Alfred Hitchcock Presents – O Youth and Beauty! (11/22/60)

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Cash Bentley stumbles through the Riverview Country Club just as I suspect he has many times before.  He says to his friend Jim, “The Hudson River is flowing backwards, From New York to Albany.  Time’s flowing right along with it.”  Save it for The New Yorker, pal!  Oh, Mr. Cheever, sorry sir! [1]

His wife Louise stops dancing long enough to come out on the veranda to nag and humiliate her husband.  Sadly, they do not come close enough to the railing to make this the shortest AHP in history.  As they argue, Jim and some other lushes come out and ask Cash, “Hey Champ!  What time’s the race, boy?”  This is a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of people.  Jim patronizingly mussed Cash’s hair earlier, but I was willing to let it go.  The guys try to goad him into having a few drinks.  When he refuses, Jim dips his fingers into his Gin and Tonic and again runs his fingers through Cash’s hair saying, “You know what I mean, pure hair tonic!”  [pause for laughter]

Cash grabs him and says. “So you make three times the money I do!  So you can pay your bills and I can’t!  You can’t stand the fact that I was once a champ, that I’m not getting soft like the rest of you!”  Jim says he just wanted a hurdle race.  Cash inexplicably says he will give them a hurdle race.

The crowd enthusiastically creates make-shift hurdles out of chairs, tables, music stands, broomsticks, velvet ropes, etc.  Clearly this is humiliating for Cash, but he does love the attention, and the opportunity to show he is still good at something he was once great at.  Cash tells someone to get his gun from the car, by which I hope he means a starter’s pistol.  Some boozehound fires the pistol; Cash does 2 impressive laps around the club and everyone cheers him.  Then he slugs Jim.  The guy who fired the pistol, hands it back to him, “Don’t forget your gun, Cash.”  Christ, good timing, bub!  Panting, sweaty, humiliated, drunk, angry, just decked a dude — this guy is a mass murder waiting to happen and you hand him a gun!

Back at the Bentley home, we see Cash has a projector set up in his living room  to view old films of his glory days as a champion hurdler — this must have been 20 years ago!  Well, maybe the projector is there because their babysitter’s boyfriend was just watching them that evening.  But why does the screen seem to be a permanent installation in their living room?  This ain’t no white-square-on-a-tripod (my nickname in college).  Cash reaches up and pulls down a huge theater-quality screen on rollers.

He starts the film, but runs from the room like me at an Amy Schumer movie.  In his case, he has set up hurdles out of furniture, much to the despair of Louise.  He clears the hurdles and runs out the patio door.  When he loops back into the living room, he crashes into the furniture and breaks his leg.

Just awful. Was he on the GI Bill after serving 20 years in the Army? Also, the insert of him is laughable: He is a geezer, there is no background, and it is oddly framed.  Very disappointing work from the pros at AHP.

His doctor tells him he’ll be able to run again, but no hurdles.  Back at home, his young neighbors are having a party.  Cash is jealous of their dancing and partying at this shindig.  Is this Cheever being clever with a dig at his injured shin?  [Comment timesaver:  No, you’re an idiot].  Amusingly, he looks out his window and the party seems be happening about 6 feet from his window.  Cash gets into the classic sprinter stance: crouched, one hand touching the ground, cocktail in the other.  He complains about the teenagers, but his wife says they’re entitled to some fun.

Their Saturday night takes a turn for the better when Jim calls and invites them back to the club.  Naturally, Cash gets liquored up.  He hits on a younger woman.  And I don’t just mean younger than him, I mean younger than his wife who is already 16 years younger than him.  Wait, why is Louise with with this dumbbell anyway?  I doubt she was that swept away by his track prowess as she would have been six when he graduated from college.  The guys try to goad Cash into another race, but he runs into Louise’s arms and they leave.

Back at casa de Bentley, Cash is still liquored up.  He fires up the old projector to replay the best 53 seconds of his life (2nd best accord to Louise).  He hands her the pistol and says, “I’m a hurdler, I’m going to hurdle.  Now you fire.”  He tells her he will say, “On your mark, get set, go” and she should fire.  When she protests, he slugs her.

Cash again assumes the position.  He says, “On your mark, get set” and she blows him away.  Was it on purpose?  That is for the jury to decide.  She does give him a kiss and looks guiltily at the projector, which baffles me.

Meh.  I liked it better than many people, but maybe that’s because we finally had a murder after several bloodless episodes.  Or maybe as I get older, I identify with living through past glories, except for the part about having past glories.  Gary Merrill (Cash) does make it hard to like the episode.  He is at least 10 years too old for the role; and, frankly, it is not great criticism, but I just don’t like his face.  There, I said it.

