Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Little White Frock (06/29/58)

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ahpwhitefrock01My first inclination was to post a JPG of the old Monopoly Free Parking tile and close up shop for the day.  I always knew I’d get to an episode of something that was so mind-numbing that I just couldn’t go on — I just thought it would part of Ray Bradbury Theater.

Flipping around the whopping — if you were lucky — TWO other channels the Sunday night this aired, you could have turned to the Dinah Shore show on NBC, or The All-American Football Game of the Week on ABC.  Strangely, the football game only had a 30 minute time slot; even at that, it must have been about 20 minutes of guys standing around.  Most worthless game ever.  But still more interesting that this CBS AHP POS.

Been unseasonably warm this year, hasn’t it . . . oh, hell I might as well get on with it.

Writer Adam Longsworth and director Nofirstname Robinson are auditioning actors for their new play.  They are starting starting to wonder if they will ever find the right actor for the 2nd lead.  Their anxiety is understandable as the old guy on-stage is the 1950’s version of Bill Paxton.

ahpwhitefrock03They retire to their gentleman’s club for a drink and to meet with their friend Koslow to discuss casting alternatives.  As they dismiss actor after actor, Colin Bragner approaches them.  He is a bit of a has-been, but was well regarded back in the day. He invites Longsworth and his wife to dinner, but Longsworth declines.

The two big-shots are dismissive of Bragner because of his age — but they should be dismissive because he is a bore.  And they should know because these are two most brutally boring characters I’ve encountered in almost 500 posts.  Sadly, their performances are not elevated by the dreary and infrequent score and leaden direction.  This is a rock.  An island.

When Longsworth arrives home, he finds that Bragner has tricked his wife into accepting his invitation to dinner.  He mansplains to his wife that it is just a ruse for Bragner to get cast in his new play.  He says that Bragner’s style is passe, that modern audiences wouldn’t accept him.  Longsworth warns his wife that Bragner’s place is probably filled with “scrapbooks, faded reviews and brass spittoons.”  Wait, what?

ahpwhitefrock06His wife is a little more sympathetic and reminds her husband how they were broke themselves just three years ago.  So they go.

Bragner pours the wine and gives an interminable toast which is merely a hint of the soul-crushing monologue to come.  He assures the Longsworths that he did not invite them just to weasel his way into the new play.  He invited them to announce his retirement.

He picks up the titular white frock and begins telling them the story of Lila Gordon.  He and another actor named Terry had the hots for her.  Bragner proposed, but she rejected him, possibly because he was costumed like Ming the Merciless at the time.  He told Terry that it is him that Lila wants, so Terry went to Lila to propose.  If that isn’t bad enough, the lucky son-of-a-bitch inherited millions of dollars and bought a New York penthouse.  Before Terry got a chance to marry Lila, he met a younger babe named Annabelle and married her.  Terry ended up being killed in a mugging, but he and Annabelle produced a daughter named Jeanie.  Lila took an interest in Terry & Annabelle’s daughter.

ahpwhitefrock08When Jeanie was 10 years old, Lila summoned Bragner and he came so quickly he still had the operatic clown tears on his face.  Lila asked him to take a dress to Annabelle.  Jeanie is a spoiled brat and throws it on the floor.  When he went back to Lila, she was dead.

Bragner’s maid enters and says the dress belongs to her niece.  The Longsworths realize this has been one long audition.

With the exception of Julie Adams, this was the most boring group of people I have ever seen.

Post-Post:

Twilight Zone S4 – Jess-Belle (02/14/63)

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Hee Haw Honey Ellwyn is at a barn dance verging on a full-blown hootenanny when she runs out to find Billy Ben.  After some smooching, he pulls out a tiny box and puts a ring on Ellwyn’s finger.

The happy couple spots Jess–Belle leaving the party early and Ellwyn sends Billy out to see if she is OK. Jess-Belle is upset that Billy has chosen Ellwyn over her, believing it to be because she wears fancy dresses and has a rich father; the fact that she’s insanely hot might also figure into it, but why pile on?

