Monthly Archives: July 2017

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Dry Run (11/08/59)

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Welcome to guys talking.  I hope you like guys talking because that’s all we serve. Catch of the Day: guys talking.  Soup de Jour: guys talking.  Happy Hour: half price on guys talking.  Ladies Night: Sorry, still guys talking — this is Hollywood after all.

We begin with three guys talking.

They are admiring the piranha in Mr. Barberosa’s office.  Barberosa likes the piranhas’ dependability.  Prentiss says, “Yeah, you can depend on him to snap your finger off the minute you put it in the water.”  He says he will stick to raising rabbits which is just bizarrely random and never followed up on.

After Prentiss leaves, Barberosa lectures Art about dependability.  He says in his organization, “I am the coach.  I depend on teamwork.  Maybe that’s why we keep going strong while most of our competitors fold up when the going gets a little tough. Because I can depend on everybody on the team.  And they can depend on each other, too.”

He says he has had his eye on Art and is ready to move him up in the organization.  Art said he appreciates the chance and Barberosa busts him, “I don’t like that word, chance.  I hand-pick the people who work for me and I look for one quality, dependability.”  Dude, how did you not see that coming!

Art says, “Well, you can depend on me.”  Good boy!  You’ll go far!

Barberosa has one last test for Art before promoting him.  He just did a deal with a man named Moran, and wants Art to deliver the payment; and then kill him.  He even gives Art an untraceable pistol.   Barberosa specifically instructs him to hand Moran the cash before killing him; which should be a tip-off that something is awry — why does it matter if he is going to kill Moran anyway.  He will get the new job if he can handle that hit; oh, and pass the typing test.

Art drives out to the Old Valley Winery — are there really any new valleys?  He looks around the dark winery.  The lights come on and Moran is holding a gun on him.  He demands that Art hand over the $10k which must be in $1,000 bills because the envelope is pretty slim.

They have a glass of wine while Moran goes on and on about Barberosa.  Moran offers a toast to Barberosa, “May his cheap heart burn in — hey, that’s pretty good, huh kid? — cheap heart burn.  Cheap heartburn, don’t ya get it?”  If he does, he’s smarter than me.  OK, heart and burn go together to make heartburn, but where does cheap fit in?  He specifically repeats it like it is a real bon mot but it is barely even a mot.

Over the next 15 minutes, Moran talks Art into joining his organization.  All Art has to do is betray (i.e. kill) Barberosa.  Art is convinced.  As he is leaving, Moran pulls a gun and tells him Barberosa will be disappointed that he flunked the dependability [1] test.  Bang!

Yeah, you could question why Moran let Art walk up the long stairway and get the high ground before pulling his gun.  Or you could question why Moran drank twice as much wine as Art if he knew he had a tough shot coming up.  Or you could question why Barberosa gave Art a revolver where he could even see there were no bullets in the chambers.[2]  But none of that matters.

They had a very talky episode that was redeemed with a good twist.  To make it palatable, they recruited four heavy hitters:  Walter Matthau (The Odd Couple, Fail Safe, Bad News Bears), Robert Vaughn (The Man from UNCLE) [3], David White (Bewitched), and Tyler McVey (OK, three heavy hitters)[4].  Their big roles were in the future, but there’s a reason they had such success.

Matthau did the heavy lifting.  He had to make a 15 minute conversation tolerable, and pulled it off expertly.  The winery set, though small, was very well designed to allow for gloom, movement, casks and an interesting place for the conversation.

So, unlike Touché, we have a very talky AHP episode that works due to good performances.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] It finally hit me that loyalty was the word that should have been used throughout the episode.  But then they would have lost the piranha metaphor.  I guess a Cocker Spaniel wouldn’t have been exotic enough.
  • [2] OK, maybe there were dead bullets in the cylinders.  They weren’t blanks because all he got was a click.
  • [3] As an aside, I saw the Man from UNCLE movie last week.   I learned that Henry Cavill’s stiff portrayal of Superman is one thing you can’t blame Zack Snyder for.  But his suits are fabulous.
  • [4] To be fair, Tyler McVey had a huge career, he just never had a truly iconic role.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.

Twilight Zone – The Toys of Caliban (12/04/86)

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Problematic.

Like the Outer Limits episode Unnatural Selection, this episode uses a mentally-challenged kid as its catalyst.  That isn’t inherently bad, but man is it hard to do well.

Toby, a mentally challenged teenager, is looking at a book and becomes interested in a picture of a unicorn.  He says, “Brinnnnng.”  When his mother calls him and his father Ernie to dinner, it is fairly subtly revealed that a stuffed unicorn has magically appeared in his lap.  It’s a good thing he chose a mythological creature which could not materialize — three inches to the left, there was a picture of a gorilla.

