The Hitchhiker – Out of the Night (10/29/85)

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A blind Stan Lee doppelganger is walking his dog.  He passes a Bob Dylan doppelganger.  Someone yells, “F*** you all!” since this is HBO and guest star Kirstie Alley is unlikely to take her top off.  We hear a gunshot.  He looks around to see where it came from — the blind man looks around, I mean — this is The Hitchhiker, after all.

We cut to an 18 year old kid running away from a motorcycle cop.  He passes through an intersection which has a traffic jam of old-timey classic cars, then runs into the kitchen entrance of the San Marino Hospitality Inn.  The butcher-knife wielding chef chases him out.  He enters the lobby of the hotel which is filled with Felliniesque menagerie of weirdos, freaks, drama queens, and weirdos.  Did I mention this is set in California?

He sees the chef talking to the cop.  The cop pursues him with his gun drawn, for some reason bringing the chef along.  The cop says, “Are you sure it was him?”  Is he sure it was who?  It’s not like the chef identified someone from a mugshot.  He just said he said he saw an 18-year old kid.  The cop says, “He sure made a mess of things.  I can’t wait to get my hands on him.”

The kid is also packing heat.  He wanders into a bizarre room, made more bizarre by the from-nowhere entrance of Kirstie Alley.  As he spins around, she shoves a puppet in his face and is lucky he doesn’t shoot her.  She shouts, “They don’t like me either, but they’re stuck with me.”  He asks who she is and she pulls a card magically out of the air.  It says:

NECROMANCY

ONEICROMACY [1]

THAUMATURGY

The card changes before his eyes to say The Amazing Angelica.  He asks how she did that, but she says she has a lot better tricks.  She then pulls dead flowers out of a hat which is not a better trick.  She leaves, and the card goes blank, which is an equivalent trick.

The kid finds himself at the bar, but doesn’t know how he got there.  He asks if the bartender knows a guy name Baxy, same as he asked the chef.  He doesn’t, but the waitress does.  She says, “Baxy can’t help anyone, not even himself.  He’s a major head case.”

The waitress disappears; suddenly there is an older woman sitting beside him and the bar is full of people.  She says the waitress doesn’t care about him, but that is also the kind of girl her son likes.  The kid sees the cop, and asks the woman to help him sneak out.  They go up to her room.  She asks him what happened and he says if he told her, she would hate him.  When she tries to kiss him, he freaks out.  There is a knock at the door and he sneaks out the open window.

Suddenly he appears in an elevator with Kirstie.  As going down goes, that’s better than going out the window.  But again he has no idea how he got there.  She says she is putting on a show tonight and if he comes with her, he will be history around here.  He sees the waitress walk by and follows her as she goes into a sauna.  We get a nice topless scene.  They begin kissing and she slides off his jacket.  His shirt has conveniently disappeared, but his gun has not.  She freaks out when she finds he is not “just glad to see me.”  He leaves and she says he will end up just like his pal Baxy.

Again, suddenly, he is a waiter at the Conference of American Cardiologists.  Again with the suddenly — all the diners become white-coated physicians.  He escapes, and Kirstie again appears.  She drags him before a cheering crowd.  At this point, it is pretty clear what is happening.

Unfortunately, we get an interminable scene — OK, 3 minutes — of Kirstie Alley grotesquely hamming it up in front of a crowd.  It finally ends to reveal the kid is a patient in an operating room — he is Baxy.  As the doctors finish up, they say he had attempted suicide, but will recover.  The surgeon, the same actor as the cop, goes downstairs to inform his family.  He approaches the older woman seen earlier and says, “Your son is going to be fine.”  The girl seen before as the waitress is with her.  I think the producers were worried that people — as I did — would think that was his sister and that he dreamed a topless make-out session with her.  There is a clunky “You must be his sister / No, his girlfriend” bit of dialogue inserted to make it less sexy creepy.

Most impractical operating room ever!

This one actually benefits from a second viewing.  I didn’t care for it on the first go-round.  The second time, however, I was able to see all the foreshadowing, and how an impressive number of lines of dialogue were parallel to what would be happening in the operating room.  Some of the scenes that seemed a little creepy, like his mother kissing him on the bed, could be interpreted as a caring mother, but more-so on a second viewing than relying on my memory.

I appreciated the visual style as it reflected the randomness of dreams.  The titular hitchhiker’s intro was a little off, though.  The kid hallucinates this crazy hospital with all the classic old cars out front.  And there is the hitchhiker right in the middle of it. Was he in the kid’s dreams?  I thought it was weird when he was in France.

