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One Step Beyond – Brainwave (10/06/59)

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One Step Beyond aired 2 episodes of its 2nd season, then took a week off before airing this episode.  I will assume that was for some minor retooling.  The show now opens with a wavy animated intro floating over a starry background.  Sadly, it is very cheesy; this series has proven itself to be above — nay, beyond — such sci-fi tropes.  Besides, this series has always been about the afterlife, not space.

However they have also inserted a second new sponsored-by intro.  We are shown, in glorious B&W (that is not sarcasm), molten aluminum being poured into a vat which, hopefully, is not made of aluminum.  It really is a beautiful shot, but I have to wonder:  Who is this marketing directed toward?

John Newland intros the episode as not taking place in the USA (typical for OSB). Tonight we are set in Japanese waters during WWII. Wisely, they are not again expecting us to empathize with the enemy as they did in The Haunted U-Boat. OSB does its usual great job making the most of their budget, and seamlessly cutting in stock war footage. Well, seamlessly except for how the night sky was filled with tracers and flak one second, and the battle is in broad daylight the next. It is so well done, though, that it doesn’t matter.

Seaman Driscoll panics, but otherwise there is no major damage. The Captain is informed that the electrical board is out so they will be stuck there for 6 hours. He says he hopes no Japanese reconnaissance planes spot them. Hey, Cap’n how about those 10 planes that were shooting at you all night? You think they’re not going to tell any one?

Lt. Commander Stacey goes to check on Driscoll and finds Pharmacist’s Mate Harris drunk. He recommends a Court Martial to Captain Fielding since this is Harris’s third offense and he always bogarts the hooch.

Fielding goes to see Harris in the brig. Turns out Harris is tormented by the memory of his 19 year old brother who was killed. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the war. He was a medical missionary [1] who only wanted to, “take penicillin and the word of the Lord to the Hottentots.” After Pearl Harbor, Harris talked his brother into joining the army, and also suggested he take up smoking.

The Japanese attack again and Captain Fielding is hit. There is no surgeon onboard, so Stacey calls another ship. Dr. Bricker from the other ship is summoned. Harris is recruited to examine Fielding. Over the radio, Bricker tells him to scrub up. Bricker leads him through cleaning the wound and searching for shrapnel. During the most critical point, they lose radio contact.

After a few tense moments of radio silence, Bricker returns.  He leads Harris through tricky maneuvers required to remove a metal fragment near Fielding’s jugular, and to bill Cigna for a combat injury.  After both delicate operations are completed. Stacey returns and reports that Bricker had been killed several minutes earlier in a freak explosion on the Lido Deck.

Like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, One Step Beyond sometimes, and it is a rarity, coasts along on its sheer professionalism.  As usual, the episode is well-cast and well-directed.  The SFX, whether original or stock, solidly support the story.  But there are a couple of problems, large and small.

The large problem has been ongoing.  OSB has restricted itself to a small wedge of the genre.  There are just not many variations on the basic life-beyond-death premise.  So that sameness creeps into a lot of episodes.  

The problem with this specific episode is that it never completes the circuit.  OK, Harris has a brother killed in combat.  Later in the episode he is guided by a different dead man to complete an operation.  Where is the connection?  Why does it matter that Harris’s brother died?  It just feels like padding for a very thin story.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] OSB seems to have a thing for medical missionaries. This calling was last seen in The Riddle.
  • Dr. Bricker is played by Mr. Drysdale from The Beverly Hillbillies.
  • Among the competition that night: The Life and Legend of Wyatt Rifleman, The Many Loves of Tightrope, Fibber McGee and Arthur Murray, and for the kids — Molly Party! Woohoo!

Thanks to classic-tv for the screen shot.

Suspense – The Yellow Scarf (06/07/49)

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Being from the 1940’s, Suspense gets graded on the biggest curve here.  But this is just dreadful.

England 1897.  Exterior.  A Salvation Army woman is soliciting donations.

Another woman stumbles into the scene.  Let us savor this moment because it is the sole sign of a pulse in this episode: The woman drunkenly proclaims her name is Hettie . . .  Spaghetti!  Sure, it might be a joke worthy of a 3 year old, but here it is gold!  And by here, I mean this blog, not the episode.

After telling a constable she has “no kith or kin”, she starts to pass out.  The cop goes to call “the wagon” to remove this riff-raff from the street.  So I guess that bridge in the background was not the Golden Gate. [1] She is approached by a hornblower [2] — wait, maybe that is the Golden Gate Bridge!  No, that is Tom, also in the Salvation Army [3], who literally plays a horn.

Boris Karloff sees this out his window.  He goes to the door and offers Hettie shelter.  He offers her a room to herself, to feed her, buy her some clothes, and give her a pounding a week “to perform the duties of an indoor servant“, and that euphemism, I’m going nowhere near!  Oh wait, that was one £ pound a week.

