Category Archives: TV

Thriller – The Watcher (11/01/60)

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twatcher04A really — to be charitable — unattractive man is holding down a blonde girl’s head, and not in the good way.  He drowns the the girl and washes the blood from his hands.

Freitag, the titular watcher, is spying on a couple in a car in front of his house as the indulge in some 1950’s style necking, perhaps even heavy petting.  As Larry gets out of the car, and Beth drives away, Freitag typewrites a threatening letter to Sheriff Matthews:

IS THERE ANOTHER CORRUPTOR ABROAD?

I MUST BE SURE BEFORE I KILL AGAIN.

The next night, Freitag sees Larry leave the house, probably to see that hussy Beth. Freitag puts on a suit, tie and hat and takes off following Larry.  Surely he is disappointed to see that Larry just went in for a little OT at the boat shop where he works.  Freitag goes in and tells him what a great boy he is for taking care of his aunt.

twatcher05He tells Larry “a good-looking young man like you doesn’t have any trouble finding female companionship . . . it must be a problem for you.  I mean, avoiding unwelcome attention.”  Well, maybe it was annoying for Richard Chamberlain, but I personally never felt burdened by hot babes calling me at all hours.

He continues, “I’d really like to help you.  An older man can sometimes help keep a boy straight.”  Ahem.  He does everything but start massaging Larry’s shoulders.  Larry says if he ever need’s Freitag’s advice, he knows where to find him.  Down by the elementary school would be the first place to look, I imagine.

Beth leaves her house after getting chewed out by her mother by going out totally nude — no wait, she’s wearing blue-jeans, which was apparently equally taboo back then.  She goes to see Larry.  Standing out in the rain, Freitag sees the silhouettes of them stripping off their wet clothes.

twatcher06Later on a picnic in the woods, Larry asks Beth to elope, but she wants everything out in the open.  Which it kind of would be after they came back from eloping.  They think they see someone watching them from the rocks above but find no one.  When they get back to the car, however, it has a flat tire.

Not having a spare, Larry wheels it back to a gas station until he is given a lift.  Freitag suspensively creeps up on the car where she is now sitting.  When she spots him, she lays on the horn for so long that he cleverly pops the hood and disconnects the battery. Beth helpfully faints, but Freitag does nothing with her.

Back at the filling station, which is apparently do-it-yourself, Larry is working on the tire. Freitag knocks him out and lowers the car lift onto him.  The police take Beth home where her mother is so relieved to see her alive that she calls her a tramp.  Luckily Larry survived due to a tire rim blocking the lift.

twatcher07Larry is taken back to his boarding house to recover, where the owner also calls Beth a tramp.  Freitag has a good vantage point of all the activity from his room across the street.

When the landlady goes out to the drugstore to pick up a prescription for Larry (luckily the neighbors have not burned it down like in Baltimore), Freitag sneaks upstairs.  Beth catches him and brains him with a ceramic pitcher.  This is apparently enough for him to stagger around until he falls from the window and beaks his neck.

A decent episode carried by the casting and performances of the actors.  An extra layer of entertainment is found in the clearly homo-erotic overture in the boat shop.

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Happiness Machine (07/17/92)

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rbthappiness13That Ray Bradbury was one happy son-of-a-bitch.  Or at least he comes across that way in his stories.  Part of it was having the luck to grow up in a simpler time when the country was growing, and growing in the right direction.  His timing also couldn’t have been better for a 50 year window where it was possible to make a good living writing short genre fiction.  A story called The Happiness Machine sounds right in his wheelhouse.

Also lucky, is the star of the episode who has made a fine living for decades despite being possibly the only actor worse than Bill Paxton ever to get steady work.  Elliott Gould awakens one sunny morning to birds chirping, dogs frolicking, bees buzzing, birds soaring.  He is so goddamn happy he decides he needs to pay it back (or forward as we say now).

rbthappiness14He pulls various pieces of junk out of his garage to invent a Happiness Machine.  He then walks around the neighborhood taking pictures of little boys climbing trees and little girls playing hopscotch.  His luck continues by him not being arrested.

He spends hours in the garage soldering, welding, wiring, painting and finishing the Happiness Machine.  Under deadline from his wife who has called the city to haul it away, he tests it out by putting her in it.

She dances by the Danube, sees the Sphinx, sees London, sees France, sees a little girl’s underpants. She is having the ride of her life until suddenly she is in tears.  She emerges distraught from the Happiness Machine.

rbthappiness15Turns out it, the Happiness Machine is great on the way up, all sweetness and light, hope, birds chirping . . . like experiencing Bradbury’s life.

But when you step out of the machine into shitty reality, it is soul-crushing.  It leads only to sadness and depression . . . like experiencing Bradbury’s TV show.

Gould’s wife begs him to destroy it.  He tries it out himself and briefly experiences the euphoria before a fire starts that destroys it.  It pains me to say it, but there is an effective ending.  He is saddened by the destruction of his Happiness Machine, but his wife tells him to look in the windows of his house.  He sees his kids playing the piano, the violin, showing off a painting, modeling a new blouse.  His home and family are the Happiness Machine.

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Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Equalizer (S3E19)

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ahpequalizer05Eldon Marsh (Martin Balsam) has just whipped his boss at golf.  The boss is better at the long drives than the diminutive Eldon, but has a tendency to be a 3-putt chump. Eldon credits his putter which he dubs “The Equalizer” for the win.

At the Club that night, his boss isn’t sure he will fare too well against the strapping young new salesman Wayne Phillips (Leif Erickson (really?)).  At the moment, Eldon should be more worried as Phillips is dancing pretty close with his wife Louise.

