Science Fiction Theatre – The Mind Machine (06/08/56)

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Host Truman Bradley: “If you pussies at Variety don’t like this episode I’ll kick your asses”

They must have been a little short on story this week as it is an interminable 4 minutes before they get started.  There is some obvious padding as we have to wait while Truman Bradley dials a number on a rotary phone in the intro.  This torture is lessened by the fact that 1) this was back when phone numbers apparently had only 6 digits, and 2) it is followed by a cool little clip of how the caller is connected to the callee.  All this is to set up how the brain is superior to this technical marvel.

78 year old Dr. Milton — sweet Jesus!  This guy is only 78?  They hired a 69 year old to play him, but he looks 100.  Anyway, he drops by the lab of Dr. Alan Cathcart [1].  He asks Cathcart how he would like to be able to “measure nerve impulses in micro-volts and expressed in a typewritten language.”  Cathcart is intrigued because who wouldn’t be?  They go to Milton’s lab.

Milton shows Cathcart his new discovery that allows brain impulses to be transmitted as language.  Unfortunately, Milton feels he doesn’t have long to live and wants the youthful Cathcart to collate his notes, finish the research, and open a jar of pickles.

Cathcart agrees to continue Milton’s research and comes to the lab the next day.  Several men are testing the mind-reading device on Joyce.  Judging by her radiant smile, she is not reading their minds, or maybe she is!  The machine begins printing data from Joyce’s mind.  Milton sees it as gibberish.  Cathcart suggests the symbols can be decrypted, although Joyce quickly shoots down his proposition that “gamma = in the butt”.

Sadly, Milton has a stroke leaving him unable to move except for one finger.  At the hospital, Cathcart says, “Listen carefully.  Let 1 represent the letter A, 2 B, 3 C, and so on.”  Milton wiggles his finger to indicate he understands the system.  He begins communicating by moving his finger to indicate the binary numbers associated with the letters forming the words of his response.

After his initial plea of K-I-L-L-M-E, Milton informs them he has memorized the code.  He instructs them to keep his brain alive after death and he will attempt to send his thoughts to the printer.  His supposition is that without the other pesky organs confusing his thoughts, the data should come out in perfect english.  Recognizing this is a 30-minute show, Milton dutifully croaks during the commercial.

His brain is preserved in a vat of nutrients.  The printer (actually an electric typewriter) begins producing data.  Cathcart’s assistant looks at the data and says, “That can’t represent the alphabet; there’s more than 26 characters!”  Wait, this is a typewriter, how is it just making up symbols?

Or is he counting punctuation?  Like S-E-R-I-O-U-S-L-Y-K-I-L-L-M-E-I-M-A-F-#-$-^-%-&-I-N-G-D-I-S-E-M-B-O-D-I-E-D-B-R-A-I-N !

Cathcart takes the message to the US Signal Corp in Washington DC to be translated.  They use the most sophisticated decryption equipment of the era which seems to be a chalkboard.  After a few hours, they crack the code, but it is not very interesting.  A message from Heaven would have been better.  A message from Hell would have been awesome.

On 06/21/56, Variety said:  This one may be a hit at Caltech, but it is a miss on TV . . . A viewer tuning in in the middle might get the impression it was partly dubbed in Pakistani . . . Actors doing their best with thankless material . . . Paul Guilfoyle’s directing is unimaginative.

Wow, I thought I was tough.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] BTW, the new Catch-22 series is looking dreadful.  WTF are any of these people other than Clooney?  The 1970 version was also not good, but what a cast!  Go read the book!
  • Correction:  The first episode of Catch-22 was surprisingly not-awful.  The actors playing Yossarian, Cathcart, and Daneeka were especially good; the others might grow on me.  This version also captures a few of the verbal set-pieces better than the original movie which sometimes sounded like a table-read.  Go read the book!
  • The big money this week went to Dr. Cathcart ($800).  The lovely Joyce made a mere $80.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – A Very Moral Theft (10/11/60)

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Well, AHP wastes no time in establishing lumber yard manager Harry Wade as a prick.  First, they cast Walter Matthau who, while always entertaining, is typically an obnoxious jerk or know-it-all blowhard.  In comedies, he really shows his range by being a drunken loser or a bum.  However, imagine Jack Black or Seth Rogan in any role that Walter Matthau ever played and you will have a perfect illustration of how Hollywood has gone to shit. [1]

Within seconds we see him pawning some inferior wood off on a customer.  He is probably also pawning off some inferior wood on his girlfriend Helen who he treats like dirt.  He grudgingly takes her out to dinner.

