Alfred Hitchcock Presents – The Crystal Trench (10/04/59)

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In September 1907, a train rolls across one of those impossibly huge bridges in the Alps.  I’m not sure we could build one of those now.  It’s like those gigantic statues and titular towers in Lord of the Rings; how did those simpletons build such colossal structures?  There is probably a 50 page LOTR answer replete with Elvish songs, so I retract the question.

Mark Cavendish [1] is arriving in Switzerland today to climb the Schwarzhorn, which I hear is very popular in German porn.  He sees the other members of his climbing party arguing on the veranda about whether they can see some dumbkopfs atop the mountain at 4:00 PM.  That would very dangerous as 1) the weather is unpredictable, 2) visibility decreases, and 3) the pro shop charges you another full day for carabiners and crampons.

That night, the concierge — possibly the hotel manager, but concierge is so much more fun to say . . .  Concierge!  Concierge! — informs Cavendish there has been an accident on the mountain.  Mr. Ranks led a pair of young men up the mountain, taking a route that was beyond their skills.  Only Ranks and George Liston made it back. The other young man, Michael Ballister, died before reaching the summit.  Ranks and Liston were too fatigued to haul him down.  The manager thinks since Cavendish is from England like Ballister, he should be the one to tell Mrs. Ballister to cancel that couples massage.

They find the lovely Stella Ballister sitting alone in the ballroom as others dance around her.  Apparently, they feel this is the perfect place to let her know her husband of six months is dead.  Before Cavendish can give her the news, she asks him to dance.  She is not flirting; she loves her husband, but just feels like having a little fun with a fellow Brit.  They get in a few steps before he takes her aside and says, “Mrs. Ballister, your husband is dead. His body is up on the Schwarzhorn.”  Amuse-bouche?

Stella insists that he retrieve her husband’s body off the mountain. Cavendish and his pals brave a Frosty Blizzard and a blinding Blast of McFlurries to find Ballister. Despite the heavy snow, they are wearing lederhosen (also fun to say  . . . Lederhosen!  Lederhosen!) [3] and hats that don’t cover their ears.  They find Cavendish Ballister draped frozen along the side of a cliff.  As they are hauling him up, they lose their grip and he comically slides down the mountain like Stallone rode that dude in Cliffhanger,[4] until he disappears into a crevise, then a crevasse.

Cavendish returns and again must give Stella tragic news — maybe during pool aerobics this time. She asks him to go with her to see Ranks and Liston in the hospital where they are recovering from frostbite.  Stella thinks Michael was too strong to just die of exposure. She wants to get “the truth” out of the two men.  At the hospital, Ranks is wheeled in.  He gives Stella his condolences.  Ranks admits they left with too little food and that the boys were too inexperienced for the route he took.  Even in a wheelchair, he’s a stand-up guy.  However, he insists that he and Liston stayed with Ballister until he died.

Stella doesn’t buy his story and shouts, “You left him up there to die!  I know it!”  The nurse wheels Ranks back out and Stella gets her groove back.  She tells Cavendish that she will keep her husband alive through her memories.  She — not me, she — says it will be easy because being packed in ice, he will never change.

Back in London, Cavendish and Stella begin attending dinners and concerts together.  One day, she invites him to tea and he shows up with a ring.  She refuses his proposal.  To explain why, she takes him with her to see a professor.  He describes — in very authentic sounding jargon, BTW — how glaciers move and transform over time.  He blows his credibility when he absurdly predicts the glacier will poop Ballister out in 40 years on July 21, 1947, around tea time.  Stella plans to wait all that time to be with her beloved, perfectly preserved Michael.  In a stunning Hollywood reversal, the wife would be 40 years older than the husband.  Madness, I tells ya!

Forty years later, Cavendish and Stella return to the glacier. [5] Some men picking at the ice, not realizing it will never get better, reveal Ballister’s frozen face, unchanged after 40 years in the glacier — I guess . . . we never saw him before.  Cavendish retrieves a locket from around Ballister’s neck.  Stella doesn’t seem thrilled.  When Cavendish opens the locket, the picture inside is another woman.  He tries to protect Stella, but she knows her husband had no such locket with her picture.  She takes the locket and chucks it back into the ice.