Other Stuff:

  • [1]  The episode is indeed based on a short story by John Cheever.
  • Jack at Bare*Bones notes that Patricia Breslin (Louise) was on AHP and an episode of The Twilight Zone in the same week.   Her parents must have been busting!

 

If pie-eating directing were an olympic sport.

One Step Beyond – Emergency Only (02/03/59)

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Ellen Larabee, not only telling the future, but balancing a tray of cookies on her head at the same time.  C’mon, Newland, just because Hitchcock never looked through the camera doesn’t mean you can get away with it.

Like thousands of other couples in New York City, Jim and Betty Hennessey are giving a cocktail party . . .

The guests are trying to get Ellen Larabee to make some of her famous predictions.  Like the time she told Marie Cooper her house was going to burn down 3 days before it happened.  Or how she predicted Betty and Jim would get married.  Arthur is skeptical of her ability to foresee such catastrophes.  After much prodding from her friends, she agrees to tell Arthur’s future.

Ellen goes into a trance and describes Arthur’s upcoming train trip.  He is immediately skeptical as he has a reservation to take a plane that night.  However, it is a Delta flight so this one could easily come true.  She drops several other tidbits before she finally “sees” Arthur with a woman holding a knife.  This kind of kills the party.

That night, Arthur comes back to the Hennessey’s apartment.  He says Idlewild is fogged in and he is going to take a train.  I guess he doesn’t want to wait for a flight the next morning, so he’s taking a 2 am train?  Nice of him to drop by the Hennessey’s and tell them.

When Arthur gets to the train station, the cabbie tells him he dropped his keys, just as Ellen predicted.  Then the conductor tries to give him room 102B just as Ellen predicted.  He breaks the cycle by insisting on a different room.  Minutes after settling in, the conductor says this room was actually booked and he will have to move to 102B.  After some argument, he relinquishes the room to the woman who had booked it.

They meet up in the club car and both order a scotch (presumably Canadian Club) and club soda and a club sandwich.  Several more of Ellen’s predictions come true.  Arthur has a great opportunity when he realizes Ellen foresaw the inscription inside a ring the woman is wearing:  To thee for whose love I rise and fall. [1]  Man, if he had played his cards right, maybe he would not have been sleeping in 102B after all.  But no, he blows it and lets her read it to him.

Arthur then panics and angrily demands to know if the woman knows him or Ellen.  She — by the way, Ms. Big Shot psychic predicted every stitch and accessory this woman was wearing, but did not mention her name — insists that she does not.  Arthur bolts out of the club car.  Inexplicably, the woman runs after him; maybe he didn’t pay for the drinks.  After a chase through several cars, she closes in on him.  In a panic, he pulls the Emergency Stop cable.

He wakes up with his head bandaged and the woman holding a knife.  Seems that by pulling the Emergency Stop, Arthur prevented the train from slamming into a stalled freighter.  She says she is a nurse, but that doesn’t really explain the knife.  She also asks how he knew to stop the train when it was clear that this sweaty maniac running through the halls really had no idea what he was doing.

Also, cool as it was to know the mystery lady would be wearing a fur collar and a snake ring, maybe Ellen could have also let someone know that a passenger train was going to slam into a freight train that night and possibly kill dozens.

There is not a lot of story here.  The dominoes are set up one by one, then they are knocked down one by one (not even in one of those mass falls).  The predictions weren’t particularly cryptic which might make you wonder how they could possibly occur.  The final one with the knife is dismissed anticlimactically.  Still, I appreciated the things that were well-done.

So, another quality episode, but there is a certain sameness to all of them so far.  And a certain sameness to me saying that every week.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] That’s pretty salacious when you think about it.

Tales from the Crypt – A Slight Case of Murder (05/03/96)

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This might be the worst opening I’ve ever seen to a TV episode.  It begins with 83 seconds of Sharon Bannister typing.  That’s it.  There is no suspense, we can’t read what she is typing, she isn’t topless.  It is just typing for 83 seconds. [1]

Sharon removes the last page of her new book from the typewriter and we see the title, Death by Love.  This will be an ironic capper to her series sitting on the bookshelf: Death by Greed, Death by Pride, Death by Envy, Death by Lust, Death by Remorse, Death by Revenge, Death by Hate.  She seemed to have a 7 Deadly Sins thing going there (if you count Revenge as Wrath (any Trekkie can explain the connection)), but what is Remorse doing there? [2]

Her neighbor Mrs. Trask has come by to borrow a cup of sugar although, frankly, that’s the last thing she needs.  She has also asks Sharon to read a story that she has written.  Sharon’s review is, “In the pantheon of mystery writers, there’s the greats, there’s everyone else who’s ever written a book, and then there’s you.  Agatha Christie can rest in peace.”  The actors are well cast, the line is fabulous, but this is painful.  I like some good dry British humor, but this is just death.  The lethargy — which seems like a good English word, but I guess they all are — is stifling.

