Pastorale – James M. Cain (1938)

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1.

It looks like Burbie is about to be hung for thinking himself “so damn smart.”  And this was the year before Gone With the Wind, when damn meant something.

When Burbie was 16, he ran away with a travelling show.  Ten years later, he returned with all his fingers so thought he knew it all.

Lida was just like him.  She made her living “selling dry goods to the men” and fortunately was not a prostitute.  She married an older fella about a year before Burbie returned.  He starts meeting her in the cornfield to play hide the cob after her husband goes to bed each night.  Eventually they decide they will have to kill him.

Burbie enlists another ex-con, Hutch, to help him do the deed.  He tells Hutch there is a literal pot of money just awaitin’ to be stolen.  While Lida is at the store, they go to the house and kill the old man.

2.

Hutch gets angry when he discovers the pot of money contains only $23 in pennies, nickels, and dimes, and a couple of those are Canadian.  Burbie claims he thought there was $1,000 in the pot.  He magnanimously volunteers to let Hutch have the whole thing even though neither of them knows that word.  When some visitors drive up, they replace the empty pot and take the old man’s body with them as they sneak out the back way.  They pick up some tools and drive out to the woods.  Finally, one of the stories I post about gets it right:

So Burbie dug the grave.  He dug for two hours, until he got so tired he couldn’t hardly stand.  But he ain’t hardly made no hole at all.

The excuse here is that the ground is frozen.  But for most dudes, that’s probably about right pace at any time of year.  They throw the body into the shallow grave.  When the head is still sticking out, Hutch beats it down with a shovel.  LOL.

On the way back, Burbie admits that he has been plowing Lida’s crop circle, Hutch turns the truck around.  He forces Burbie to cut off the old guy’s head so they can take it to Lida.  He plans to put the head in a box with a ribbon and surprise Lida when she opens it.

3.

Burbie is not thrilled at this idea.  The first chance he gets, he tosses the severed head out of the truck.  The bad luck continues as it lands on the frozen ice of a river.  The crack of the ice — the old guy must have had one of them Ted Kennedy 50-pounders — alerts Hutch.  He tries to kill Burbie, but he literally runs home, and hides beneath the covers of his bed.

The next day, a gruesome sight is found at the river.  There is still a human head sitting out on the ice, Hutch’s horse [1] is”damn near froze to death” and Hutch himself is at the bottom of the river “stiff as a board.”  I guess he had the $23 of change in his pockets.  The head ties Hutch to the murder, but Burbie gets away with it.

Some time later, however, he feels compelled to tell his life story to a group of people, including the constable.  He was so proud of all the women, all the liquor, Lida, and Hitch alone being nailed for the murder that he just couldn’t hold it in.

A short, fun romp.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] OK, they were in a horse-drawn carriage.  But truck was so much easier to type.
  • First published in the March 1938 issue of The American Mercury.

Ray Bradbury Theater – Banshee (02/22/86)

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Screenwriter Douglas Rogers is taking a cab to meet with renowned Irish director John Hampton.  The cabbie says that Hampton left one wife to take another.  He continues,  “We know all about him, and can tell far more than we know.”  What?  Is this a joke?  A mistake?  An Irish colloquialism?  I am too fatigued with RBT to care at this point.  This is the last episode I need to watch, and son-of-a-bitch if I don’t have to read the short story too.

Hampton greets Rogers at the door.  He immediately begins pulling pages from the file, glancing at them, and dropping them to the floor.  After skimming, skipping, and discarding pages, he pronounces, “Damn you, it’s good!”  Hampton is distracted by a sound outside.  He says it is the titular banshee, “The spirits of women who roam the woods the night someone is to die.”

Hampton challenges Rogers to go outside and have a look.  He humors the old drunk and walks into the woods.  And walks and walks.  He sees nothing for 2 1/2 minutes which, in TV time, is enough to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.  Then he sees the woman in white.  She gazes past Rogers to the house.  “Is he in there now,” she asks.  “The great animal who walks on two legs.  He stays, all others go.  Girls are his napkins, women his midnight feast.”

I started transcribing, thinking it would eventually pay off.  She droned on for 5 minutes which, in TV time, is enough to hike the Pacific Crest Trail twice.  She tells Rogers to go back to the house and send Hampton out.

Blah blah blah.

There is just nothing interesting here to grab onto.  The performances were fine.  If you want to see a foppish Peter O’Toole chewing the scenery in pair of knickers, this is your lucky day.  Me, I just found him annoying.  Charles Martin Smith is solid as always.  He has shown up on Twilight Zone, Tales from the Crypt, and Outer Limits and always delivered.