After they return to the table, the boss suggests the men-folk retire to the game-room for some Bridge.  Phillips declines, mortifying the other salesmen; maybe because of the effrontery to his new boss, or maybe because he is left alone with their wives — a situation he immediately takes advantage of by flirting with another wife, making Louise visibly jealous.

ahpequalizer06That night in their bedroom, Eldon asks Louise what she thinks of the new salesman Wayne Phillips.  She not quite convincingly assures her husband that she did not like Phillips. She slips off her robe and they get into their separate twin beds, as real couples did in the 1950’s.

The next day Phillips, with his salesman smile, comes into Eldon’s office.  He tells Eldon what a lovely girl Louise is.  Phillips accuses him not not trusting his wife,  Eldon says he trusts Louise implicitly but doesn’t trust Phillips as far as he could throw him.

Phillips stands up, about 6 inches taller than Eldon and says, “That wouldn’t be be very far, would it little man?”  Eldon warns him, “Don’t try to test your irresponsibility with my wife.”  Eldon actually comes off as a pretty cool customer.

ahpequalizer07That weekend when Phillips misses a tee-time with the boss, speculation runs wild among the salesmen that he was playing a round with some dame instead. Overhearing this, Eldon assumes Phillips is banging his wife; especially when she does not answer the telephone (back when they were tethered to the wall and not easily transported to a Motel 6).

Later at the club, Eldon believes he sees his wife and Phillips making eyes at each other.  After she leaves, he throws a drink in Phillips face, and says, ‘I want to fight this man!’  Phillips refuses to fight, but finally Eldon takes a swing at him and Phillips decks him.

At home, the real switch is that Louise admits Eldon was right.  Not only that, she berates, him, “These things happen all the time.  Some men have enough sense not to make a spectacle of themselves.”

He assumes she will go to Phillips now, but she blames him again.  “You very nicely ruined that for me!  You created such a scandal that we couldn’t possibly go on!”  She does leave him, though, just not to go to Phillips.

ahpequalizer08The next day, cleaning out his desk, even his boss blames him, saying, “I don’t understand why you put me in a position where I had to fire you. You couldn’t just let this blow over?”

Eldon says he could have tolerated it if Phillips had loved Louise, but he was just making her look cheap.  For that, they must fight.  His boss even offers to fire Phillips instead of Eldon, but it’s no good — he wants that fight.

Later at the club, as Phillips is flirting with another of the wives, Eldon comes in and challenges him to a duel.  They idiotically agree to meet for a duel — 10 paces, turn and fire.

Eldon arrives for the duel, but doesn’t see Phillips.  As he is looking out over the city, he hears Phillips emerging from the shadows.  Before he can say anything, Phillips plugs him.  Phillips dutifully calls the cops and claims self-defense.  Unfortunately, Eldon is unarmed, not even bringing a knife to this gunfight.

Post-Post:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  All equally dead.
  • Title Analysis:  The titular Equalizer is the fact that Eldon feels he has nothing left to lose, thus he is not afraid of Phillips.  That would be good had they not muddied the water-hazard by Eldon earlier referring to his putter as the Equalizer rather than, say, the old Billy Baroo.
  • For a more in-depth look at the story, performers and production, head over to bare-bones ezine.

Night Gallery – The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes (S3E6)

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ngvelvet03The awful-named James Figg (played by manly-named Gary Lockwood) is in his dressing room after winning the boxing championship.  While his manager is on the phone, he sees a hallucination of his dethroned opponent, the even more manly-named Big Dan Anger (played by the just weirdly-named Ji-Tu Cumbuka).`

Figg doesn’t have a scratch on him, but Anger looks like he took a massive beating, which isn’t unreasonable given that he just lost a heavyweight fight.  Making less sense is that he is black and I think Lockwood is the first American white champion since Rocky Marciano.  Anger sneers at Figg and says mockingly, “Champion!  You just think you’re champion . . . you’re no more of a champ than I was.”  His manager hangs up the phone and tells him Anger is on an operating table.  So it’s a safe bet he’s dead.

ngvelvet07Figg goes into an extremely steamy shower which apparently transports him to another place — the home of Sondra and Roderick Blanco.  He meets Sondra in the game room. She says she likes him because he is different from the others, the other champions.  Raaaaaaacist!

Roderick enters the room.  He says that Anger was never the real champ because he had knocked him out.  Now he wants to fight Figg for the real championship.  “A private match. In my ring.”  Just like the end of Rocky III, but without the dreadful Leroy Neiman painting.  “Winner take all”.

That night, Sondra comes to Figg’s room and asks him to throw the fight, let Roderick win.  The next day in a red room, they climb a set of red stairs, duck through the titular red velvet ropes, Roderick in a red robe, trunks and boots.

ngvelvet04Figg beats him to a pulp and finally wins by a knockout.  He berates everyone for not stopping the fight, which, of course, he could have done at any time.  The ref then announces that Blanco is dead. Everyone arises and chants, “The champion is dead.  Long live the champion.”

I guess it’s like The Masters — Figg is given the red robe.  Blanco, having been champion since 1861, is now a dried up old man.  Old, yes, but not bad for being about 125 years old.  The all in “winner take all” includes Sondra . . . for as long as he wins.

So presumably he is stuck there forever to take on each new champion until he loses.  Sounds suspiciously similar to the TZ episode A Game of Pool.  Not that it matters, but did Big Dan Anger have to die?  Did Roderick have to die?  Could Figg have won on a decision?  Is he marooned in this other reality or can he go back and forth?  If so, who is the new champion now that he is missing?  Who is this support staff?  Where did they come from, especially Sondra who is just a whore for the latest champion.

ngvelvet05Not an awful episode and the leads were competent as the boxers, even though we did not see their faces much of the time.  I give it 7 out of 12 Rounds.

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