There is a lot to like here . . . I seem to use that phrase a lot in a passive-aggressive way.  I enjoyed the location.  This ain’t a James Bond movie — you’re working with a 1950s TV budget, meaning stock footage, papier-mâché rocks and snow made of deadly asbestos shavings.  But they were all cut together great.  In particular, the shot of Ballister sailing down the mountain sticks with me.  That is too specific to be stock footage, and didn’t strike me as a model. It was just a great drawn-out Hitchcockian “uh-oh” moment like Norman Bates trying to sink Marion’s car.  If that shot cost half the budget, it was worth it.

Although I respect the twist, it rings hollow.  While I enjoy seeing other people waste their lives — the Dead-Heads always made me feel like my life actually had direction — the premise is just too flimsy.  OK, Stella’s handsome young husband died tragically.  I can imagine her going into seclusion.  I can imagine her heart-broken.  I can imagine her never remarrying.  I can imagine her expressing her grief by having a steamy affair with the proper young woman who just arrived on the train to be a dance instructor at the local academy, who wears jodhpurs even though she doesn’t have a horse, and never had time for men and their boorish ways.  However, I can’t understand her waiting 40 years for her dead husband’s body to reappear.  To what end?  And Cavendish, dude!

Still, 30 minutes well-spent.

Other Stuff:

  • AHP Deathwatch:  Only one survivor, but his character had no name.  However, the professor (Patrick McNee) had a good run, dying at 95 in 2015.
  • [1] James Donald, Senior British Officer at Stalag III.
  • [2] Werner Klemperer, Senior German Officer at Stalag XIII.
  • [3] Or maybe they were knickers.  They were pants that did not break at the shoe, but ended with socks from the calf down.  Just seems a strange choice for freezing weather.
  • [4] I didn’t find a clip, but everyone should watch Cliffhanger (again).  It’s just great fun.
  • [5] I think it was meant to be a stunning reveal when the actors turn to the camera and are made up to be older.  However, we already knew it was 40 years later.  I do admire the restraint of the make-up, though.  Rather than the hideous job done on Guy Pearce in Prometheus (or anyone ever in any series of Star Trek), for example, just some gray hair and an ashen complexion are perfectly adequate.
  • The Twilight Zone premiered 2 days before this episode aired.
  • This is the end of Hulu’s AHP line-up.

Twilight Zone – A Day in Beaumont (04/11/86)

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Well this is a problem.

Seeing the title, I immediately recognized it as a reference to TZ master Charles Beaumont and patted myself on the back accordingly. When the car was zapped by a Bradbury Ray, I thought, clever, but they’re pushing their luck.  Then they tell the sheriff they saw a meteor land near Willoughby, and I finally got it.

The segment is admirably stuffed with such references to the original Twilight Zone and 1950s sci-fi movies.  There comes a tipping point — and it comes early — where the point of the episode is mainly to shoehorn in as many references as possible.  This is the Mr. Creosote of TZ segments.  But that’s not a bad thing.

Many of the actors were actually in those 1950s movies such as Forbidden Planet, This Island Earth, and Them.  Their character’s names have at least one homage in them. The aliens, their uniforms, the spaceship design and sound effects are all based on those films.  There isn’t a whole lot of room left for a story after that.  But that’s not a bad thing.

It was the last episode of the season and they ended with a hoot.  But it doesn’t give me much to work with.  I could document every reference, but where’s the fun in that?  I didn’t even catch many of them.  The director’s commentary educated me on the more obscure ones.

It might have been more interesting if they had the actors — and their bloody composer — play it more straight.  Filming the segment in B&W would have given it a huge boost.  But why quibble.

So, I will just say it was a fun, light-hearted ending to the 1st season.  And get back to bed at a reasonable hour for a change.

Other Stuff:

  • Classic TZ Legacy:  What the — didn’t you read anything above?
  • Written by the writer of The Trouble with Tribbles.
  • Skipped Segment:  The Last Defender of Camelot.  Pffft.

The Price of a Dime – Norbert Davis (1934)

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On a personal note, I originally bought the dead-tree edition from Amazon.  This 2.8 pound doorstop proved nearly impossible to read, so I had to buy it again for the Kindle just to get through it.  For this amount of money, I might as well have gone to a bookstore. [0]  Learn from my mistake — do not buy the paperback.

Private detective Shaley is idling idly at his desk when he hears screaming from the lobby.  His secretary Sadie is trying to push a “fattish” [1] woman out the door because Shaley said he didn’t want to see anyone this morning.