I could even imagine the story working on film, but it just was not well-adapted.  The long walk into the woods and the long scene with the banshee were excruciating.    There were some mind games between the two men which could have been a fun duel, but that too is painful to watch.  Finally the last scene is just squandered.  An unknown entity rattling the doorknob, if properly set up, is a classic.  To be fair, that did create a tiny bit of suspense.  However, Rogers fleeing up the stairs for a freeze frame and fade to black was just an utter nothing.  It could have been worse — in the short story, Rogers literally jumps into bed and pills the covers over his head.

Other Stuff:

  • Nothing to see here.
  • Thus endeth RBT.

Outer Limits – Rite of Passage (03/13/98)

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In a small forest commune, people, goats and chickens are doing their thing.  Brav is carving a big-bellied fertility statue, other people are working in a garden that should sustain the community for about three days, a young couple is making out on the stairs.

Brav’s wife Shal begins screaming.  He shouts, “Come to her, Mother!” and runs to Shal.  The community, including the cloaked Mother, surround Shal.  The people don’t understand what is happening as Mother delivers a baby; although not understanding why Mother was exposing Shal’s lady parts in the town square was probably equally disconcerting to them.  Mother holds the human baby up to her face which we see is alien Vorak, somewhat like a Cardassian. [1]

Some time later, Mother sees Brav carving the wooden statue.  She says, “It is a good likeness, but of a form she no longer has.”  Brav starts whittling away the belly to be more accurate, but optimistically leaves the boobs.  He asks when Shal will be returned since Mother took her away to The Obelisk to care for her.  She says it is far too far and far too dangerous for him to visit.  Mother also has to assure him that the baby will grow up to look like he and Shal.  This confuses him since they don’t look like Mother.

Mother has brought a human girl named K’ren to be his new companion until Shal eventually returns someday far in the future.  Brav is not interested despite Mother stripping K’ren naked to entice him.  K’ren begins making out with him, but he bails.

The next day, K’ren gives him the stink-eye out in the woods.  One of the other guys is playing with the community dog and accidentally runs through the barrier surrounding the community.  He stumbles back through, writhing in pain.  Brav is going to help him when he sees two Voraks returning Shal to the community.  Wait, so Mother waited some indeterminate stretch of time to whore K’ren out to Brav the night before Shal was being returned?

Shal says the Voraks want to keep the baby at the Obelisk.  She is just back for a visit, but has a plan to break out of the community and get their baby.  They break into Mother’s house to steal a tool to remove the ankle-bracelets which are on their wrist (this is sci-fi, after all).  Shal also sees a book with pictures [3] of other people, but Mother had told them there were no other people.  They remove their bracelets and escape through the barrier.

As they are walking through the woods to the Obelisk, Shal is attacked by a snake thing.  The bite leaves an organism in her leg which begins crawling up her thigh under her skin (this is sci-fi, after all).  Wait, isn’t this earth?  Where did the snake thing come from?  Did the Voraks bring them?  WTF would they do that?

They find a structure which clearly was not built by the aliens.  It is a large concrete building, dirty, crumbling apart, with no signs of life, like a Sears.  They find a couple of skeletons holding a baby skeleton.  Shal suggests, maybe these are their ancestors, not the Voraks.

After an encounter with some more snake things, they reach the Obelisk.  It is actually a lovely lighthouse, although what the hell it is doing on the bank of a river is a little baffling. [2]  It also seems to be in pristine condition with a fresh red & white paint job.  After the ruins and grown-over bridges we have seen, I guess the Voraks are real handy-men; maybe four-handy-men, like the dudes on Barsoom.  And nice of them to have the humans living in Camp Crystal Lake cabins while they live in a hipster Architectural Digest showplace.

They enter the lighthouse and snatch the baby.  When they are discovered by a Vorak, the racist Shal shouts that the baby belongs with its own kind.  Brav says they saw what the Voraks did to their parents.  The Vorak says they did nothing.  When he tries to stop them from taking the baby, Brav stabs him, but gets blasted.  Shal runs off with the baby.  She goes back to the Sears, but is surrounded by snake things in the Automotive Department.  Mother and the other Vorak kill all the snake-things and rescue her — luckily the baby had an ankle-bracelet tracker that looks as stoopid-big as an Apple Watch on its tiny wrist.

The blaster was only on stun, so Brav is able to reunite with Shal.  Mother gives their baby back, but says the Vorak will continue to watch over them.  The earth’s population died out hundreds of years before the Voraks arrove, for reasons unknown.  The humans in the community were cloned from bodies they found in the ice.  This is the first baby to be born old-school.

