Twilight Zone Companion (54 page)

SPUR OF THE MOMENT (2/21/64)

Written by Richard Matheson

Producer: Bert Granet

Director: Elliot Silverstein

Director of Photography: Robert W. Pittack

Music: composed by Rene Garriguenc; conducted by Lud Gluskin

Cast: Anne Henderson: Diana Hyland Robert Blake: Robert Hogan David Mitchell: Roger Davis Mr. Henderson: Philip Ober Mrs. Henderson: Marsha Hunt Diana Hyland Reynolds: Jack Raine

This is the face of terror: Anne Marie Henderson, eighteen years of age, her young existence suddenly marred by a savage and wholly unanticipated pursuit by a strange, nightmarish figure of a woman in black, who has appeared as if from nowhere and now at driving gallop chases the terrified girl across the countryside, as if she means to ride her down and kill her and then suddenly and inexplicably stops, to watch in malignant silence as her prey takes flight. Miss Henderson has no idea whatever as to the motive for this pursuit; worse, not the vaguest notion regarding the identity of her pursuer. Soon enough, she will be given the solution to this twofold mystery, but in a manner far beyond her present capacity to understand, a manner enigmatically bizarre in terms of time and space which is to say, an answer from the Twilight Zone.

After being chased by the black-clad figure on horseback, Anne rushes home to where her parents are waiting with her fiancee Robert, a young stockbroker. Suddenly, in bursts David, to whom Anne was once engaged,but of whom Annes parents disapprove. He begs Anne to marry him, whom she loves, and not be forced by her father into a marriage with Robert. Annes father wont hear of this; he forces David to leave at gunpoint. Twenty-five years pass. Anne is now a bitter alcoholic of forty-three; her drunken bum of a husband has gone through her familys entire fortune. It is she who, dressed in black, chases her younger self, trying in vain to warn her not to marry the wrong man. But the wrong man was not Robert it was David!

This is the face of terror: Anne Marie Mitchell, forty-three years of age, her desolate existence once more afflicted by the hope of altering her past mistakea hope which is, unfortunately, doomed to disappointment. For warnings from the future to the past must be taken in the past; today may change tomorrow, but once today is gone tomorrow can only look back in sorrow that the warning was ignored. Said warning as of now stamped not accepted and stored away in the dead file in the recording office of the Tivilight Zone

Richard Mathesons final four Twilight Zone scripts run the gamut from mildly disturbing to outright horrific. In Spur of the Moment, the romantic situation is a familiar one: Annes family wants her to marry the proper-but-dull stockbroker, but she is in love with the romantic, headstrong young fellow of whom they disapprove. We all make the assumption that the older woman is warning her younger self not to allow her family to force her to marry someone she doesnt love, but here Matheson gives the story a delightful twist. Anne runs away with her true love who turns out to be a thoroughgoing wastrel who goes through all of her money and utterly ruins her life. The warning was to not marry for love!

I liked the idea, says Matheson. Its like J. B. Priestley, the British playwright who wrote all these plays about time travel, the convolutions of time. He wrote a book called Man in Time, too. I like that type of story where you play around with time and show, with things that you meant to do, how badly they worked out.

In the lead, Diana Hyland is convincing, both as a naive, impetuous eighteen-year-old and as a cynical, wretched woman of forty-three. Not so capable is young Roger Davis, who obviously found it far beyond his ability to play the middle-aged derelict his character ultimately becomes.

I didnt like the way it was done, particularly, Matheson says of the episode. Especially galling are certain closeups in the teaser which clearly show that the girl and her middle-aged pursuer are one and the same. I felt the director gave the whole thing away in the beginning. You could see it was the same girl, and you werent supposed to know that until the end.

Steel

Written by Richard Matheson

 Producer: Bert Granet

Director: Don Weis

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: Van Cleave

Makeup: William Tuttle

Cast: Steel Kelly: Lee Marvin Pole: Joe Mantell Maynard Flash: Chuck Hicks Battling Maxo: Tipp McClure Nolan: Merritt Bohn Maxwell: Frank London Mans Voice: Larry Barton

Sports item, circa 1974: Battling Maxo, B2, heavyweight, accompanied by his manager and handler; arrives in Maynard, Kansas, for a scheduled six-round bout. Battling Maxo is a robot, or, to be exact, an android, definition: (an automaton resembling a human being. Only these automatons have been permitted in the ring since prizefighting was legally abolished in 1968. This is the story of that scheduled six-round bout, more specifically the story of two men shortly to face that remorseless truth: that no law can be passed which will abolish cruelty or desperate neednor, for that matter, blind animal courage. Location for the facing of said truth a small, smoke-filled arena just this side of the Twilight Zone.