His mother Mary asks if he is hungry and he shouts, “Doughnuts, momma, doughnuts!”  Ernie says no, he had doughnuts yesterday, like that’s a reason not to have a delicious doughnut today.  Even during dinner, Toby wants doughnuts.  Ernie finally gives in and pulls pictures of doughnuts out of a locked drawer.  Before he can give Toby the picture, he conjures up a chocolate doughnut.  Previously, like Amy Schumer, he always needed to see an pre-existing object in order to create.

That night Toby is in pain from OD’ing on doughnuts.  Mary says he only had two, but Ernie points out that with Toby’s improved powers, he could have eaten a dozen earlier.  They call an ambulance.  The hospital wants to keep him overnight in the children’s ward which has a TV and lots of comic books.  Ernie demands Toby must stay in a private room, so I hope he can wish up a good-ass insurance policy.

The next morning, Toby is better.  The family gets a visit from Mandy Kemp — she’s from the government and she’s here to help.  Actually, she is asking some valid questions about why Toby has never been to school.  All the adults are throwing around the R word — no, the original R word — so this is clearly an old episode.  You probably would have never heard the word retarded on the old TZ either.  Strange that there was a brief period when it became acceptable, although the taboos on each end were for different reasons.  But I digress.

Over Mandy’s objection, Ernie & Mary take Toby home.  Once again, TZ undermines itself with an entirely inappropriate score.  Toby has just thrown a tantrum and his parents blasted Mandy.  So naturally we get happy piano music which I swear I thought was leading into the Charlie Brown theme.  Sure, Toby is excited to see a floor-waxer, but the doctor and Mandy are concerned for his welfare, and his parents are desperate and angry as they defy they hospital.  Ernie grimly glares at Mandy as they enter the elevator.  This is no time for the Snoopy dance.

In his room that night, Toby closes his eyes and says, “Bring.”  A magazine Ernie was reading at the hospital appears.  Sadly, dad was not reading the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition.  Mary goes in and sees Toby fondling a bloody human heart like one pictured in the science magazine.  She has a heart attack and collapses.  This a little muddled, at least to me.  My initial interpretation was that the heart he was holding came out of her chest. [1]  Other write-ups do not suggest this, and he is clearly playing with something before she collapses; so I guess I’m wrong, but I’m not sure my way is not better.

Some time later, Mandy comes to the house.  She insists that Toby must be moved to an institution.  Ernie decides to show her why Toby can’t go with her.  He makes a suit of armor appear and she is shocked.  But not as shocked as when Toby grabs a picture of his dead mother and wishes her rotting corpse back into the living room.  Mandy runs out and Ernie buries his wife in the back yard.

Just as Ernie finishes burying Mary, he hears sirens.  He fears they will take Toby and slice him up like a lab rat.  He goes inside and looks through his books as we hear more entirely inappropriate, sickeningly sweet music.  He apparently finds Great House Fires of North America and gives it to Toby.  Boom.

I like a simple, high-concept episode like this.  I really felt like Ernie and Mary loved their son, so it didn’t feel too exploitative.  The score, while dreadful, was only really offensive in a couple of scenes.  On the plus side, no narration from Charles Aidman.  That is strange, because this is the kind of episode his avuncular voice might have fit into.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] My interpretation comes from a problem I always had with shows like Bewitched.  Where does this newly materialized stuff come from?  Does it come from somewhere else?  How is the source chosen?  Is it a completely new object?  How was it designed?  What matter was used to create it?  Guess you’re not supposed to think about that.
  • Classic TZ Legacy:  It’s a Good Life.
  • Title Analysis:  Did they really need to compare a mentally-challenged kid to a monster?  They called Anthony Fremont in It’s a Good Life a monster too, but at least he was making reasoned choices.  You know, for a six year old.
  • And, BTW, Prospero was the magician; I don’t remember Caliban having super-powers, but it’s been a while since I skimmed the Cliffs Notes after a few beers the night before the test.

The Dilemma of the Dead Lady – Cornell Woolrich (1936)

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1.

Babe Sherman, “a good looking devil,” is packing his steamer trunk for a boat ride home from France.  He used his looks to fleece a woman out out her life savings earned at the largest jewelry store on Rue McClanahan de la Paix.  He also managed to pull a switcheroo with a string of pearls at her store, swapping out a $75,000 [1] string with a diamond clasp for a cheapo string.