After dinner, Harry drops Helen off.  She asks him to come in “just this once.”  He says he has things to do.  His excuse is that he doesn’t want to deal with that “meatball brother” of hers.  She asks if she can see him tomorrow night which makes me wonder if there is one other straight, single man in that town.  As if this would be a huge imposition, he says, “Maybe.”

Helen, the latest in a long line of AHP women who live with their brother, goes inside.  Her brother John says he plans on marrying his girlfriend in August.  This will leave Helen homeless.  The happy couple goes out again the next night.

And so it goes.  There are just too many moving parts to labor through.  Here are the other bullet points I jotted down:

  • Wood / Erection pun.
  • Harry needs $8k for only 24 hours like a Nigerian prince.
  • Wood / Erection pun.
  • Harry shows up at Helen’s office drunk.
  • Wood / Erection pun.
  • Helen steals money from her employer.
  • Wood / Erection pun.
  • Harry can’t repay the loan.
  • Wood / Erection pun.

It’s a fine story and Matthau is always fun to watch.  Helen was kind of a drag and her brother was a non-entity.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] I know I saw Billy Bob Thornton in the Bad News Bears reboot, but I don’t remember if I liked it.  He is one of the few genuine bright spots in Hollywood though, so even if he did it for the cash, it would be at least watchable.
  • So what was the moral theft?  The money Harry swindled the mob out of?  If it were really moral, he would have returned it to the innocent shop-owners who coughed up protection money, anonymously with no-strings-attached.  Or let the exploited prostitutes work it off.

Twilight Zone – Love is Blind (03/25/89)

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Jack Haines is sitting outside a CW bar drinking in his car.  He overheard a conversation that his wife is meeting another man there.  He takes a gun from the glove compartment and turns it into a CCW bar.

He walks around inside but doesn’t see her.  He orders a beer and listens to the singer.  Haines is stunned by what he is hearing.  The song is jarring and baffles him.  Is this for real?  Are other people hearing the same thing he is?  Which is the same effect country music has on me.

He hears aspects of his own life in the singer’s words.  The bartender says the old man just wandered in out of the storm, so they let him open for the house band.  He says the man was so good he didn’t even notice he was “blind as a bat.”  If coming in at night wearing opaque welding goggles and a thousand yard stare didn’t tip off the bartender, maybe his eyesight isn’t so great either.

The singer comes over and asks how Haines like the song.  “Kind of hits you where you live, don’t it?  That’s what it was meant to do.”  Haines asks how the man knows all about him.  He replies, “I don’t know everything, just the bad things.”  He says he has been “blessed or cursed.  The sounds just come to me when I’m around certain people.”  He tells Haines he knows what he is about to do, and it will cause everyone pain.

Haines spots his wife in the bar with another dude.  Just when he is about to make his move, he realizes it is just a stranger hitting on her.  The singer reminds him just how close he came to killing an innocent man.  Yada yada . . .

It is another perplexing third season episode.  There have been several that were as good as anything this run of the series every did.  Too many, however, fell into the same old traps of happy endings, maudlin stories, and those dreadful, insipid scores.

This was one of the good ones.  It was serious, but not somber.  Romantic but not sappy.  And, thank God, it had a soundtrack rather than a score.  That could have gone very wrong.  They happened to find an interesting actor with an engaging, twangy voice.  I completely bought him as the mysterious blind man.   I even enjoyed his singing and I’m not really a country fan.  That was some lucky or shrewd casting because he carries the episode.  The other actors are stiffs or insanely hammy.

And, yeah, it’s another TZ happy ending.  But that’s OK sometimes.

The Duchess Pulls a Fast One – Whitman Chambers (1936)

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Spike, Katie, Pinky, and The Duchess — surprisingly humans, not puppies — are hanging out in the City Hall Press Room on a “dark and rainy night” when a fire alarm comes in.  Apparently, the fire house is actually in City Hall because the three run just down the hall to see the fire engine pulling out.  All three jump on the back of the vehicle as it pulls out.  This is a thrill for the ladies because they were were told it is men-only.  It is a thrill for Spike because he was once an 8 year old boy.