She was sent here by her brother Bennie Peterson, a bellman [2] at the Grover Hotel.  She says, “He just lost a dime, Mr. Shaley.  And now Mr. Van Bilbo is going to have him arrested.” Seems Bennie had delivered a drink to a room and got a shiny new dime [3] as a tip.  As he was flipping it in the air like George Raft [4], he dropped it in front of a door.  Van Bilbo caught him and accused him of looking through the key hole [5].  Bennie instructed Sadie to have Shaley tell Van Bilbo there was no funny business.  She tells him where Bennie is hiding out under the cryptic Ben Kenobiesque alias of Bennie Smith.

After she leaves, he tells Sadie he is going to get Bennie for involving him in a blackmail caper.  About a week ago, a woman was killed at the Grover.  Sadie says the woman’s name was “Big Cee” just like my ex-girlfriend.  She had been mixed up with some gangsters.  She had come out here to hide, but it didn’t work.  The newspaper [6] said Van Bilbo, a movie director, had heard the story and paid for her funeral.

Shaley drives his “battered Chrysler [7] roadster” to the studio to see Van Bilbo.  “There was a group of Indians [8] standing in a silent motionless circle in front of the big iron gate.”  Through the gate, he sees his friend Mandy working and says “I need you today, oh Mandy.” [9]  He let’s Shaley in and after the chauffeur with the “swarthily dark face” [11] beats it, they are alone.

Shaley asks, “Why all the war-whoops [8] outside?”  Mandy explains they are extras.  He tried to tell them there was no work today and to go to Wigwam Depot, “but they just grunt at you.”  He then suddenly asks Mandy who “Big Cee” was.  Mandy says, “Her name was Rosa Lee once.  She worked with the old man on some serials back in ’09 or TO”. [12]  That seems to satisfy Shaley who turns to leave.  Mandy is less satisfied and tells him not to target Van Bilbo or “I’ll kill you deader than hell!”

Shaley finds a phone-booth [13] and checks in with Sadie.  She says the no–neck no-name woman from that morning called to thank Shaley for getting Bennie that job in Phoenix. She told a caller where he could find Bennie for the interview as bellhops are so uniquely skilled that they sometimes must be recruited out of state.

Shaley high-tails it to Bennie’s hide-out.  A “fat [1] man in a pink shirt” tells him which room.  He uses a skeleton key [14] to quietly enter his room.  Seeing Bennie has been stabbed several times, he backs out and heads over to see the no–waist no-name woman at her job at Zeke’s Tamales.

He sneaks in the back door.  The Chef, “a short, fat [1] man with a round face” knows him.  Laughably, Shaley says no-ankles no-name’s “brother has been murdered . . . and you’ll have to tell her.”  Shaley heads back to the studio to see Van Bilbo.

He confronts Van Bilbo with a story that he admittedly half makes up on the fly.  Big Cee ran a joint (i.e. brothel) in Cleveland.  Some local “politicos” closed her down because f*ing the citizens is their job.  She came to California with “some affidavits” and planned to shake them down.  “But they didn’t want to play that way.  They sent a guy after her, and he biffed her.”  And afterward, I guess, he killed her.  Big Cee had given the affidavits to Van Bilbo, and Bennie knew it.  There is some Hollywood gun play.  Yada, yada . . . the swarthy guy did it.

After the last story, this one was short, breezy fun.

Post-Post:

  • [0] Old brick buildings where they used to sell books and over-priced coffee.
  • [1] Gravitationally-challenged.
  • [2] Luggage-management person.
  • [3] Still only $1.83 in 2017, cheapskate!
  • [4] Gangster archetype from 1930s movies.
  • [5] Old-fashioned security device used to secure a door before hackers could open every door in the hotel at once.
  • [6] Archaic delivery system for 24-hour old news.
  • [7] I flagged this, but imagine my surprise to learn that they are still in business.
  • [8] Native Americans
  • [9] 1970’s song by Barry Manilow [10]
  • [10] 1970’s singer
  • [11] A person of indeterminate color, although I think we can rule one out.
  • [12] I don’t know what TO means and can’t even guess at a reasonable typo.
  • [13]  Literally a booth with a phone inside.  Crazy, man.
  • [14]  A key capable of opening many locks.
  • First published in the April 1934 edition of Black Mask.
  • Also that month:  Jane Goodall born.

Science Fiction Theatre – The World Below (08/27/55)

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Once again Truman Bradley opens up with more dubious facts than a month of Ancient Aliens.  He says there are two great undiscovered areas — “outer space and the 4/5ths of our own planet lying under the earth’s great oceans.  Beneath the sea is a hidden region more than twice the size of all the nations of the earth put together.”  Well, wouldn’t it be five times the size of all the nations then?  I guess he has a partial out with Antarctica not being a nation, but I’m no cartographer.