But there are 2 rules:  1) always keep the front door closed, 2) never leave the house alone, except for the morning shopping.  He points to another door which leads to his laboratory.  No one goes in there except his assistant and his clients. She is never to enter that room.

Karloff tells his assistant Tilson that Hettie will do fine.   “She will sit in front of the shop to allay suspicions”, which seems to violate both rules.  He says their “special clients” will be able to come and go as they wish.  Tilson asks what will happen if she finds out what they really do there.  Karloff says he will marry her!  No, as my president says, joke.

Months later, she hears Tom playing a horn in front of the shop.  She puts her hands on his chest and says, “What a chest you must have!  What windpower! And you must have real muscle in your lips.”  Oh sure, but I get sent to HR.

Karloff is working on a paralyzed man when Tilson rats out Hettie about opening the door.  Or maybe it is a corpse sitting up.  Still no clues what’s going on here.  I guess that’s the titular suspense.  This is going to have some great payoff, I tells ya!

She moans about being cooped up.  He asks if there is any detail of their Clintonian marriage agreement he has not lived up to?  She has her own room, her own clothes, enough allowance, and he has made “no demands on her person.”

She says she just wants him to talk to her at dinner, or say he likes her dress, or even just smile.  He reminds her of the 2 rules and wants to get back to work.

The next time she sees Tom, he gives her the titular yellow scarf that he got from the donations bin.  He says on their next hookup maybe they can go shoplifting at Goodwill.  She says she can’t come out, but Tom says he can come in. Maybe he’s in the Salvation JAG.  Boris sees them smooching.

A month later, at dinner, Hettie spills soup on the scarf.  Boris asks where she got it.   Tilson again rats her out about Tom.  She claims Tom gave her the scarf for taking a temperance pledge, although that might have been a clever ruse to steer her away from the chastity pledge.  Boris demands it, saying his wife will not accept presents from other men.

Hettie goes nuts and in a rant, finally says she is inviting Tom to dinner.  Boris takes the scarf into his lab and stuffs it in a beaker where he says it will be slowly destroyed.  He does, however, decide to allow Tom to come to dinner but they can go to hell if they expect him to serve amuse-bouche.

Karloff is not around when Tom arrives for dinner.  He and Hettie enter the lab to look for the scarf.  They see it in the beaker, but when they remove it, it is covered in a powder.  They flee back to the lobby just in time to meet Karloff and Tilson.  There is a bit of business where Karloff has Tom help him open a can of salmon with a hunting knife.  Though the series does not hold up, I appreciate that they usually take the time to inject some manufactured suspense.  Seriously, kudos.  Sure enough, Tom gets cut “by accident.”

Hettie acts quickly, pulling out the scarf to wrap his wound.  To be fair, Karloff seems to be concerned for Tom when he tells her not to use the scarf.  Rightly so, because Tom croaks within seconds.  Hettie is so distraught at his death that — and this is pretty good for this show — she grabs the knife which has been foreshadowed, stabs Karloff in the hand, and in his pain she is able to wrap his hand with the killer scarf.

She stumbles outside and tells the same constable she’ll be needing that wagon after all.  It might have felt like months to us, but it has been months for him — does he even now know WTF she is??

By all modern (or even 10 years later) technical standards, it is a disaster.  However, I admire some of what they attempted.  The two big failures were 1) as always, the oppressive, omnipresent organ score, and 2) the complete lack of backstory or even sidestory for Karloff.

Please consider this episode NSFW!  Not because it is lewd, but because your boss should smack you for watching TV at work.  Is this what you were doing while working remotely?  POW!  Oh sure, but I get sent to HR.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  Rigorous New Yorker-level fact-checking reveals the GGB was opened in 1937.
  • [2]  It seemed to me that hornblower would be an amusing euphemism for a gay dude (not that there’s anything wrong with that). In checking it out, I confirmed that it is, and learned it also can mean a chronic masturbator.  BTW, a Horatio Hornblower is the act of farting on another’s head with such force that the hair is blown back.
  • [3]  Sadly, could not work in Piano Man reference:  . . . talking to Tommy, who’s still in the Salvation Ahmy, and probably will be for life . . .
  • Proximity Alert:  Russell Collins was just in last week’s episode.  Collins is a genresnaps-fave, but give someone else a chance!  What the . . . Douglass Watson (Tom) was also in both episodes.  Was there an actor shortage in 1949?  My heavens, where ever did people get their political and climate expertise? [4]
  • [4]  The same gibe appears in the underrated Get Smart movie.  The writers had no non-sequel writing credits for 5 years.  Coincidence?