Turns out it is Kurt Bergstrom’s chemical plant going up.  Spike says it is fine with him if Bergstrom is inside.  Bergstrom might be an inventor and wealthy, philanthropic dude, but Spike says he is a publicity hound, and we are told “reporters do not like publicity hounds”.  Unlike now when any camera-whore with a face will be put in a little box on cable news to give their unchallenged talking points.

They are happy to hear there was a fatality, but it is not Bergstrom.  His assistant John Hamlin was working late and became smoked Hamlin.  After getting the facts, they pile into a cab to go see Bergstrom who is dining at the Hotel Drake because the Drake Hotel was not fancy enough.  Spike brusquely tells him that Hamlin is dead.  Bergstrom takes the news calmly, then inexplicably invites the reporters to go with him to break the news to Mrs. Hamlin.

Mrs. Hamlin reveals that her husband had fortuitously just purchased an $80,000 life insurance policy.  This immediately makes Spike and Pinky suspect that Hamlin’s death was faked for the insurance money.  He suspects collusion between Bergstrom, Hamlin and possibly the Russians.  They tell the story of a guy named Schwartz who had done exactly the same thing.  The Duchess cracks the story and invites the gang back to the hotel for the denouement.  Bergstrom and the widow Hamlin are also invited and an unlikely self-incrimination is made.

Pleasant enough, but not much going on here.

Other Stuff:

  • First published in the September 19, 1936 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.

Tales from the Crypt – Comes the Dawn (01/11/95)

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Even this could not stop me from fast-forwarding through the Cryptkeeper’s segment.

Oh, come on!  TFTC already did Came the Dawn!  I was disappointed that Dawn was not the insatiable female lead in that one.  Predictably, TFTC did not learn from that mistake.  On the other hand, this episode starts off with a nice tracking shot along a bar with a few bits of business along the way.  So all is forgiven.  Although, I always wonder if shots like this were in the script or the work of the director.

The shot ends with a, er, rather severe looking blonde with short hair, a bandana, and a biker jacket putting on lipstick like she was driving down a bumpy road.  She is surprised when a couple of hunters show up to the bar.  Burrows and Parker stumble in, bundled up against the cold Alaskan weather and order schnapps.

Burrows says the night is “colder than a witch’s left one” so I guess there will be no nudity in tonight’s tame episode.  Parker says they are looking for a guide that ignores the Endangered Species List, which rules out that bleeding heart Michelin Guide with their snooty no Bengal Tiger Tartare rule.  She suggests her ex, Jeri (the gender ambiguity is lost in print) who was busted for dynamite-fishing.  But the bartender doesn’t care for poachers and picks up the phone to call the game warden.  So Burrows shoots her.

In an edit more jarring than the bone-to-satellite in 2001, the boys are suddenly offering Jeri $100 to help them bag a grizzly bear.[1]  Where they are or how they found her is a mystery.  And, by the way, shooting the bartender was pretty gratuitous.  I mean, it would have made sense if it had been Michael Ironside, but it was the other guy.  Anyhoo, she is no longer in that business.  Parker sees her name on a Purple Heart citation and plays the Colonel-card.  She jumps at attention and accepts the mission to find that bear.

They go to an abandoned government weather station which Jeri says the bears love.  Parker agrees, “It is a perfect place for Winter hibernation.”  Wait, are they going to shoot them while they’re hibernating?   No, they find some fresh tracks and set up camp.  But someone been hunting there already.

Just when I feared the episode was going to play out as a straight monster-fest, a couple of pretty ingenious curves are thrown into the story.  It is not giving away much to say this is a nest of vampires — that isn’t the twist.  The story beat 30 Days of Night to the Alaskan Vampire scene by 5 years.  That might have been dazzling in 1995, but is still appreciated here — and not the twist.

The twists both have to do with Jeri’s role in this society and with one of these two men.  It is not mind-blowing, but is just a nice bit of storytelling.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] By the way, Jeri is a hot Chinese woman.  OK, maybe the bartender dug Asian chicks.  Or was TFTC trying to pass her off as Inuit?
  • Minor nitpick:  In the first scene, shown above, the vampire bartender was looking in a mirror to apply her lipstick.  What the heck — there is nothing for her there.  Yeah, vampires don’t have reflections, but mostly I mean because she is really unattractive.