Bradley also demonstrates how fake boobs are made.

Using a mammalian balloon, he then shows us how a man would explode in the vacuum of space due to the air in his body.  Well, probably not unless he took a big breath and held it.  Conversely, he says deep sea creatures explode when brought to the surface.  I’m doubtful of that too.  Maybe if they have sealed air sacs, but that seems unlikely or they’d be launching out of the water like Polaris Missiles.

To explore the ocean at record depths, the Turner Institute of Oceanography converted a “surface combat submarine” to withstand the pressure 1,000 fathoms down.  The 4-man crew is on a “photographic mission” apparently thinking deep-dive submarines have big ol’ windows.  And BTW, how is a submarine a surface combatant?  Maybe that’s how Indy survived.

Truman Bradley tells us, “On April 2nd, Captain John Forester began his first vacation in 5 years.  He disconnected the doorbell to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed.”  He has a fiendishly clever visitor at the front door who outfoxes him by knocking.  Turns out it is his old pal Buck Naked Weaver. He has come to recruit Forester to captain an experimental sub named The Loon.  Wait, what?  That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.  Sailors are a superstitious lot.  There’s a reason there was never a ship named after Louis Leakey; although it was probably because he was a paleontologist.

This is Jean’s factory setting.  BTW, pictures 1 and 3 are different shots.

Twenty-6 days later The Loon is cruising at 1,000 fathoms.  When they go down to 1,200 fathoms, they lose radio contact.  On a sonar scope, we see 3 blips — escape pods — rising to the surface.  Later on the news, Forester’s wife Jean is relieved to see her husband survived.  Weaver tells a reporter that at 1,800 fathoms, they found a city and Forester backs him up.  So, they are famous and in the newspaper.

Forester and his wife turn on the TV to see the film they took of the city beneath the sea. The film shows a rippling skyline.  However, when the Navy goes down to salvage The Loon, they see no city.  Forester and Weaver will be charged with perpetrating a hoax that got a man killed.

Forester is called into a Board of Inquiry where they grill him about a possible hoax.  It isn’t The Caine Mutiny but it is pretty good for SFT. The next day Weaver shows up with an explanation of what happened. They did not see a city, but it was an honest mistake.  Shockingly, the explanation does not strike me as complete baloney.

One of the more tolerable episodes, but that ain’t saying much.

Etc:

Outer Limits – Feasibility Study (07/11/97)

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Sometimes I will accuse an episode of setting up a story that is never told.  Usually, my complaint is because the other story would have been an improvement over the bile left on the screen. Tonight, however, I am happy to see the alt-plot take off on a motorcycle not to be seen again for 40 minutes.

Sarah Hayward brings her boyfriend Nicky home to meet her father.  Pop is not crazy about the motorcycle-riding hooligan.  The good news for him and the viewers is that they will never see each other again.  What could have been another angsty teen drama with a sprinkling of sci-fi is pared down to its SF essence.  Mr. Hayward convinces Nicky to slow down their relationship and sends him away.  While calling Sarah from a phone booth, Nicky sees Sarah’s neighborhood scooped up from the earth like Jouret IV  [1] and get transported away.

Hayward is returning from a run when he is caught by his neighbor Pat Dooley.  Despite being neighbors for three years, they’ve never spoken.  Within seconds, Dooley is blabbing his life story about his wife’s death from cervical cancer, and asking for a ride to work, thus illustrating why people don’t talk to their neighbors.  Hayward gets the last laugh by transporting Dooley to work after not taking a shower because the utilities are off.

Another set of strangers neighbors is having breakfast.  Dickish attorney Daniel Tenzer is established as a tool early on.  He pictures himself a tough-guy because of his prowess in the court-room.  Their phones are out and his too-good-for-him wife suggests he ask to use a neighbor’s. He says then they will think he owes them a favor.

Dooley and Hayward begun their drive to the city.  They soon encounter a shimmering barrier across the road which blocks their passage, however, they are thrilled to now be living in a gated community. The camera pulls back to show the neighborhood now sits atop a spire on an alien world.  Tenzer pulls up in his Mercedes and is literally about as useful as a lawyer in an apocalypse.  I’ll say this for him, though, he is smarter than Dooley who gets handsy with the barrier and is sucked into it.