She hustles Mrs. Trask out, and the cycle begins again.   She hears noises, then gets a call from her ex-husband Larry.  She hears the door and tells Larry, “They’re coming in.”  She picks up a fireplace poker and advances toward the noises.  Again, this is so flatly staged that it creates zero suspense or tension.  Of course, it turns out to be Larry playing a trick on her.  As he enters the room, she calls him a bastard.  He replies, “You used to call me biscuit” which is just cringe-inducing.  Yada yada, he kills her, which in a good episode would have been one of the yadas.

This awful tone is sad, because there are some great bits here.  The two women are great in their roles, or could have been.  There is a nice scene where Mrs. Trask comes back after Larry has killed Sharon.  He has propped her up at her typewriter with a ruler in a way which is just awesome.  After Mrs. Trask leaves, Sharon falls over, and that is used to transition to a shot of Larry dumping her body on the floor of the basement.  Great stuff, although I’m not sure a famous author would live in a house with a dirt floor in the basement.

Well, Mrs. Trask’s loser son Joey has a crush on Sharon, there is a bit over some missing keys, Sharon is maybe not as dead as suspected, Joey gets a gun and Larry finds some hedge-clippers.  This plays out nicely, but is just so deadly dull that it is hard to care.  As if to really punish the audience, the return of Mrs. Trask is literally in slow motion.

This strikes me as the greatest misfire in 7 years of TFTC.  There have been some awful episodes, but none that had so many great assets totally squandered.  Amp up the energy, give it a decent score, and this story could have been a classic.  How this got to air is puzzling.  The writer can’t blame the director because he is the same guy.  And that guy was responsible for L.A. Confidential and a lot of other fine work.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Just the opening credits, you are thinking.  No, only the Producer and Writer/Director overlap with this scene.  And I only started the clock when she was visible, not at the sound of the typewriter.  To be fair, some of it is hand-held, indicating a voyeur, but that soon gives way to a more standard shot.  It’s a lot of typing is all I’m saying.
  • [2] Seven books (or eight with the Love capper) seems to indicate a lack of confidence.  Maybe she learned a lesson from Sue Grafton who just missed finishing the series.  If Stephen King’s titles followed a formula, he could have probably made it through the Periodic Table of Elements by now.

Outer Limits – The Inheritors (07/16/99)

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It’s too bad about Jacob Hardy.  I was just starting to like him for his willingness to speak truth to power . . . ful stench of modern art.[3]  Sadly we do not get to see the referenced work “Problem Stain 11” before a meteor streaks through the atmosphere and shoots a lugie into Jacob’s melon.  He falls to the ground with blood pouring out of the wound, creating both a bigger problem and a bigger stain.

He is taken to the morgue and we get a good look at that wound.  There is no exit, so Dr. Ian Michaels reaches in and pulls out a metal projectile the size of his thumb if he had a larger weiner.  A tentacle pops out of the hole and flails about before retreating back into Jacob’s noggin.  Even more shocking, Jacob gets up and walks out of the morgue.

That night, Ian dutifully goes to visit his wife Daria who is in the hospital.  She expresses no shock or surprise at her husband’s story, but that might just be the coma.

Jacob’s girlfriend is surprised when he walks in the front door.  He seems changed, cold and distant.  Within seconds, he packs some clothes and says, “I have to go away.”  Wait, did they delete a sex scene?  He makes her promise not to reveal his plans which he didn’t reveal to her, then he leaves.

He meets up with 2 other people who had similar experiences with meteor tentacles in their heads.  Whatever it is that they are going to do, it is agreed they have 6 days and 10 hours to do it. [1]  It is important because Jacob says, “Everything depends on us.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Michaels has discovered online that in addition to Jacob, Curtis Sawyer and Kelly Risely were apparently killed by the meteor that night, then got better.  Dr. Michaels somehow thinks their recoveries might hold the solution for bringing Daria out of her coma.

Jacob funds the team with $500,000 in 2 days of day-trading with a Clintonesque level of success.  Kelly bones up on metallurgy at the library, and Curtis gets a consulting gig at a tech firm.  They use these resources and one of the slugs in their head to create a large device.  They test it out on a cat, zapping it out of existence.

Next they round up patients both old and young who don’t have much time to live, and take them to the device.  Daria is among the patients.  There is a good reason for their actions that boil down to “Life for life.”