No other episode has improved so much upon further reflection.  If not for that god-awful scene with Kirstie Alley near the end, it would have been a success.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Did they mean ONEIROMANCY?  Could this series really be that lame?
  • In Baxy’s imagination, the building sign said SAN MARINO HOSPITALITY INN.  Back in reality, it says SAN MARINO HOSPITAL with an IN sign beside it.  Pretty clever, but you really have to look for it.
  • The chef with the butcher knife was the surgeon’s assistant.  When the kid initially entered the kitchen, we saw him cutting into a fresh piece of meat — again pretty clever.
  • Given some of the bartender’s lines (kill the pain / pump the gas), it is clear that he was intended to be the anesthesiologist.  It is a major faux pas that the director did not get a shot of him in the operating room; at least not a shot without the surgical mask.
  • Why did he dream of a conference of cardiologists when he had a head wound?
  • Written by Marjorie David who also wrote The Legendary Billy B.  Maybe I should go back and watch that one again.  Not gonna happen.
  • The cop was also in the excellent Trial by Fire.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents – No Pain (10/25/59)

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Millionaire Dave Rainey — make that Six Million Dollar Man, Dave Rainey — is stuck in an iron lung. He’s pretty insistent on making sure everyone knows he’s worth six million.  I don’t know if people still know what an iron lung is — kids today, with their science and progress!  Actually, I never knew what was going inside those contraptions until I just looked it up.

The body from the neck down is sealed into metal tube.  A ventilator creates an oscillating atmospheric pressure inside to facilitate breathing.  It doesn’t seem like it would work, but people were’t spending years confined in these things for their health. Well, I guess they were in them for their health, but it was no fun.

Dave has a mirror angled over his face so he can see something other than the ceiling. His wife Cindy enters in a striped shirt over a bathing suit and a snazzy yachting hat. Their handsome pal Arnold has invited Cindy out on his boat.  In a brilliantly callous bit, Cindy uses Dave’s mirror — his sole lifeline to the horizontal world — to check her hair before boating off with another man.

While Cindy is gone, Nurse Collins turns the iron lung so Dave can see the ocean out their window just in time to see Arnold’s boat go by.  The nurse suggests that Dave should get out of the iron lung for 8 – 9 minutes as his doctor recommended.  Dave says he would rather just watch the boats. Although, really, who knows what he’s doing with his hands inside that thing.[1]

Dave flashes back to his days before the iron lung.  He and Cindy were having fun on the beach.  He tells her he’s “seen more cover on a loaf of bread” which I can make no sense of.  They start making out and Dave asks Cindy to marry him.  He admits he was a mug 5 years ago, but having six million in the bank has changed him.

At Dave’s invitation, Arnold sticks around for dinner after the cruise with Cindy.  When he drives the nurse to the bus station, Cindy and Dave are left alone.  After a few drinks, Cindy, the director, and the composer take a long look at the electrical cord that poweers Dave’s iron lung.  Dave says, “I hope it will be painless . . . however you planned it for tonight.  The killing, I mean.”  She asks when he first suspected.  She does unplug the ventilator, but she is just doing as the doctor prescribed.  She slides him out a few inches like a file cabinet.

While she pours herself a drink, she compliments Dave on how well he is taking the news that she is going to murder him.  She admits they had a few good years before his disability.  She tells him that now he is more dead than alive and, “You know me.  I was never meant for those nobler forms of solitaire.”  What the — is she talking about masturbation on TV in 1959?  After the almost-incest of Touché and the almost-cannibalism of Arthur, AHP’s slide into depravity is getting more explicit.  Well, the 1960s are just a couple of months away.

Cindy says seeing him in this condition, she almost thinks he wants to die.  He says, “I haven’t figured out yet why a man with six-million dollars would want to die.”  He was already worth six-million a few years ago before they got married.  What, is he keeping it buried in the back yard?  Make it work for you, dude!  She says, “I wonder if you know how unfair this whole thing is to me.”

Sadly, despite this intriguing premise, there is a huge lull in the middle of the episode.  Brian Keith has never been the most expressive actor other than conveying a coiled spring of rage.  He is just a strange choice to play the helpless Dave.  I guess it was to contrast his former virility with his current condition, but it doesn’t work.  This scene we are observing should be more about the mind than the physical body.