He is hiding the pearls in a secret compart-ment in his shoe heel when there is a knock at his door.  A woman’s voice says, “Let me in, Bebe, [2] it’s me!”  He opens the door and she wonders why he’s dressed and packing a trunk.  He says he’s just going on a business trip, but she spots his ticket to the US.  The get into a tussle about the money he stole from her — one of them tussles that undoes the tiny screws on a shoe heel — and the pearls spill out.

Knowing he can’t let her leave, “he flung the long loop of pearls over her head from behind like a lasso.”  C’mon, how freakin’ long is this string of pearls?  Is it one o’ them 6 foot strings like flappers wore?  If so, how tall are his heels that he hid them in?  What are they, from the Tom Cruise collection?

So, he strangles her with the string of pearls.  It says they are on “a platinum wire” but that seems a little far-fetched.  Babe laments that she is “Dead.  Strangled by a thing of beauty, a thing meant to give pleasure” just like the woman in Florida who choked to death giving a blow job.  Ironically, a pearl necklace might have saved the Florida woman’s life.  But I digress.

2.

As always seems to happen, the porter knocks on his door while a dead woman is on the floor.  Christ, it’s like they have ESP.  Babe quickly realizes the only way out is to take the corpse with him in the steamer trunk.  He unpacks some of the hotel towels, robes and ashtrays, then “dragged her over, sat her up in the middle of it, folded her legs up against her out of the way, and pushed the two upright halves closed over her.”  He slaps a label on the trunk indicating it is to be delivered to his cabin, not put in the hold, and opens the door.

Babe and the porter take the trunk downstairs in an old cage elevator.  There seems to be a concern whether the elevator will take the weight.  So no one has ever ridden down from the 3rd floor with their luggage [3] before?

The elevator lands safely, and the porter takes the trunk to a taxi.  Babe wants the trunk stowed inside, but the driver wants it “tied on in back, on the top, or even at the side.”  How does that side storage work?  Finally a 2.5 X fare persuades the driver to put the trunk in the back seat.  At the train station, Babe tries to book a private compartment, but is forced to share one with a Yank.

3.

Babe insists the trunk be stowed in the hall outside his cabin, but the conductor says it is against the rules.  Babe flashes a few francs and persuades him.  Finally, after the train is in motion, he swings the trunk into it.  Babe discovers his compartment mate is a cop.

When they arrive at the ship, a familiar scene plays out.  The ship steward says the trunk is too large for a cabin and must be stowed in the hold.  The cop says, “Listen, I’m in there with him . . . put it where the guy wants it to go.”

4.

So the huge trunk goes into the cabin.  Babe figures he is going to have to resolve this situation in 2 days because the Frenchwoman is going to start stinking up the joint like a Frenchman.

His first move is to try to switch cabins.  That seems possible until the steward realizes who he is.  Suddenly nothing is available.  He suspects the cop got to the steward.

The cop ups the game by purposely spilling liquid shoe polish on Babe’s white shirt.  He has no way to retrieve a shirt from the trunk and can’t go to the dining-car dressed like that since he isn’t from Florida.[4]

The rest is very episodic, much like Woolrich’s earlier story in this anthology Two Murders, One Crime.  Fortunately, he is great at this kind of story.  Both stories turn into a rambling comedic pas de deux between a cop an a killer.  Both would have made great episodes of AHP.  Chandler might be the great stylist in this collection, but for pure entertainment, Woolrich is my favorite.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] $1.3 million in today’s dollars.
  • [2] His name is Babe, but the woman calls him Bebe.  OK, that’s French for baby, but it’s a strange choice by the author since it just looks like a typo.
  • [3] I never really looked at that word before.  You lug it around; it is literally your luggage.  I wonder which word came first.
  • [4] I am stilled scarred by a 50 year old guy I saw at lunch today wearing a wife-beater.  It wasn’t a 4-star restaurant, but have a little class, dude.
  • First published in the July 1936 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.
  • Also that month: It got up to 114 degrees in Wisconsin.  Bloody global warming!

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Playground (06/04/85)

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We open in the titular playground which looks like it was shot in a sandstorm on Mars with a sepia filter during magic hour.  This dissolves to a strangely constructed shot of a kid in a cage, or in some sort of playground equipment.  There are sticks striking the bars and hands trying to grab him, but no other kids are actually shown.

Charles Underhill (William Shatner) is at home playing with his young son Steve when his wife interrupts them to tell Charles he doesn’t spend enough time with his young son Steve.  I don’t have any idea what this director was thinking, but he sure loves his earth-tones.  Charles goes into the dining room for breakfast.  The table is brown, the bureau is brown, the door is brown, we see through to the brown kitchen, there is brown paneling on the wall, and his tie and pants are brown.  The 54 year old Shatner’s toupee is a rich mahogany.  Even the toast is burnt.