Jess-Belle goes to see Granny Hart.  Granny is visually introduced as a witchy woman, cloaked in black, hunched over a cauldron on a large fire.  When Jess-Belle knocks on her door, she doffs the cloak and fixes her hair, transforming into a regular old grandma.  You could question the theatrics when she was home alone, but it was a very effective bit to communicate 1) that this woman has some mojo going, and 2) she was still a human being that should not be dismissed as a caricature.

tzjessbelle06Jess-Belle asks Granny Hart for a love potion.  In payment, she offers a pearl hair-pin, but Granny won’t take it because it also contains Silver. She will accept something else, and says it will become obvious what it is “in the midnight hour of time.”  Not the brightest candle on the tree, Jess-Belle says, “Whatever it is, I’ll pay.”

Granny gives her a potion which she chugs.  Granny promises that once Billy Bob sets eyes on her, he will never look at another woman or goat again.  Sure enough, she shows up back at the dance, and as soon as Billy Bob sees her, he do-si-do’s right up to her and they promenade out the door.

They go out for a roll in the hay — not sex, a literal roll in the hay.  As midnight approaches, she says she must go home.  Back at home in her bedroom, at midnight, she turns into a wildcat.  Again, not sex-related —  literally a wildcat.  Not a very metaphorical bunch, these hill-people.

tzjessbelle11

You’ve got a little something . . . on the left. No, my left.

Jess-Belle goes back to Granny Hart to get a refund.  She realizes that she lost her soul in the transaction. Granny tells her that she too is now a witch.  The next night as midnight approaches, she again flees.  When Billy goes outside, the wildcat is sitting on his roof like one of those lions outside the New York Public Library — except those are surrounded by people who can read.

The next morning, Jess-Belle transforms back into a woman.  Sadly, like the Hulk, she wears sansabelt clothing so she protects her modesty.  She goes back to Billy and offers to fix his fire for him and his dinner and supper too.  Throw in some ironing and she wouldn’t need no love potion.

On her next midnight run, Jess-Belle in cat form hides out in a barn.  The locals shoot her and she disappears in a puff of smoke.  She shows up later as a toad and then makes a pest of herself by becoming a spider.  After Billy and Ellwyn are married, Billy pays Granny a visit.

tzjessbelle14She explains how to kill Jess-Belle for good so she doesn’t keep coming back.  He follows her instructions and kills her off for good.

A nice little story with some real good words and purty girls.

Post-Post:

  • James Best (Billy Ben) played Roscoe Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard.  On the cartoon version, he played Roscoe P. Coltrane.  What the hell?
  • Writer Earl Hamner is best known for The Waltons, but he actually wrote more episodes of TZ than The Waltons.

Bad Language – The Right Stuff

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Another bit of dialogue that never made any sense to me.

To paraphrase:  When the pilots go in the door, they all look the same.  When they come out, they all look different; they look scared.

Surely what was intended was that the pilots all look different from each other when they go in, and the same when they come out.  They all look the same because they all look scared.

Maybe this always bugged me because the rest of the movie is absolutely awesome.

“Sir, over there — is that a man?”

“You damn right it is!”

rightstuff01 rightstuff02 rightstuff03 rightstuff04 rightstuff05 rightstuff06 rightstuff07

Tales from the Crypt – Creep Course (10/11/93)

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tftccreepcourse02Jeffrey Jones is teaching an Egyptology class in which Anthony Michael Hall is enrolled; sadly for Jones, this is several years after Hall’s John Hughes phase.

Today, Jones is discussing Pharaoh Ramseth aka “the mummy who wouldn’t die.”  Seems he was obsessed with a maiden named Nefra.  Sadly, he croaked before he could act on his desires so the moniker is not technically accurate.  And, being Pharaoh, what was holding him up? Couldn’t he have any maiden he wanted?  Or goat?  What happened to jus primae noctis?  He emerges from his tomb on each anniversary of this death to search for Nefra.  Rigor mortis is nature’s Viagra.

tftccreepcourse04To protect themselves, each year the locals delivered to Ramseth’s tomb a human sacrifice.  When Ramseth was disappointed that each year’s offering was not Nefra, he would go berserk and kill each girl. Ya know, Nefra really could have taken one for the team and volunteered.  Bitch.

