Twilight Zone Companion (13 page)

The Four of Us Are Dying, despite a basically absurd premise (after all, even if a man could change his face, how could he possibly imitate the voices and mannerisms of men he never met?), is a powerful show. Serlings writing is harsh and spare, telling the story of a merciless man who comes to a merciless end. John Brahms direction is ingenious without being obviously so. The acting of Townes, Martin, Pine, Gordon, and Beverly Garland as a torch singer is cool and controlled. Particularly notable is the fine percussive score by Jerry Goldsmith (Planet of the Apes, Alien, Star Trek: The Motion Picture). Made up of piano, drum, xylophone, trumpet and flute, it is all hard edges and sharp movement, perfectly fitted to and enhancing the story. The Four of Us Are Dying is a tough story about tough people, and it presented some difficult problems. But, once again, an unusual challenge was overcome with talent, imagination and enthusiasm.

The Purple Testament

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Richard L. Bare

Director of Photography George T. Clemens

Music: composed by Lucien Morawack; conducted by Lud Gluskin

Cast:

Lt. Fitzgerald: William Reynolds Capt. Riker: Dick York Capt. Gunther: Barney Phillips Jeep Driver: Warren Oates Smitty: Michael Vandever Sergeant: William Phipps Orderly: Paul Mazursky Freeman: Marc Cavell Colonel: S. John Launer Man with Harmonica: Ron Masak

Infantry platoon, U.S. Army, Phillipine Islands, 1945. These are the faces of the young men who fight. As if some omniscient painter had mixed a tube of oils that were at one time earth brown, dust gray, blood red, beard black, and fear yellozv white, and these men were the models. For this is the province of combat and these are the faces of war.

Lieutenant Fitzgerald is a man who has found his own special war-time hell. Looking into the faces of his men prior to a battle, he sees a peculiar light on the faces of those who are to die. Captain Riker, his close friend and superior officer, scoffs at thisuntil Fitz sees the odd light on his face. Nevertheless, Riker feels duty-bound; he goes into combat and is killed. Soon after, Fitz is relieved to hear that he is being sent back to division headquarters. Packing to go, he glances in a mirror and is horrified to see the same terrible light on his face as on the others. As he gets into a jeep, a sergeant cautions the driver that there are mines in the road. Relax, the driver tells Fitz. Weve got a four-hour drive ahead of us. Fitz replies, I doubt it. A while later, the sergeant and his men hear the sound of a distant explosion.

From William Shakespeare, Richard the Third, a small excerpt. The line reads, He has come to open the purple testament of bleeding war. And for Lieutenant William Fitzgerald, A Company, First Platoon, the testament is closed. Lieutenant Fitzgerald has found the Twilight Zone.

The look of death on the soldiers faces in The Purple Testament was an especially eerie effect, accomplished simply by suddenly shifting the emphasis of the lighting and overexposing the film.

A special irony attended this production. Director Richard L. Bare recalls, The evening that it was to be aired first-run, Bill Reynolds and I were in the middle of the Caribbean swimming for our lives, with three broken legs between the two of us. Bare and Reynolds had just finished making The Islander; a pilot for MGM, and were flying back to Miami. At three hundred feet, both engines quit and the plane went down in the ocean, killing one of the five people on board. Although Bare had two broken legs, he decided that he and Reynolds should try and make for shore.

We were four miles off the coast of Jamaica, swimming on our backs toward shore, about forty feet apart, when I yelled over to Bill and said, Bill, how are you doing? He answered, Tm making it. A little later, I called over again. You know whats playing tonight? He said, Yeah, The Purple Testament. And I said, Bill, please don’t look at me! Both Bare and Reynolds survived and recovered fully. Bare went on to direct 158 episodes of Green Acres, Reynolds to star in The FBI.

William Reynolds, whose wife had had a baby just two weeks earlier, adds an interesting postscript. Buck Houghton took the show off the air that night, because he didnt know whether I was a survivor or not from the first news reports. But I thought it was indicative of the class of that production company that they not only did not make capital of the fact, which might have been the obvious thing to do, but they took the show off the air. I was pleased that they didnt subject my family to that.