Brav asks what they were like.  Like every snotty Star Trek alien, the first thing Mother comes up with is not love or laughter or curiosity.  She says, “They had to be taught the value of lifeforms different in appearance from themselves.”  However, the Voraks appreciate that humans saw the error of their ways.  They respect that humans even tried to restore some species it drove to extinction, although they might have just mistaken an old Jurassic Park DVD for a documentary.  “We believe any species capable of correcting such a terrible flaw, and finally appreciating the beauty that lies in diversity deserves a second chance.”

So the Voraks demonstrated their commitment to diversity by giving the human race a second chance by creating a sheltered safe-space; a cloned community with a smokin’ hot population of young white models of diverse height and hair styles.

Good episode, as usual.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t work in a Kardashian reference.
  • [2] I now see river lighthouses do exist, but it still bugs me.
  • [3] The pictures are referred to as reflections.  Why wouldn’t they just be called pictures?  The Voraks know every other English word.
  • It’s like the Star Trek aliens who called the crew giant-bags-of-mostly-water.  They knew the meaning of giant, bags, of, mostly, and water but didn’t know humans?  And what happened to that fancy Universal Translator?  Isn’t this the kind of colloquialism it is supposed to smooth over?

The Hitchhiker – Joker (04/21/87)

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Next up in rotation was an episode called Made for Each Other.  Sadly, disc 1 of the 3rd DVD set is not playing, and it is not online that I can see.  On the plus side, it starred Bill Paxton, so I’m not subjected to his performance.  RIP.

A home movie is playing of George W. Bush clowning around in a Hawaiian shirt, with snakes in a can, an exploding cigar, and the nuclear launch codes.  No, wait, it is Bush doppelganger Timothy Bottoms as psycho Peter (qu’est-ce que c’est).  He was picked up by the cops for being covered with blood.  All they got out of him was an address — the apartment of a woman named Teresa.  The police found her bathroom covered in blood, but no body.

The police question him about Teresa, but all he wants to talk about is his ex-wife Melissa (Kelly Lynch) We get a flashback of Melissa at her office birthday party.  She brings the party to a halt when she says it is not her birthday.  It had started when someone gave the Hot Cops’ least hot cop a few bucks and a fright wig and told him to go to the office as Tarzan to get the birthday ball rolling.  OK, maybe he brought the balloons, but where did the cake and ice cream suddenly come from?  As the party breaks up, we see Peter in the shadows giggling like a madman even though he is hidden from the office, and we already know who he is.  He tells the cop that it was actually his birthday, but I guess Melissa didn’t make the connection.

Seriously, WTF is this thing?

At home that night, Melissa is surprised by a joy-buzzer [1] on her refrigerator.  When she gets out the Orange Juice, we can see one of the few items in her fridge is a huge brown gelatinous blob.  I thought surely this was another prank, but she has no reaction to it.  The camera not only lingers on it, she leaves the door open so we can see it.  She puts ice in the glass, but it is the wacky fly-in-the-ice-cube gag.  Once again, she makes no connection to her high-larious ex-husband Peter.  Peter screams to the cop that Teresa and Melissa are the same person, violating the show-don’t-scream rule on screenwriting.

Melissa goes into a storeroom to change for her yoga class that night.  1980s office dweeb Alan says, “Would that I were a fly on the wall.”  As I was cringing at this subjunctive Shakespearean lament, Melissa replied, “As far as I’m concerned, you are a fly on the wall.”  I’m not sure it makes sense because they do seem to have some kind of relationship.  However, I admire the symmetry and the snappy diminution of him to insect status.

As she is changing, the lights go out.  She threatens to kick Alan, “really hard in a certain place.”  She walks around the storeroom in a really half-assed scene.  She could easily put her blouse back on or remove it completely, but she holds it her chest as she searches the large room and threatens Alan with a harassment suit.  This isn’t HBO, this is TV.  Alan suddenly appears in the aisle naked except for something down below which it is mercifully too dark to make out.  Peter has him at gunpoint and duct-tapes the two of the together.

He is wearing a mask and a hoodie, and his voice is electronically altered,  so I guess it is reasonable that Melissa still doesn’t recognize him as he giggles and dances around and photographs them.  He has also shrewdly disguised his height as he now seems to be 2-3 inches shorter than Melissa in this scene.  The next day the photos are sprinkled around the office.

Blah blah blah . . .

