Twilight Zone Companion (33 page)

Music: stock

Cast Becker: Joseph Schildkraut Capt. Lutze: Oscar Beregi Innkeeper: Karen Verne Doctor: Ben Wright Taxi Driver: Robert Boone Dachau Victim: Chuck Fox

Mr. Schmidt, recently arrived in a small Bavarian village which lies eight miles northwest of Munich, a picturesque, delightful little spot onetime known for its scenery but more recently related to other events having to do with some of the less positive pursuits of man: human slaughter, torture, misery and anguish. Mr. Schmidt, as we will soon perceive, has a vested interest in the ruins of a concentration camp for once, some seventeen years ago, his name was Gunther Lutze. He held the rank of a captain in the S.S. He was a black-uniformed, strutting animal whose function in life was to give pain, and like his colleagues of the time he shared the one affliction most common amongst that breed known as nazis: he walked the Earth without a heart. And now former S.S. Captain Lutze will revisit his old haunts, satisfied perhaps that all that is awaiting him in the ruins on the hill is an element of nostalgia. What he does not know, of course, is that a place like Dachau cannot exist only in Bavaria. By its nature, by its very nature, it must be one of the populated areas of the Twilight Zone

Reminiscing happily within the ruins of the concentration camp, Lutze comes upon Becker, a former inmate whom he takes for a caretaker. Becker, however, is actually a ghost, and he and the camps other dead victims have risen up to judge Lutze and mete out justice. Following a trial in one of the barracks, Lutze is forced to experience the physical agonies of his victims something that renders him permanently insane. Later, a doctor who examines him wonders what could have turned Lutze into a raving maniac in only two hours. Then he looks around him at the camp and is filled with an angry passion. Dachau he says… Why do we keep it standing?

There is an answer to the doctors question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and remember; not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk Gods Earth.

In Deaths-head Revisited, Serlings preachment fits the subject perfectly. This is an impressive episode in every way, including the set which doubles for Dachau. Buck Houghton explains, CBS had made a pilot for a western, and they had built a four-sided frontier fort. It was a hundred-fifty or two-hundred-thousand-dollar set to pilot this western, and it was standing out on Lot 3 at MGM. We just had to downgrade it, it was nice and fresh, so we had to take some doors off the hinges and put some dust around and that sort of thing. As I recall, the look of it was quite splendid.

As effective as the set, certainly, is Oscar Beregi as former S.S. Captain Lutze. In The Rip Van Winkle Caper he was saddled with a mediocre part. Here, he has a role with some meat on it, and he presents us with a complex and complete character: assured, cruel, callous, egocentric

but never so broad as to seem outlandish.

Then there is Joseph Schildkraut as Becker, the caretaker of Dachau, who turns out to be the ghost of an inmate. The man who played Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola (for which he won an Oscar) and Anne Franks father in The Diary of Anne Frank here has the difficult role of playing a symbol, Serlings spokesman for all those killed in the concentration camps. A supremely professional actor, Schildkraut not only achieves this but manages to transcend the role, making the character both a symbol and an individual. As Becker, he is eloquent, wise, and infinitely sad. With his cultured European accent, he delivers speeches which could easily seem pompous, but which in his skilled hands seem the untainted Voice of Truth. The memories his words recall are not pleasant, but they are potent. Ten million human beings were tortured to death in camps like this, he tells Capt. Lutze. Men. Woman. Children. Infants. Tired old men. You burned them in furnaces. You shovelled them into the earth. You tore up their bodies in rage. And now you come back to your scenes of horror, and you wonder that the misery that you planted has lived after you}

Beyond the words, Deaths-head Revisited has an energy to it, a power in its images and in its actions, thanks both to Serling and to director Don Medford. Repeatedly, there are shots that are disorienting, surprising, and powerful. For example, Schildkraut and Beregi are outside the barracks. Beregi runs past Schildkraut toward the camera, screaming in anger, until his bulk fills the screen, blacking out everything. Cut to Beregis back as he runs away from the camera, still howling. But we see he is now inside one of the barracks, running toward an open door, which shuts just as he reaches it. He falls backward. Cut to his point of view, as we see, upside down, the faces of the dead inmates looking at him, judging him. The camera rotates so that now the faces are right side up. In another instance, Beregi, still inside, lunges with both hands for Schildkrauts throat. Cut to exterior as Beregi completes the movement, but instead of Schildkrauts throat, his hands grasp the post of a gallows.

Don is very good with action things, startling things, says Buck Houghton. He has a need for explosion of some sort. I was afraid that Deaths-head Revisited was going to get a little talky. There were opportunities for people to appear in a way that would startle you, and there were all sort of confrontations that I thought could profit by a director whose taste was for violent action. And I think he delivered it. I think he did very well in that.

YOUNG MANS FANCY (5/11/64)

Written by Richard Matheson

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: John Brahm

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: Nathan Scott

Cast: Virginia: Phyllis Thaxter Alex: Alex Nicol Mr. Wilkinson: Wallace Rooney Mother: Helen Brown Alex (age 10): Rickey Kelman

Youre looking at the house of the late Mrs. Henrietta Walker. This is Mrs. Walker herself as she appeared twenty-five years ago. And this, except for isolated objects, is the living room of Mrs. Walkers house, as it appeared in that same year. The other rooms upstairs and down are much the same. The time, however; is not twenty-five years ago but now. The house of the late Henrietta Walker is, you see, a house which belongs almost entirely to the past, a house which, like Mrs. Walkers clock here, has ceased to recognize the passage of time. Only one element is missing now, one remaining item in the estate of the late Mrs. Walker: her son Alex, thirty-four years of age and, up till twenty minutes ago, the so-called perennial bachelor. With him is his bride, the former Miss Virginia Lane. Theyre returning from the city hall in order to get Mr. Walkers clothes packed, make final arrangements for the sale of the house, lock it up and depart on their honeymoon. Not a complicated set of tasks, it would appear, and yet the newlywed Mrs. Walker is about to discover that the old adage (You cant go home again has little meaning in the Twilight Zone.