Fascinating as this story is, student Anthony Michael Hall is more interested in his football playbook.  Nerdy-girl Nina Siemaszko is also distracted — by Hall.  As Hall has been sentenced to a purgatory, doomed to play each role in The Breakfast Club forever [1], he is now “the jock.”  As such, he is a bonehead and seeks out Nina to tutor him.

She is thrilled at the attention and meets him in the library.  Perhaps inspired by being in a building he had never visited before, Hall comes up with an alternative to studying.  He tells Nina to ask Jones if she can visit his collection of Egyptian artifacts.  While she is distracting Jones, Hall will make a copy of the mid-term exam.  He backs her up against the card catalog and gets her decimal system all dewy, removes her glasses and asks her to go to a party.  So she is putty in his hands — silly, silly putty.

tftccreepcourse08She arrives at Jones’ homes and he leads her down to the basement, which might have actually been scary if she were a young boy.  He shows off a full burial tomb.  By shows off, I mean tosses her inside and closes the door.  Turns out Hall and Jones are in cahoots. When the door is shut, Jones blows the shofar when he could have gotten away with just tipping him $5.00 for the ride. This awakens a mummy inside.

Jones didn’t mention he had ol’ Ramseth stored in his basement.  Suspiciously, he didn’t mention if there was anyone in his crawlspace either.  Nina is a smarty, though, as evidenced by her glasses.  When Ramseth tries to strangle her, she grabs a head-dress and pretends to be Nefra, his blonde, spectacled, pasty white, English-speaking Egyptian crush.

Jones pours Hall a snifter of brandy having no more regard for 21 year old age limits than for 18 year old age limits.  Hall decides to change the terms of their deal, but wisely, Jones had drugged his snifter.  In the basement, he stuffs Hall into a sarcophagus.  As he mops his brow, he hears the tomb’s door open, and we get the classic Jeffrey Jones / Ed Rooney “oh shit” stare which is always hilarious, unless it is through a camera viewfinder.

He enters the tomb and sees Ramseth standing erect, heh heh. Possibly because Nina has donned a suit similar to Princess Leia’s golden slave bikini.  Ramseth gets jealous of Jones and begins choking him, then pulls his brains out through his nose.

The ending is a complete botch. Nina is arrested for her class project which involves the mummified Jones and Hall.  First, this is a smart chick, why would she implicate herself in the murders?  Second, the two stiffs are unrecognizable despite being unwrapped, due to their contorted faces, but who else would they be?  Neither one appears to have a mustache as Jones had.

And a little sign says that Stella got an A+.  Well, she was the nerdy-girl, an A+ is probably routine for her.  But since Jones is dead, who assigned the grade?

Jones is always a hoot, and I’m a sucker for a good mummy story (which, ironically, the original The Mummy was not).  I was also entranced by Nina Siemaszko.  She played a great nerdy girl and consistently lit up the screen.  I’m not usually a fan of the cleft chin, and have really learned to hate them after watching Henry Rollins.  But she made it work.

tftccreepcourse15Post-Post:

  • [1] Tragically, I am not familiar enough with Mr. Hall’s oeuvre to know if this is true, but I liked the idea.
  • Title Analysis:  Junk.  OK, there is a college course involved, but what the hell is “creep course”?  That is not a common phrase or even close to any I can think of.
  • Jeffrey Jones and Anthony Michael Hall were both in Edward Scissorhands.  If Winona Ryder were here, they would have a hat-trick.  But I’d keep an eye on the hat.
  • The only directing credit by Jeffrey Boam.  Sadly, he only lived to be 53 but in a five year span, he managed to write 2 Lethal Weapons, an Indiana Jones, the Witches of Eastwick, The Lost Boys, Funny Farm, and Innerspace.
  • A few years earlier, he wrote the screenplay for The Dead Zone.  Hall would later star in a series based on the same book.