Peter confronts Melissa in her home.  Actually, he breaks into her house and confronts her, then does the exact same thing in the next scene.  It is just a bizarre waste of time.  The script is so inept, it is still not clear if Melissa is really his ex-wife or if he is delusional.  He chases her into the bathroom.  Soon water starts running under the door.  He breaks in to find Melissa has slit her wrists.  As he tells the story, he gets so worked up that he has a heart attack.

The cops did not find her body, but we do.  It is at a motel washing the red out of her hair.  She looks in the mirror and says, “Hello Melissa.”  The home movie continues running and shows a woman taking off a mask and laughing.

Well.  Either this was the most consistently incoherent series on TV, or I’m just not smart enough to watch it.

  • I think it is safe to say that Teresa was a new identity assumed by Melissa after she left her lunatic husband Peter.
  • I assume the woman taking off the mask at the end of the home movie is Melissa, but damn if I can make her look like Kelly Lynch. I’m willing to accept maybe it is the B&W, the poor transfer, the bright blonde hair, the previously unseen big smile and a little face blindness tripping me up.
  • If it is her, didn’t the cops watch this movie before interrogating Peter?
  • If it is not her, is the reveal just to show that Peter really is delusional?  I don’t think this is the case, but it would be interesting since they don’t seem too concerned about logic.
  • And what is the point of showing end of the film?  Having her say “Hello Melissa” at the motel already resolved the question of her identity.  Although her hair is still much darker than the woman in the movie.
  • How did Melissa fake her suicide for Peter?  Those cuts looked pretty real, but her wrists looked OK at the hotel.
  • Where did she get gallons of blood with 30 seconds notice that was good enough to fool Peter and the police?
  • The police say the blood stains were bovine.  What blood stains?  Peter had some blood on his face.  Melissa’s bathroom looked like an abattoir.  Stains is a funny way to describe either.
  • Are they saying this was bovine blood in Melissa’s bathroom?  Then why are they looking for a “body” if there was no human blood?  And WTF did she get cow blood?
  • Waaaaaait a minute.  One of Peter’s “pranks” was to smear blood on a new dress prototype in Melissa’s office.  OK, you can stop waiting — I got nothing.
  • She faked the suicide in her bathroom, so if you’re thinking Peter had some spare blood stowed there, nope.  If you are thinking Melissa smeared her own dress to set Peter up, that’s just too dumb to rebut.
  • Melissa didn’t do anything wrong.  At the end, why is she dying her hair, changing her identity back, and hiding from the cops at a motel?  OK, she is reclaiming her old life now that Peter is no longer a threat, but why run away?
  • In fact, some people might have actually called the cops when someone broke into their house and left novelty items,  sexually assaulted them in a storeroom, and later threatened their life.
  • This is out of the filmmakers’ hands, but the IMDb synopsis says, “Deranged Peter relentlessly stalks and terrorizes Teresa, a lovely young lady who Peter thinks is his ex-wife Melissa.”  But isn’t she Melissa?  She said she was Melissa.

I can’t, as the kids say, even.

I must say Timothy Bottoms was incredibly annoying, just as the role demanded.  He was great.  Kelly Lynch didn’t really have any heavy lifting to do, but she looked great.  Many of these episodes leave me feeling stupid because I think I must have missed some key points.  Surely nothing this incoherent could have been televised.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Do they even exist anymore?  Suffice it to say, it is not a sexual aid although that would be a pretty good name for one.
  • It took three writers to create this.
  • Amazingly, the director went on to work on such great shows as Fargo and Breaking Bad.  Or maybe it was a dude with the same name.  Colin Bucksey? No, probably not.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – Special Delivery (11/29/59)

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10-year old Tom is excited to receive a box of mushrooms in the mail from the Great Bayou Novelty Greenhouse. [1] He hasn’t been this wound up since the Spinach Telegram of ’56.  These are Sylvan Glade Jumbo Giant mushrooms that can be raised in your basement for fun and profit.

Tom’s father Bill is flagged down by his neighbor Roger.  He asks if Bill has noticed that people are disappearing.  Roger says, “Something strange is going on in the world.  Something terrible has happened.”  Bill recalls Mrs. Goodbody said something about flying saucers.

What the . . . Mrs. Goodbody was just mentioned three posts ago in The Screaming Woman.  That was a reference to the Ray Bradbury Theater episode Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar!  This AHP episode was adapted from the same short story, 30 years earlier.  Mrs. Goodbody does not actually appear in this episode, so viewers and readers had to wait three decades to be disappointed.  By the 1980s, TV technology had advanced so far that RBT could disappoint viewers on a weekly basis.