Battling Maxo, an outmoded B2 model, breaks down before the bout. Desperate for the five-hundred-dollar fight money to repair Maxo, his manager, Steel Kellyso-named because, as a heavyweight, he was never knocked downdecides to disguise himself as a robot and fight the Maynard Flash, a brand-new B7, in Maxos place. Predictably, Steel is beaten to a pulp in the first round, but his ruse is not detected. He is paid half the promised moneynot a great deal, but it will help to effect the needed repairs.

Portrait of a losing side, proof positive that you can’t outpunch machinery. Proof also of something else: that no matter what the future brings, man’s capacity to rise to the occasion will remain unaltered. His potential for tenacity and optimism continues, as always, to outfight, outpoint and outlive any and all

changes made by his society, for which three cheers and a unanimous decision rendered from the Twilight Zone

Steel is Richard Mathesons faithful adaptation of his own short story, originally published in the May, 1956, issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and collected in The Shores of Space. It is his favorite of all his Twilight Zone episodes. Like many of his scripts, this too has a title with a double meaning. Steel was his nickname and that was his character, his backbone, that he was so determined, Matheson explains. When you have a monomaniacal character like that, its easier to handle. Captain Ahab is like that, too. He has no grays; he just wants to kill the whale.

As Steel Kelly, Lee Marvin turns in a strong and single-minded performance. Matheson was there during the rehearsals. I remember Lee Marvin making crowd noises and street noises to get himself into the feeling, he says. Even though there was no set or anything, he was psyching himself into feeling the moment, which I found impressive, that an actor would go to that trouble.

Equally impressive were the two robots, Battling Maxo and the Maynard Flash, played by Tipp McClure and Chuck Hicks. Massive and muscular, they look completely human but for two things: their fluid mechanical movements (cleverly directed by Don Weis) and their utterly immobile faces, complete with shiny black eyes.

The two robot faces were crafted by William Tuttle. Lifemasks were taken of the actors, atop which the robot faces were sculpted in clay. Foam rubber and latex copies were cast of these, which were then glued onto the actors faces. As for the inhuman, expressionless eyes, those were sections of ping-pong balls, painted black, with pinpoint eye holes through the center.

If there is a problem with Steel, it would have to lie in the area of the main characters motivation. Steel goes into the ring in order to get money to repair his robot. Yet Pole pleads with him not to do it, explaining that there are saferalthough more time-consumingmethods of getting the necessary money. Rather than seeming an act of courage, on the face of it Steels actions seem the result of a near-suicidal bullheadedness.

I saw the Lee Marvin character as the sort of man who never liked to ask anyone for help but chose, in the old-fashioned way, to take care of things for himself, however mad, says Matheson. To him it was a straight line progression: to get the money to put Maxo back in condition, he had to get that fee now. So he got it in the most obvious way he could as he saw things. He couldnt see Pole wiring for money. That would take time. Worse, it would be begging. The money might not come anyway. What if Poles sister said no? What if the work in Philadelphia did not eventuate? Much too complex for Steel. Go in the ring and hang in there and get the money and leave. Even when he got his brains beaten out and only a small percentage of the money, he did not give up. Not the brightest man in the world but, in many ways, pretty admirable, pretty brave.

NIGHT CALL (2/7/64)

Written by Richard Matheson

Producer: Bert Granet

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Director of Photography: Robert W. Pittack

Music: stock

Cast: Miss Elva Keene: Gladys Cooper Margaret Phillips: Nora Marlowe Miss Finch: Martine Bartlett

Miss Elva Keene lives alone on the outskirts of London Flats, a tiny rural community in Maine. Up until now, the pattern of Miss Keene’s existence has been that of lying in her bed or sitting in her wheelchair reading books, listening to a radio, eating, napping, taking medication and waiting for something different to happen. Miss Keene doesn’t know it yet, but her period of waiting has just ended, for something different is about to happen to her, has in fact already begun to happen, via two most unaccountable telephone calls in the middle of a stormy night, telephone calls routed directly through the Twilight Zone.”