 Arriving at the house, Alex is overwhelmed with nostalgia for his boyhood.

Virginia suspects the spirit of Alexs mother is exerting her influence, a suspicion supported by an old, supposedly-broken radio playing the womans favorite song, a broken clock ticking, and the reappearance of long-gone furniture, appliances, magazines and homemade fudge. The allure of the past grows stronger: Alex refuses to sell the house. Then Alexs mother appears on the stairs and confronts Virginia. But it is not her wish to return to the pastit is Alexs. Alex changes back into a boy again, ^ then tells Virginia to get out. She doesfilled with a mixture of disgust, horror and loss.

Exit Miss Virginia Lane, formerly and most briefly Mrs. Alex Walker. She has just given up a battle and in a strange way retreated, but this has been aretreat back to reality. Her opponent, Alex Walker, will now and forever hold a line that exists in the past. He has put a claim on a moment in time and is not about to relinquish it. Such things do happen in the Twilight Zone.”

Richard Mathesons story is an interesting one, but somehow Young Mans Fancy never really hits the mark.

The ending, I hated, says Matheson. It was the way I wrote it, the story being that the boy was causing it, not the mother. Its just that the mother didnt look menacing, she just looked a little worn out, like Stella Dallas or something. It didnt have the impact it should have had. She should have been kind of horrifying, so that when Phyllis Thaxter started to tell her off you thought that there was a confrontation here like in The Uninvited. But there wasnt that feeling to it. And then the little boy came out and he wasnt very good either, which kind of blew the whole point of the show.

FIVE CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN EXIT (12/22/61)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Lamont Johnson

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Makeup: William Tuttle

Cast: The Major: William Windom The Clown: Murray Matheson The Ballerina: Susan Harrison The Tramp: Kelton Garwood The Bagpipe Player: Clark Allen Little Girl: Mona Houghton Woman: Carol Hill

Clown, hobo, ballet dancer, bagpiper, and an army major a collection of question marks. Five improbable entities stuck together into a pit of darkness. No logic, no reason, no explanation; just a prolonged nightmare in which fear, loneliness and the unexplainable walk hand in hand through the shadows. In a moment well start collecting clues as to the whys, the whats and the wheres. We will not end the nightmare, well only explain it because this is the Twilight Zone.

The five characters find themselves trapped inside an enormous, featureless cylinder, with no memory of who they are nor how they got there. After various speculations on the nature of their imprisonment including the theory that they might be in Hell the Major hits on a plan of escape. With the other four forming a human ladder, he is ultimately able to reach the rim of the cylinder and climb over. Unfortunately, he loses his balance and falls into the snow far below. The truth is revealed: the five characters are actually nothing more than dolls; their prison a Christmas toy donation barrel. A little girl spies the Major and returns him to the barrel.

Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth, wrought in the distorted image of human life. But this added, hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only for the moment. In the arms of children there can be nothing but love. A clown, a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer and a major. Tonighfs cast of players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.

Rarely can the plot of an episode be summed up so completely in its title. Five Characters in Search of an Exit is a drama with the fewest possible of props. For most of the show, the five actors are all that can be seen, with the exception of the blank, curving wall of the cylinder.

It was like a theater experience, says director Lamont Johnson, like working on a unit set in the theater, and Ive done a lot of theater so it didnt hold any particular problems for me.

As for the odd cylinder, Johnson says, The barrel was two different sets. One was vertical, the other was horizontal or at an angle so that we could cant it and make it at whatever angle we felt we needed for the camera. Thus, when the characters stood on each others shoulders, the set was actually tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, with a mattress at the bottom just in case anyone should accidentally slide down. As to what the set was made of, director of photography George Clemens says, It was a round aluminum set that we just kept moving around. And I could not use direct lighting, I used what we call indirect lighting, reflected. I had a great big sheet that was treated so as to reflect light.

The greatest enjoyment from Five Characters in Search of an Exit stems from the dialogue between the ultra-serious, prone-to-hysteria Army Major and the ridiculous, ever-facetious, and utterly charming clown. In his white clown face, with potted plant for a hat, Murray Matheson is delightful, doing somersaults and fatalistically refusing to ever take matters too seriously. I was upside-down for most of the time, Matheson recalls, but I started as a dancer on the stage and so that part of it was easy for me.

As the Major, William Windom provides a perfect counterpoint to Matheson, loud, belligerent, impatient. Of the part, Windom says, I just poured on the coal. You try to make it undoll-like as long as you can, which isnt hard to do, because theyre all sort of strange people.

The people werent the only strange thingthe dolls were, too. As the camera pans from doll to doll at the end of the episode, we see that the figures are clearly not the actors in makeup, yet their faces bear a marked resemblance to the actors. One would assume that tiny replicas were fashioned, but in reality, these figures were actually life-size copies of the actors. With each of them, a life mask was made, then painted to look like a doll. Says makeup artist William Tuttle, They sent out and got some mannequin bodies, so that we just did the heads. Charlie Schram did most of them.

For Buck Houghton, Five Characters in Search of an Exit held special anxieties; the little girl who places the army-major doll back in the barrel at the end of the episode was played by his daughter Mona. She was terribly nervous about the whole thing, he recalls, and she was a very active child in the first place, she spent her days in motion. So I just took her out and walked her around the backlot until she was so goddamn tired that she couldnt be nervous. I must have walked her three miles

.TO SERVE MAN (3/2/62)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton