Ryan”) who is so possessive of the French cabaret singer, Perette Dijon (Macha Meril), whom he is building into a star, that he refuses to see that she loves him. Moreover, he won’t admit that he loves her (he was devastated when his previous protégé jilted him). Only when Tod beats the stuffing out of him does he accept the truth and turn his pain into affection.

The odd aspect of this episode is that is really doesn’t need Tod or Buz. It’s one of a number of stories (see also “One Tiger to a Hill”) in which a central character hides his sensitivity behind a veneer of violence. Marvin is commanding in a complex role, and Bert Remsen, as his friend and chauffeur, Higgy, is equally skillful. It’s directed by Sam Peckinpah with none of the touches for which he would become known, although the Ryan-Tod slugfest on a narrow balcony is carried off in a space so cramped it’s a wonder there was room for the cameras. Publicity releases at the time pointed out that Milner broke Marvin’s nose in Peckinpah’s search for realism.

“Some of the People, Some of the Time” (airdate: December 1, 1961):
Maximilian Coyne (Keenan Wynn) is a scam artist who runs fake Hollywood talent pageants, but his past catches up with him in Boiling Springs, Pennsylvania once he hires Buz and Tod to be his advance men.

Directed by Robert Altman (who, like Peckinpah, had not yet blossomed), this twist on Meredith Willson’s
The Music Man
starts off going in one direction but winds up unexpectedly but satisfyingly in another. 
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The main story has Coyne using his wiles to sidestep fate, but while that is entertainingly going on, Buz tries to rig a Cinderella contest so a plain-looking young waitress he likes, Jahala (Lois Nettleton), wins. When she does, she reveals that she was one of Coyne’s ringers, but this is the first time she actually has been made to feel special. The skill of the writing is that, even though the guest stars completely con the series stars, everyone emerges with his and her integrity intact. So maybe it
is
a Robert Altman film after all.

“Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way” (airdates: March 6 and 13, 1964):
The two-part series finale was written as “Don’t Kill Us, We’ll Kill You” in teleplays dated January 17 and 21, 1964. Set in Tampa, Florida, the contrivance is that a millionaire has died and willed his $4 million estate to his surviving relatives on the provision that his daughter, Margo (Barbara Eden) marry Tod. The multi-plotted story also includes Russian spies, greedy kin, and Linc and Tod donning a succession of disguises in order to foil everyone’s dastardly schemes.

Silliphant was not known as a comedy writer, and these two episodes, directed by Alvin Gazer (who worked with Leo McCarey and Preston Sturges before switching to TV) are loopy at best. Considered one of the first TV series to produce a definitive ending,
Route 66
thus concludes with a married Tod driving to Houston with Margo in the Corvette, and Linc heading there on his own to reunite with his estranged family. Linc’s long walk down a driveway after one last caress to the ‘Vette was scripted as a melancholy wrap to 116 episodes, an effect somewhat diminished by being immediately followed by a promo for the first re-run. While not one of the series’ best, it can safely be said that there was no shark-jumping associated with the final fade-out.

Even today,
Route 66
remains a breakthrough series. Considering that America in the early 1960s was nowhere near as permissive as it would become in the late ‘60s, here was a popular network show that pushed the boundaries of broadcast standards with episodes on heroin addiction (“Birdcage on My Foot”), survivalist zealots (“A Fury Slinging Flame”), Fundamentalists (“Aren’t You Surprised to See Me?”), mercy killing (“A Bunch of Lonely Pagliaccis”), LSD (“The Thin White Line”), terrorist hate groups (“To Walk with the Serpent”), and an almost all-black cast (“Good Night Sweet Blues”). It was the power, the taste, and the tenacity of Silliphant and Leonard that goaded the series, no matter who the writers were, into the fast lane of social observation.

Route 66, the road, was officially removed from the United States Highway System on June 17, 1985.
Route 66,
the series
,
drives on.