Over a period of several days, Elva receives a number of mysterious phone calls, culminating in a dull voice saying, Where are you? I want to talk to you. In reply, the terrified Elva screams, Leave me alone! But then the next day she discovers that the calls are originating from a fallen wire lying atop the grave of her long-dead fiancee Brian, who always did what she said including letting her drive on the occasion that she crashed the car, crippling herself and killing him. Elva is filled with joy; with Brian to talk to, she wont be lonely anymore! Rushing home, she lifts the receiver and speaks his name. His sole reply: You said, leave you alone. I always do what you say. Then he is gone.

According to the Bible, God created the heavens and the Earth. It is mans prerogative and womans to create their own particular and private hell. Case in point, Miss Elva Keene, who in every sense has made her own bed and now must lie in it, sadder; but wiser; by dint of a rather painful lesson in responsibility, transmitted from the Twilight Zone.

Based on his short story Long Distance Call (which is included in his collection Shock! and which originally appeared in the November, 1953, issue of Beyond under the title Sorry, Right Number), Mathesons Night Call is a wonderfully creepy tale, a triumph of atmosphere in which the horror grows ever so slowly, bit by bit. It is directed by Jacques Tourneur, a master of subtlety, in whose finest films (notably Cat People and Curse of the Demon) what is unseen remains always more terrifying than what is seen. Here, he applies the same techniques. Aided by director of photography Robert W. Pittack, Night Call is filled with exquisite detail, suggestively malevolent, such as when the shadows of the branches of a tree play over the old womans face as she sleeps.

It was upon Mathesons recommendation that Granet hired Tourneur (Granet had worked with Tourneur before, on the 1948 film Berlin Express). There was some doubt at the time as to whether to use Tourneur, because they thought he was a movie director and couldnt handle the scheduling, Matheson recalls. As it turned out, he, to my knowledge, shot the shortest shooting schedule for a half hourI think it was twenty-eight hours.

For the most part, the episode remains close to the original short story with one notable exception. The original ends gruesomely: after the operator has mentioned Miss Elvas home address on the line and then informed her as to the source of the curious calls, the phone rings. On the other end a cadaverous voice says, Hello, Miss Elva. Ill be right over.

The alternate ending of the episode might seem somewhat cruel. Miss Elva initially reacted out of fear, as any normal human being would. To have permanent solitude visited on her as a result of a perfectly natural frailty seems extremely unjust. Still, one cant deny that its better than having a corpse come round the house, as in the original.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

Written by Richard Matheson

Producer: Bert Granet

Director: Richard Donner

Director of Photography: Robert W. Pittack

Music: stock Makeup: William Tuttle

Cast: Bob Wilson: William Shatner Ruth Wilson: Christine White Gremlin: Nick Cravat Flight Engineer: Edward Kemmer Stewardess: Asa Maynor

Portrait of a frightened man: Mr. Robert Wilson, thirty-seven, husband, father, and salesman on sick leave. Mr. Wilson has just been discharged from a sanitarium where he spent the last six months recovering from a nervous breakdown, the onset of which took place on an evening not dissimilar to this one, on an airliner very much like the one in which Mr. Wilson is about to be flown homethe difference being that, on that evening half a year ago, Mr. Wilson’s flight was terminated by the onslaught of his mental breakdown. Tonight, he’s travelling all the way to his appointed destination which, contrary to Mr. Wilson’s plan, happens to be in the darkest comer of the Twilight Zone.”

Looking out his window while the plane is in flight, Wilson sees a bulky, furred creature land on the wing. At first, he doubts his own sanity, but soon he comes to believe the evidence of his eyes. The creature is a gremlin, and it means to sabotage one of the engines. Unfortunately, it flies out of sight whenever Wilson summons his wife or the stewardess and the flight engineer refuses to heed his warnings to keep a close watch on the wings. Wilson realizes he must act alone and seeing that the gremlin has already forcibly torn back one of the cowling plate she must act quickly. He removes a pistol from a sleeping policeman, then throws open an emergency door and empties the gun into the gremlin. Mortally wounded, it is swept off the wing. Later, Wilson is taken off the plane in a straitjacket. Its all right now, darling, his wife reassures him. I know, he replies, but Im the only one who does know right now.