THE MONSTERS ARE DUE ON MAPLE STREET (3/4/60)

Written by Rod Serling 

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Ron Winston

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: composed by Rene Garriguenc; conducted by Lud Gluskin

Cast:

Steve Brand: Claude Akins Charlie: Jack Weston Mr. Goodman: Barry Atwater Tommy: Jan Handzlik Tommys Mother: Mary Gregory Mrs. Brand: Anne Barton Mrs. Goodman: Lea Waggner Pete Van Horn: Ben Erway Don: Burt Metcalfe Charlies Wife: Lyn Guild Woman Next Door: Joan Sudlow Man One: Jason Johnson Woman One: Amzie Strickland First Alien: Sheldon Allman Second Alien: William Walsh

Maple Street, U.S.A. Late summer. A tree-lined little road of front porch gliders, barbecues, the laughter of children, and the bell of an icecream vendor. At the sound of the roar and the flash of light, it will be precisely 6:43 p.m. on Maple Street… . This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon, in the last calm and reflective momentbefore the monsters came.

After what is at first taken to be a meteor speeds overhead, Maple Street experiences a total power failureappliances, telephones, even cars. Pete Van Horn sets off on foot to find out the cause, but Tommy, a young reader of sci-fi, says he knowshuman-looking aliens have infiltrated Maple Street. At first, this is laughed off, but when Mr. Goodmans car inexplicably starts up for a few seconds, suspicion falls on himbolstered by the fact that a neighbor has seen him looking up at the stars late at night. As evening falls, Steve Brand tries to get others to remain calm. But when a mysterious figure walks toward them in the dark, panic breaks out. Charlie Farnsworth grabs a neighbors rifle and fires, killing the menace, who turns out to be the returning Pete Van Horn. Madness prevails. Charlie is accused of being the alien, then Tommy. As the lights of various

houses flash on and off, full-scale rioting breaks out. From nearby, two aliens watch these events unfold. One explains to the other that by manipulating electricity, it is easy to turn neighbor against neighbor. Maple Street is typicaland only the beginning.

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, altitudes, prejudicesto be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its ownfor the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone

The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street is Serlings chilling commentary on how easily neighbor can be turned against neighbor when brought up against inexplicable eventsin this case, manipulated by aliens in outfits from Forbidden Planet. (The final shot of the episode shows the

Jack Weston leads his hysterical Maple Street neighborsaliens ship flying through outer space, away from the camera. In fact, this is a shot from Forbidden Planet, shown upside-down and backwards.)

The real star of the show is the mob itself, and in all its individual parts it is convincing and frightening (ironically, the episode was shot on MGMs Andy Hardy street). Directed with intensity by newcomer Ronald Winston, the episode is filled with dark power reminiscent of Fritz Langs fine 1936 anti-lynching film Fury, starring Spencer Tracy. Here, the brute group entity is dissected, and Serling reveals it for what it is: a violent chaotic force, powered by fear and nurtured by irrationality.

Curiously, just prior to the broadcast of the episode, a number of papers, including the Miami Herald, misquoted Serling as saying that The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street was his commentary on the fact that the minorities always need a scapegoat to explain their own weaknesses. Serlings point had been borne out even before the show had aired prejudice cant be confined to The Twilight Zone.

LONG LIVE WALTER JAMESON (3/18/60)

Written by Charles Beaumont

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Anton Leader

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Makeup: William Tuttle

Cast:

Prof. Walter Jameson: Kevin McCarthy Prof. Samuel Kittridge:Edgar Stehli Laurette Bowen: Estelle Win wood Susanna Kittridge: Dody Heath

Youre looking at Act One, Scene One, of a nightmare, one not restricted to witching hours or dark, rainswept nights. Professor Walter Jameson, popular beyond words, who talks of the past as if it were the present, who conjures up the dead as if they were alive … In the view of this man, Professor Samuel Kittridge, Walter Jameson has access to knowledge that couldnt come out of a volume of history, but rather from a book on black magic, which is to say that this nightmare begins at noon.