Tales of Tomorrow – Flight Overdue (03/28/52)

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ttflightoverdue03When a jet plane disappeared in thin air, what was the explanation?

An announcer tells us this is the story of a great aviatrix [1], Paula Martin.  So imagine my surprise when she disappears, and the headline reads “Paula Bennett Lost at Sea.” IMDb plays it safe just calling the character Paula. [2]

Paula’s husband Donald is working the short wave trying to find his wife.  He believes some mysterious indecipherable transmissions might hold a clue.  We are told he never gave up searching for his wife. Presumably he did take off a couple of days to marry his 2nd wife Deidre.

Donald gets a call from an old friend, Sam Rutgers who says he will be over in 15 minutes.  Deidre makes good use of this time by nagging him over his obsession with discovering what happened to Paula.

ttflightoverdue05Donald flashes back to when he and Paula were first married.  Paula is posing for photographers after winning her second Bendix Trophy. Donald suggests that now that she has won her 2nd trophy, she can “stop proving things” she can marry him and iron his shirts.

She counters that she still has a lot of unfinished business up there. She could never be happy if she gave up flying.  They married and she continued flying.  Then she began disappearing for weeks at a time, apparently filming stock footage.  She was also frequently in the company of a mysterious man.

Donald is just as jealous as his future wife, although not over a corpse.  He suspects the man might have a wiley post and confronts Paula about her disappearances.  She says she has “never allowed anyone to lock me in a hangar and she’s not going to start now.” Nobody puts Baby in the Cessna!  On a trip across the Pacific, she disappears.

ttflightoverdue07Back in the present, Rutgers shows up to talk to Donald and Diedre.  He also asks their maid Anna to stay because “she was closer to Paula than anyone,” which suggests that their marriage was a plane-wreck even before she took off.

Rutgers says he was just given the go-ahead today to explain what happened to Paula. The government recruited Paula, as the country’s leading woman flyer.  She went to an obscure island 2,300 miles out of San Francisco which housed a rocket base.  The government wants her to be part of the crew to test the stresses of space on a woman’s body.

Rutgers tells her it will be extremely dangerous, and she replies, “That wonderful new world, from millions of miles away, pulls at me across all that space as if it had me by the hands.”  As the rocket is only going to the moon, which is just 240,000 miles away, the millions of miles make no sense.

He continues telling Donald, Deidre and Anna how they watched the rocket take off perfectly through giant telescopes, going into outer space until it became a tiny speck. Sadly, the government has determined that Paula died when the ship crashed into the moon.  But it wasn’t her fault, she blew the horn.

Don, who has spent 4 years searching for clues to Paula’s fate, announces that she is glad she’s gone because he’s finally free.

Kind of a disappointing outing.  There really wasn’t much science-fiction in this episode. We get talk of a rocket only at the very end; the rest is mostly melodrama.  It was not helped by the casting.  Donald’s current wife is, frankly, a little scary.  Paula was also no beauty, but at least had a cool butch haircut and was believable in her part (i.e. a woman some man would actually have married).

Post-Post:

  • [1] Possibly the greatest word in the English language.
  • [2] The name-change is somewhat plausible as her husband’s last name is Bennett. So maybe she kept her maiden name as her professional moniker [3].  Still, why would the newspaper use her non-professional name?  Just sloppy.  Also, was she lost at sea or in thin air?
  • [3] Possibly the 2nd greatest word in the English language.
  • I had heard Veronica Lake’s name before and thought she was a glamorous babe from the 1940’s.  But no.  Well, she was from the 1940’s.
  • At one point, the actor portraying Donald accidentally calls his maid Anna by his first wife’s name.  That’s kind of amusing, but it also makes you appreciate that they were doing this live and didn’t have their eyes tharned on cue cards like most of the cast of SNL.
  • In the next scene, Paula calls the maid Emma — OK, maybe an occasional glance at a cue card would be OK; or showing up sober to rehearsal.
  • I’m not entirely sure, but it also sounded like Rutgers called Anna Hannah.
  • Anna, Hannah bo Banna Bonana fanna fo Paula Fee fy mo Memma Emma!