Joanna Moore’s low key performance does not help. Cindy had 5 drinks on the boat and 3 more after they returned.  Played slightly inebriated, this just drags the episode down even more.  I can imagine this scenario being suspensefully played out with a more intelligent, manipulative Dave, and Cindy arrogantly thinking she is in charge while he works her strings. Unfortunately, these two and the script just aren’t up to it.

There is a twist, but even that is kind of hum-drum.  There was just a lot of potential in this one that did not get exploited.  Of course, this still might be the best episode I watch this week.  The AHP bar is pretty high.

Other Stuff:

  • [1] Upon further research, I see that he is probably paralyzed . . . I feel terrible.
  • AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.  However, if IMDb is to be believed, director Norman Lloyd, will be 103 in November and is still working. He was in Trainwreck with the odious Amy Schumer in 2015, and optimistically — dare I say quixotically — has a new series in development for 2018.
  • Joanna Moore (Cindy) was the mother of Tatum O’Neal.

Twilight Zone – The Storyteller (10/11/86)

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Dorothy Livingston and her daughter are coming out of the Robert Byrd Library.  The sign tells us the hours are 9 to 5 thus guaranteeing no students or working people will ever soil its stacks.  Dorothy recognizes a man getting into a cab.  She drags her perplexed daughter into the next car and says, “Follow that cab!” although figuratively, not literally.

She believes she knew the man 50 years ago when he was a kid and she was the new school teacher.  She flashes back to 1933 West Virginia where she arrove on the Robert Byrd Bus Line with a suitcase full of books.  She passes the former teacher as she leaves on the same bus,  As the bus pulls away, she yells out the window that Dorothy must be sure Micah Frost has full access to the library.

The next morning at Robert Byrd Elementary School, she faces her rowdy class full of flannel, bib-overalls, suspenders, and small humans.  As she begins her first history lesson, she notices Micah is not paying attention to her.  He is writing furiously in his notebook, although I’m not sure how she knew he wasn’t just aggressively taking notes.

Like all government employees, Dorothy works late her first day.  Micah also stays, looking at some books in the classroom bookcase which, I guess, is what represents a library in West Virginia.

As she is walking home, she passes Micah’s house.  Through the window, she can see him reading from his notebook to an old man.  The next day, Dorothy asks Micah if she can set up a parent-teacher conference.  He says his parents are dead and he lives with his grandfather.  When Dorothy suggests a grandparent-teacher conference, Micah gets very upset and runs away.

Despite Micah’s insistence that she stay away, Dorothy goes to his house that night.  Through a window, she hears Micah again reading the old man a story.  When Micah catches her, she asks him what is going on.  He says the old man is actually his great-great-great-grandfather, born in 1793.  Micah keeps him alive like his father before him, by reading him a story every night with a cliffhanger.  He would stop each night before the end, so the old man had to stay alive to hear the resolution.

The next day, Micah falls out of a tree and breaks his arm.  The doctor keeps Micah overnight, so Dorothy goes to his house.  She lets herself in, lights a lamp in the old man’s room, and gives him something to live for.

The next morning, Micah returns home and is happy to see his GGGGF still alive.  He doesn’t understand how he survived without hearing a story.  He turns and sees Dorothy is there — she read him a story from Micah’s notebook.  Presumably with no spoilers as they would kill him.

Back in the present, Dorothy tells her daughter that she thinks the man they are following is Micah.  She always wondered what happened to him, and if the old man is still alive, approaching his bi-centennial.  Or, at her age, maybe she wants him to read her a story.  They follow the man into a building, then to his apartment.

Strangely, the version posted on You Tube stops there, before the twist.  Being a good citizen, I have the DVDs.  Turns out this episode was just a story being told by Dorothy to keep her mother alive.

Despite TZ’s usual efforts to undermine the episode —  Charles Aidman’s terrible narration, the insipid score, the maudlin tone, the complete lack of any edge — there is a lot to like here.  Glynnis O’Connor is excellent as the new teacher.  The script didn’t give her much room to exercise the skepticism I would hope for from a teacher, but she transcended the words.

It also introduced a moral dilemma, although it spent about 5 seconds on it.  Not much, you say, but dang near a record for network TV.  Why is the old man being kept alive?  Is it enough just to breathe?  He seems to have no quality of life.  He never leaves his bed, has no friends, has a scraggly beard and is — just a hunch — not a regular bather.  Maybe Micah is keeping him alive as a guardian since his parents were killed.  But why did his father take on this task?  What happened to Micah’s grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather?  And sorry ladies, men-only.