In class, JamesonKittridges colleague for twelve years and prospective son-in-lawreads aloud from the Civil War journal of Union officer Hugh Skelton. That evening, when Jameson arrives at his house for dinner, Kittridge reveals that he has looked Skelton up in a book of Mathew Brady photographsand found him to be a dead ringer for Jameson, down to the mole on his face and the ring on his finger! Jameson confides in Kittridgehe is Skelton, but his secret is an even darker one. More than two thousand years ago, he paid an alchemist for the gift of immortality, but soon he found that it was no gift at all. Down the long years, he has seen wives, children, friends, all grow old and die. Now he longs for an end, but he lacks the courage to kill himself. Kittridge forbids Jameson to marry his daughter, but Jamesonrealizing the woman would think her father a madman if he tried to tell her the truthconvinces her to elope with him that very night. Going home to pack, Jameson is surprised by a hideously withered old woman in his study. A wife he long ago abandoned, she saw the notice of his engagement in the paper and has come to stop the wedding. When he refuses, she grabs a revolver off his desk and shoots him. Hearing the shot, Kittridge rushes injust in time to see Jameson age and turn to dust.

Last stop on a long journey, as yet another human being returns to the vast nothingness that is the beginning and into the dust that is always the end

The twentieth episode of The Twilight Zone (nineteenth under Houghton) was the most technically demanding yet attempted. To accomplish the climactic effect of Jameson aging and turning to dust a close collaboration was required between Kevin McCarthy, director of photography George Clemens, and William Tuttle, head of the MGM makeup department. Fortunately, a more talented man than Tuttle could not have been present. Five years later, he became the first makeup artist to receive an Academy Award, for his superb work on Tony Randall in The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao (which, coincidentally, was also scripted by Beaumont). His credits range all the way from The Wizard of Oz (uncredited) to Young Frankenstein, The Fury and Love at First Bite.

McCarthys metamorphosis consisted of three separate and distinct age makeups, each older than the one before it. For the first change, a trick was employed which Clemens had first encountered while working on the Fredric March Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1931. This consisted of drawing lines on the actors facein this case age linesin red makeup. The set was then lit with key lights with red filters over them so that the set was bathed in a red light, rendering the lines invisible. As the scene progressed, the red lights were dimmed while simultaneously lights with green filters were raised. Now in a green light, the lines suddenly became visible. Since the film is in black and white, the color change is undetectable. What appears to happen is an apparent miracle in which a complete makeup change has occurred on camera with no cuts.

Considerably heavier makeup was required for the second and third changes. Prior to the shooting, a life mask was made of McCarthy. Onto that, folds and wrinkles were modeled in Plasticine, an oil-based clay that never dries out. For each various component of the makeup (forehead, cheeks, chin, neck, and upper lip), a separate mold was made. Foam rubber pieces were cast from the molds and glued onto McCarthys face. What emerges is a sequence in which the illusion of someone rapidly aging is rendered quite convincingly, while leaving McCarthy still recognizable throughout (something that wouldnt have been possible had they just substituted real old men for McCarthy).

Like Perchance to Dream, Long Live Walter Jameson is basically a dialogue between two men (in the former, between the main character and a psychiatrist; in the latter, between the two professors), but whereas the former sustains itself with its tremendous velocity, the strength of the latter lies in the allure of its concept and the virtuosity of Beaumonts writing. Like so many of the more memorable episodes of The Twilight Zone, it cues into a basic universal fantasy and brings us to a revelation about that fantasy. Who, in his mind, has not dreamed about immortality, longed for it, wondered about it? In Walter Jameson, these dreams are realized and taken to their logical, inevitable, and dreadful conclusion.

The challenge in Walter Jameson was to present a character claiming to be immortal and not have the audience immediately reject the notion out of hand as absurd. This was accomplished through the utter seriousness with which McCarthy, Stehli, and Winwood played their roles. Nothing is tongue in cheek here, nor condescending. Director Tony Leader, previously a producer-director of radios Suspense and later director of the motion picture Children of the Damned, keeps the proceedings down-to- earth, which lends credence to the fantastic subject matter.