Tom tells Bill he is “afraid for me, my family and even right now for you.  And your friends, and your friends’ friends” although their friends can go f*** themselves.  He advises Bill to keep his eyes open for the next few days.  He predicts something terrible is going to happen.

Tom’s mushroom crop is, er . . . mushrooming.  They give his mother the willies, but she wouldn’t know a toadstool from a toad’s tool.  Roger’s wife Dorothy calls and tells Bill that Roger, “vanished, disappeared, dropped out of sight.”

Bill goes to Roger’s house to interrogate his 10-year old son Joe.  The boy says he didn’t see or hear anything.  His dad’s closets were just empty, and he was gone.  As Dorothy begins speaking, Joe turns and stares directly into the camera.  This might be the single creepiest image I’ve seen so far for this blog.  Dorothy says there was no history of insanity in Roger’s family . . . that maybe he was kidnapped.  Bill snaps at her about why the kidnappers would take all his clothes.  Dude, she just lost her husband and is left with a demon child — give her a break!  Joe turns away from the camera and goes down to their cellar.

Bill goes home and tells Cynthia, “He’s gone all right.”  She says, “Doesn’t this kind of thing happen to a lot of men in their 40s?”  They get a telegram  from Roger: TRAVELING [SIC] NEW ORLEANS.  THIS TELEGRAM POSSIBLE [SIC] OFF-GUARD MOMENT.  REFUSE ALL SPECIAL DELIVERY PACKAGES — ROGER.

Bill gets a call from the police.  Roger was just picked up on a south-bound train in Green City.  The police say “he was polite, cheerful and in good spirits” and denied sending a telegram.  The only special delivery package they received was Tom’s mushrooms.  Bill calls Dorothy to see if they received any packages.  She says, like all the boys on the block, Joe has taken up mushroom farming.

Bill ponders whether Roger was right.  Maybe the earth is being invaded by things from other worlds.  “How could creatures from outer space invade us without us noticing?”  He realizes it could be done by dust, spores, fungi, mushrooms.  And the swamps of Louisiana would be a great places for them to take root.  Bill stares directly onto the camera and asks “Tonight.  In this very minute.  In how many homes all over the USA are billions of mushrooms being grown by innocent boys in their cellars?”

Seeing Tom has stored some mushrooms in the refrigerator, Bill conjectures that the alien species would propagate by people eating the mushrooms and being controlled.  Bill opens the cellar door.  Tom tells him to not turn on the light because it is bad for the mushrooms.  There is a very tense confrontation and an ending that that leaves just the right amount to the imagination.

It is strange that AHP let Bradbury get away with sci-fi stories like this and Design for Loving.  I can think of only one other sci-fi / fantasy episode in the 4 1/2 seasons I’ve watched.  On the other hand, they seemed to have an excellent system of vetting stories.  This episode is so good that I’m surprised it is not as iconic as Lamb to the Slaughter or Man from the South.  It certainly isn’t representative of AHP, but is one of their most effective episodes.

Since the RBT version was not as good, I have to wonder how much of the success is due to Norman Lloyd’s direction.  The episode was filled with great moments such as two characters addressing the camera (and I think the kid was going for 4th wall breakage), the glowy white mushrooms at the bottom of the stairs, and Bill almost being hit by a car.  The ending becomes more like Thriller as Bill realizes what is happening, yet is drawn into the conspiracy.

Excellent.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] The return address is 713 Canal Street — a McDonald’s.  I might have known.
  • Cheers that I’ve actually eaten there.  Jeers that I was in New Orleans and ate at freakin’ McDonald’s.  C’mon, it was just breakfast.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  Roger’s family — Dorothy and Joe — is still with us.  I must say, though, Joe’s photo on IMDb might be even creepier than when he stared into the camera.  It looks like he has just wrapped up a porn shoot.  He is naked, daintily holding a towel over his junk.
  • [UPDATE] I somehow missed that this was covered in depth over at bare*bones ezine.  Interesting and well-written as always.
  • [UPDTE 2] Another blog reminds me that this is suspiciously similar to Bradbury’s Zero Hour.  Both feature aliens taking over the world by using children to carry out seemingly innocuous tasks that are baffling to their parents.

 

Completely off-topic, but this story of the nurse being arrested is burning me up.  As a supporter of the police, the first shorter video is infuriating.  The longer second video makes me question my beliefs.  A cop, with other officers standing by, explains to the nurse why this is her fault like every guy who ever slugged his wife.