The ending is kind of beautiful.  The reveal that this has been a story told by Dorothy is well played as opening a door into a room which fades to white.  When cut to Dorothy and her mother, it is intriguing beyond the simple twist.  Was there actually a Micah from whom she learned this cliffhanger technique?  Why did she let her mother get to be 90 years old before she began practicing it?

But most of all, is the old man — real or fictional — still alive and pushing 200?  Even after watching the episode and writing this, my mind keeps snapping back to that question.  They have physically involved me in the mechanics of the story in a way that has very rarely happened to me before from TV or a movie.  Yeah, I want to live to see what happened.

Other Stuff:

  • Classic TZ Legacy:  Nothing really, it was a pretty original premise.  It did remind me of One for the Angels.  Ed Wynn had to filibuster a sales pitch to keep Mr. Death from taking a little girl.
  • Dorothy is said to be 22, but Glynnis O’Conner was 31 at the time.  F’ing actors, man!
  • Directed by the ubiquitous Paul Lynch (Prom Night, Ray Bradbury Theater, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits).
  • Micah was played by an unrecognizably young Bud Bundy.
  • Skipped Segment:  Nightsong.  Unwatchable, Lifetime movie caliber.  It has the standard TZ shortcomings discussed above, but with no redeeming features.  I thought the lead actor was a dick when he had 4 shirt buttons open, then he later came back with 5 unbuttoned.  Actually, there is one well-done aspect to the episode.  I have often commented how awful DJs are on TV.  Here, Lisa Eilbacher and Kip Gilman both struck me as pretty authentic.

Two Murders, One Crime – Cornell Woolrich (1942)

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Gary Severn goes out at 11:45 pm, as he does every night, to pick up the midnight edition. OK. Were there midnight editions of newspapers back then?  Newsstand operators manned their post in the wee hours of the morning?  There were people waiting on this delivery?  Severn actually has to “worm his way through a cluster of customers” and ends up grabbing the same paper as another man.  He begins reading as he walks home, hearing “numbers of other footsteps” behind him, which eventually dwindle to one; well, one pair.

As he arrives at his home, a hand comes down on his shoulder.  It is the man he played newspaper tug of war with.  The good news is, he’s a police officer.  The bad news is Severn is arrested for the murder of another officer.

At the police station, the guys are monkeying around with the eye chart and they are a pretty average bunch.  They bring in Mrs. Novak for a test as she was a witness to the murder.  Unfortunately for Severn, she can read the chart down to “Printed in Taiwan“. She busts Severn as “the man I saw running away right after the shots.”  A CPA backs up her story.

In no time, Severn is walking to the electric chair with another man accused of the crime.  The other man decides to come clean before he is executed.  He finally admits to the priest that he killed the cop, but that Severn wasn’t involved; his accomplice was a guy named Donny Blake.

The cops bring in Blake.  Mrs. Novak and the CPA decide, no that’s the guy.  Whoopsie, Severn has already been executed.  Kudos on this being quite a shock; you know, if some jerk didn’t spoil it for you.  The author took the time to establish a bit about his life, and it was clear he was to be the protagonist of the story.  Then bang, or rather buzzz, he’s dead.  They get word from the District Attorney’s office to let Blake go free because it is more important to let a murderer go free than to have the state admit a mistake.

Detective Rogers is the only one unwilling to go along with the ruse.  When Blake laughs at them, Rogers resigns from the force and promises to dog Blake’s every move; which I believe was the 2nd Act of Dirty Harry.

At first Blake is aggravated by Rogers tailing him.  Then he gets paranoid.  Eventually it seems to become a road picture; everywhere Blake goes, Rogers is sure to show up.  Blake eventually learns to accept it.  They don’t exactly become friends, but there is a familiarity.  Finally, after 3 years and 7 months, Rogers is able to manipulate Blake into a position where he will pay for his crime.

This was a very good entry in the collection.  It surprised me, had some humor, and justice was served.

Other Stuff:

  • First published in the July 1942 issue of Black Mask.  Also that month:  Harrison Ford born.

Mini-Mini-Review of Baby Driver:

It is so great to see a movie from a director who is in control.  The opening scene is almost too precious, but quickly reeled me into this stylized world through the combination of writing, direction and music.  If I had to come up with any criticisms, they would be pretty miniscule:

  1. Parts of the soundtrack are god-awful.  But then, I’m not 14.
  2. Jon Hamm is a great actor, but they put him in a leather biker jacket.  I’ve said it before, if you aren’t Vic Mackey or The Fonz, just don’t do it.  You will look foolish.