Oops, not his wife, but his sister Carol.  She has a career and is getting married, so she won’t have time to take Steve places anymore.  She chides Charles for not even taking him to the local playground so he can meet some other kids.  She is worried he will never learn to fit in; a misfit who lives with his sister — just like Charles, or countless men on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

That night after work, Charles walks by the playground to see if it is safe for his son.  He sees a lot of kids having fun on swings, on a corkscrew slide, running around, riding a lazy susan, roller-skating, see-sawing.  Things gradually darken so the kids are getting hurt, some are crying, bullies begin hassling one boy.  Charles calls them out and they stream by him like a flock of assholes.

That night, at his sister’s insistence, he takes Steve to the park.  At night, I say.  To the park.  Who goes to the park at night?  A lot of kids apparently, as it as filled with kids when they get there.  When they arrive, the kids stop and stare at them.

One of the kids calls to him, “Come out and play, Charlie!”  He sees them as monsters as they approach him.  To be fair, this is one homely bunch of kids.  He panics and runs home like a little girl.  Well, not like the ones he is running from.

The next day on the train, he is gazing despondently out the window.  He has this exchange with his twitchy, gum-chewing co-worker:

Charles:  How do you raise a boy?

Twitchy:  I don’t know.  You find a cement mixer, you throw him in, you let it run for five minutes, you take him out.

What?  That’s not how you make anything.  That’s not even how you make cement.  And he didn’t say make, he said raise.  Bradbury was a great prose stylist, but some of his dialogue is just painful.

As Charles passes the playground that night. he sees Steve running around having fun with the other kids.  He chews Carol out for bringing him and picks him up in his arms.  Again a kid calls his name.  Charles recognizes it as Ralph who bullied him as a kid.

That night after PTSDing over his childhood, Charles goes back to the playground.  He sees 12 year old Ralph and runs home.

The next night — or maybe it’s the same night; who the hell knows?  This playground only seems to be open sunset to sunrise — when they get to the playground, all the kids stop and stare at them.  And I can’t stress enough how hideous these kids are.  If there were a juvie version of Escape From New York, this would be it.

What happened next actually shocked me.  I expected a long-winded soliloquy from Bradbury on the innocence of children.  Actually, I got some interesting imagery and a body swap between Charles and Steve.  Charles, now in Steve’s body, is once again chased up the monkey bars and the kids are poking at him.

I was surprised again.  I expected Steve, now in Charles’s body, to rescue li’l Charles.  But no.  He mills around, does a little swinging on the swing set.  Makes his way toward the gate, and leaves.  What do you expect, he’s just a dopey little kid.

This was peak-Shatner, filmed between Star Trek III and IV.  Yeah, you get the breathy pauses and the permed brown toupee, but people forget how good an actor he was.  The image of him, with Steve’s katra in him is tough to shake.  The easiest thing would have been for Bradbury to have him go save Steve, they switch back, and have a good cry.  However, with the mind and soul of a six year old, the Charles-body doesn’t know what to do.  He stays away from the crowd.  Maybe he doesn’t fully understand what is happening.  He plays a little by himself, then gets bored and leaves.

Maybe a little too melodramatic, but one of RBT’s better episodes.  It certainly would have made a better debut than Marionettes, Inc.

Other Stuff:

 

Outer Limits – In Another Life (02/16/98)

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TV is never satisfied.  Ya got a dude, he has to have an evil twin.  Ya got twins, ya got to throw in an evil triplet.

We get a fabulous walk through the fabulous offices of Eigenphase Systems.  And I mean, they are really fabulous — modern, open, airy, well-lit, great views and a dude crying in his office.  Mason Stark is looking at a picture of his dead wife Kristin, and remembering how he was more useless than Thomas Wayne in an alley protecting her from a mugger.  It doesn’t help his mood that he has just been sacked for, as far as I can tell, wearing a sweater-vest to work.  A co-worker helpfully reminds him that his severance package includes psychiatric coverage.

About a dozen people are staring at him — stupid clean, open, airy, well-lit offices!  He slams the door and closes his vertical blinds.  He pulls a pistol out of his desk drawer and moves it toward his head.  Before he can do anything crazy, he is transported to an alternate reality where he ends up nekkid on the floor.  Thankfully, a couple of guards show up immediately with a gown and drag him away.  He is shown three cells which each contain a duplicate of him.