Interesting justification for their actions, but a pretty average episode with pretty average performances.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] We have the standard twerp who is compelled to point out it is really 6 days, 9 hours and 40 minutes.  That’s OK here, but it bugs me when a character says something will happen in 6.2 seconds.  Is that from when they start speaking, or from when they say “6.2”‘, or from the end of the sentence?  I’m lookin’ at you, Star Trek!  But not on CBS All Access.[2]
  • [2] What f***ing idiots are encouraging CBS by subscribing?  Just say NO, people, and it will be free.  You know, like NetFlix, Amazon, HBO or Hulu.
  • [3] Honestly, this sentence seemed like a good idea last night.

 

 

Science Fiction Theatre – The Phantom Car (07/20/56)

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Host Truman Bradley tells us the show opens in “Mesa Flats . . . 105 degrees in the shade . . . but there is no shade.”  WTF?  Could there be a more useless piece of exposition?  We see prospector Mort Woods who is luxuriating in a cool swimming pool . . . but there is no swimming pool.  He is sitting on some rocks beside the dusty flats.

He sees a car approaching which is strange because there are never cars there.  He tries to flag down the car, but it zooms right past him.  He can see that there is no driver.  Being from South Florida, he even checked for skeletal fingers on the wheel and the tip of a hat.

Mort thinks this is so significant that he runs in the 105+ degree heat to report it to Sheriff Barney Cole in Mesa City.  Mort has had hallucinations before, but Barney goes out to the desert with him.

Meanwhile, Dr. Arthur Gress and his wife Regie are also in the desert.  She calls up to him on a ridge to ask if he sees anything through the binoculars.  He says, “No, I can’t see a thing, Regie.  Better turn off that engine.  As soon as it cools, I’ll tape up that radiator hose.”  So he has brought his wife to collect samples in the 105+ degree desert, left the car running, knows there is a radiator problem, and risked stranding them in this furnace because the car overheated?

Dr. Gress heads into the desert where he spotted an outcropping of ore.  Regie is left at the car.  Soon, she hears another car coming.  She attempts to flag it down, hoping they have some water or eligible bachelors.  Unfortunately, the erratic car swerves and mows her down.  Gress arrives just in time to see that there is no one in the car!

The sheriff meets Gress’s car in the desert.  Both cars stop and the Sheriff says, “You won’t get very far that way, mister.  You’ll burn up your engine.”  I guess he thinks Gress was speeding.  They put Regie in the Sheriff’s car and head back to Mesa City.  On the way, they are surprised to meet an ambulance that has already been summoned.

At the hospital, she remains unconscious with the diagnosis of a concussion.  The local doc calls a specialist in Los Angeles, but learns the doctor is already on his way to Mesa City, summoned, like the ambulance, by a mystery caller.

Morty and Sheriff Cole go back to the desert to search for the driverless car.  At 1:45 they spot it and begin a swervy pursuit.  Somehow, on the vast empty flats, the driverless car is able to shake these two bumpkins.

The specialist, Dr. Avery, is able to patch Regie up pretty quickly.  Gress dutifully stays by his injured wife’s side, nursing her back to health, making sure no further harm comes to her.  Naw, he borrows some equipment from the Air Force and heads back to the desert with the Sheriff and Morty.  I guess the deleted scene where they convinced the Air Force to hand over a million bucks of radar and acoustical equipment to a Geologist, a Sheriff, and a smelly desert rat will be on the DVD.

While they are fiddling with this high-tech gear to locate the car, it does a drive-by and almost clips them.  Nice work, fellas!

Back at the hospital, Gress says the car they are looking is radar-controlled, and electronically-guided.  And apparently solar-powered because it seems to go forever without gassing up.  When the Sheriff gets a call about another hit-and-run they go back to the desert.  WTF — the victim is the local doctor!  Before he dies, he confesses that he built the car and tells them how to stop it.

There isn’t much going on here, yet I liked the episode.  Hollywood, not noted for ever learning a single f***ing thing [1], has never understood the appeal of just watching a pile of American metal zooming down the road.  Whether it is Barry Newman in Vanishing Point or Steve McQueen in Bullitt, Americans are hypnotized by a vehicle in motion.  Even when there is an utter nothing in the driver’s seat like in the schlock classic The Car or Peter Fonda in Easy Rider.[2]

The shots of the runaway car zooming across the desert were just awesome.  By any objective standard, the episode is awful, but I give it a thumbs-up.  God Bless America!

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Like how the overuse of the F-word hurts movies.
  • [2] R.I.P.
  • Title Analysis:  Hmmmm, it is pretty clear that it is a real car.  The phantom seems to be the driver.