Three yahoos are sitting on the veranda — oh hell, this place isn’t fancy enough for a veranda — they’re on the porch of the Milled Buck Hotel. They are bitching about the heat, the lack of air conditioning, and the fact that the main road does not go by here any more.
If we had a twitchy transvestite psycho killer, it would be the Bates Motel. If we had a hot-ass mom character, it would be the Bates Motel TV series.
But we have three yahoos on a porch. Come midnight, they are still there. Apparently it is an annual event waiting for August 29th — the one day a year it rains in this little town. The next morning, they emerge from the hotel, disappointed at the sunny, cloudless sky. Mr. Smith has had enough; he talks of moving to Ireland where he hears it rains everyday. Terle, the hotel owner, convinces him to at least stay the day.
Yahoo #3, however, has a more serious plan. Fremley is going up to bed. If he doesn’t hear rain that day, he is just going to die in bed. Terle tries the old garden hose on the roof trick, but Fremley is not fooled. Also, probably not the best use of their precious water supply.
They get excited at the sight of some dust blowing up in the distance, but it just turns out to be a guest for the hotel, another once a year occurrence by the looks of things. Blanche Hillgood follows Terle and Smith upstairs as they carry a shrouded object from her car.
At dinner, for some reason, Blanche feels compelled to tell her life story, how she was 29 and unmarried, then 40 and now 65 — the actress was 52 at the time. This is a reversal of male characters on a few other shows whose characters claim to be 10 years younger than the actor portraying them.
Blanche undrapes the object the two yahoos hauled in, revealing a harp. She begins playing and somehow the harp brings the rains. They go outside in the rain and Terle exclaims, “50 years of drought are over!” That’s pretty optimistic based on 5 minutes of rain.
A pretty tedious affair. Sheila Moore is very good as Blanche, but the dudes are pretty much walking through their parts, and in Fremley’s case, laying through most of it. At least Terle (Vincent Gardenia) has some facial recognition going for him as Archie Bunker’s neighbor, and Detective Ochoa in Death Wish.
Post-Post:
Meh.
I found this episode tedious & unfulfilling. There was a similar episode of “Quantum Leap” that made a bit more sense.
Perhaps I was distracted by the name “Blanche.” I kept seeing Rue McClanahan.
Also, it could have taken a bit of a Comedic turn: Blanche playing the harp, only to have Harpo Marx appear and start chasing her around it with his “Horn.” Could have worked, perhaps.
wtf! it would have been terrible because it’s not a comedy. A little horror would have been better
For the life of me, I feel as if this installment could have been more interesting, especially if the script were more cerebral in Nature. As it stands, we have three old geezers waiting for the rain. Hmmm…is the rain a metaphor for Death?
Certainly was in that Marc Singer and Crew stranded on Mars episode. And as we all know, harp music is de rigeur in Heaven. Still, in the immortal words of Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?”