Mason is strapped to a chair.  Another duplicate wearing a necktie enters.  We’ll call him Mr. Stark.  See, maybe if Mason had worn a proper suit to work instead of a silly sleeveless sweater, he’d be Mr. Stark.  He begins interrogating Mason.  He asks about the time when he was 15 and his father beat him.  Mason just took it, but Mr. Stark says he kicked the old man’s ass.  Mr. Stark asks if Mason married Kristin.  He says he did, but describes how she was killed because he was too scared to try to save her.  Mr. Stark explains he invented a Quantum Mirror to bring Masons from other realities.

He plays a hologram of the first Mason he brought through.  He arrived nekkid with a huge wound on his forehead.  On the screen, he is called Mason #001.  For some reason, Mr. Stark took him home.  That night, he found #001 with a knife to his wife’s throat.  In a rage, he slit her throat and escaped.  Mr. Stark brought Mason here to stop #001 before he kills again.

Now that Mr. Stark has a relatively sane Mason, he can start returning some of the other Masons although he can only get store credit.  He fires up the Quantum Mirror, and brings in one of the Masons.  Pictures of thousands of other Masons flash by.  Mr. Stark explains that the QM is searching for the right reality to return him to.  What’s weird is that the QM finally stops on #001, and that Mason is transported back to his reality.  But wait, this can’t be right — homicidal-headwound Mason was #001!  And just search in order next time!  You went through 500 of these before finding the right one was #001, dumbass.

#001 commences killing Mason’s friends, or whatever you call people who gawk at you as you are weeping in despair and seconds from suicide.  Meanwhile, Mr. Stark tells Mason that in this reality 1) Kristin is alive, 2) she and Mr. Stark are not married, and 3) she got a D-cup boob job (although, frankly, I think the last one was just a ruse to reel him in).

Mr. Stark believes #001 is “killing everyone close to me — my wife, my business partners.”  Mason corrects him that he is looking at this from his point of view, not #001’s.  He confesses that before he was beamed to this reality, he was going to kill himself, and also thought about massacring everyone in his office.  He even had a flash of other realities where that actually happened.  He thinks #001 is “just trying to put things back the way they are supposed to be.”

Wait, I thought the Mason with the head wound was #001.

They agree “that jerk Balmer” is most likely to be next.  Mr. Stark says there is a car waiting downstairs, hands Mason a key-card, and a gun, and tells him to go to Balmer’s office and kill him.   So Mr. Stark’s plan is to send a man — who looks just like him, uses his car, uses his key-card, leaves behind his identical DNA and fingerprints — to commit a murder?  How did this guy get to be successful CEO?  The callous murder, I understand; but the inattention to detail!

Mason goes to Eigenphase Financials, a division of Eigenphase Systems, a subsidiary of The Squim Group [1].  He finds #001 has killed a woman and has Balmer tied to a chair.  #001 says, “Come on Balmer, how do you like my version of a severance package?” and belts him.  Oooooh, sorry — the correct follow-up would have been to sever his pinky with a cigar-cutter.  See, sever?  Has this guy seen no 1980’s action movies?  #001 shoots Balmer and gets away because Mason hesitates to shoot him.

Mr. Stark sends Mason to a park where he sees his wife, dead in his reality, sitting on a bench.  #001 shows up and Mason punches him out, telling him “to leave Kristin alone!”  #001 says he is just there to spare Mason some embarrassment.  As they watch, a man joins Kristin on the bench.  They are clearly a couple, or else this guy is one smooth operator.

Mason and #001 talk it out.  #001 explains that Mr. Stark, despite his wealth — and they agree, his devilishly good looks — is not happy.  He was using the Quantum Mirror to find a happy version of himself.  He then planned to switch places with him.  He ended up grabbing #001 because he “looked happier than any other Mason he’d ever seen.”  #001 admits this was true “because I had just killed everyone I hated.”  Woohoo!

#001 blackmails Mason into helping him kill Mr. Stark.  They go back to Eigenphase, but Mr. Stark shoots #001 first.  Mr. Stark then forces Mason back into the Quantum Mirror.  There is a merry mix-up — #001 and Mr. Stark are beamed back to the wrong realities.  Mason stays behind in Mr. Stark’s reality where he approaches Kristin in the park, totally c*ckblocking the dude she was smooching earlier.  I’m sure they will be very happy . . . until DNA, eyewitnesses, fingerprints, phone records and security cameras link him to multiple homicides.  So, happy until then.

Another fine episode.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Where did I get that?  It feels like Arrested Development or the criminally underrated Better Off Ted, but is too obscure even for Google.  It was randomly weird enough for me to remember for several years.
  • All this Mason talk and I couldn’t work in the Illuminati anywhere?