Sarah sneaks out of the house in a fabulous ensemble topped off by a beret.  In the woods, she is grabbed by a blue alien with barnacles on his head.  She screams and he says, “I know I look horrible.  It is the disease.”  He is an alien, so what is the symptom that he thinks scared her?  The blue skin, the webbed fingers, the cthulhu tentacles, the barnacles?  He is an alien, for crying out loud — how does he think she knows what his “normal” is?  To his credit, though, he did not scream at the sight of her nose-ring.

He says most of his people are dead, that it is something in the air.  He explains that they are both are in the same predicament.  They have been brought to this moon by the Triunes. He says “you have machines that protect you” as he fondles her headphones.  He asks for her help.  Boy, is he in the wrong neighborhood.

Like Maple Street when the titular monsters were due, the neighbors meet in the street.  Hayward suggests pooling their resources, but they aren’t crazy about that idea. When the neighborhood security guard shows him Sarah’s backpack, he asks for help finding her.  Again, no takers.  Tenzer says they have their own families to worry about.

Blue-Boy leads Sarah through a breach in the barrier.  Although an earlier shot suggested they should be falling to their death, they arrive in a rocky desert wasteland.  Scattered around are his dead, fully barnacled “people”, all in red garments. Strangely, there are 5-foot towers of rocks with red material tied around them.  At first I thought his people had turned into these stones, but no.  It took me a minute to figure out that they must be elaborately stacked cairns with a ribbon of the deceased’s clothing.  It amazes me that most TV is such crap that a little thing like this is awesome.  Kudos on leaving this for the viewer to figure out!

But then the tone-deafness returns.  Blue-Boy again refers to Sarah’s Walkman as a “medical device” that will protect her.  That’s a fun idea, although, why the hell would he jump to that conclusion?  But the boneheadedness is in the branding.  The unit clearly says WALKMAN [2], which was a product made by Sony.  OK, TV likes to hide brand names unless they are getting paid for it, so Sony is replaced by fake company MD. Blue-Boy calls it a medical device — MD.  Hunh?  Is that a coincidence?  Did he call it a medical device because it said MD?  How did this gargoyle who never saw a human before learn to read English?  Plus, when he referenced it earlier, he motioned toward her headset — the unit with the MD logo was hidden on her belt.  I am utterly baffled by this.

While Hayward and the security guard are looking for Sarah, they find Dooley is back from the other side.  He says the aliens examined him, but he seems to have not gotten the standard anal probe.  He tells Hayward that they are no longer on earth and seems oddly chipper about it.  Hayward hears Sarah’s voice and goes through the barrier to find her.  Unfortunately, he is diverted to the examination room where he gets the full Dooley.

The aliens tell him the neighborhood was brought to their world to test human’s feasibility as slaves.  The aliens assure him humans “will enjoy the usual perquisites of slavery” which I guess are room and board; although interstellar slaves miss out on the fabulous sea cruise. If humans are the first species to survive their atmosphere, the aliens will come pick up a few million more.  This group is the Swedish Meatballs at the end of the CostCo aisle.

Hayward proposes to his neighbors that they all infect themselves so the aliens believe humans can’t survive their atmosphere, thus saving the earth.  He takes his daughter’s hand to infect himself.  The preacher takes Hayward’s other hand.  Another man takes his free hand and Mrs. Tenzen joins in probably just to get away from her husband.  It’s a nice kumbaya visual, but unless this disease conducts like lightning, and about that fast, I don’t think this daisy-chain approach would work.

Meanwhile back on earth, Nicky returns to look at the big hole in the ground.  I wonder if he is silently thanking Hayward for saving him, you know, from marriage.

Another fine episode.

Other:

  • [1] Although The Best of Both Worlds is two of the best hours in TV history, I was always disappointed we never got to see the Borg city-scooping in that episode or any other.  And what was the point of it, anyway?  The Borg wanted bodies and technology.  How did scooping up a city fulfill those needs?  Maybe they will show us on Star Trek: Discovery, but I won’t see it — I will NEVER pay for TV other than VHS, DVDs, Blu-Rays, cable, NetFlix, Amazon Prime and Hulu.  NEVER, I tells ya!
  • [2] Does anyone under 25 even know what these were?  They were like early iPods . . . does anyone under 30 even know what they were?  They played cassettes . . . does anyone even know what they were?  They were like tiny reel-to-reels . . . does anyone even know . . . feeling old now.  BTW, this is the 2nd 1997 Outer Limits episode where a cute blonde girl listening to rock & roll was expected to save the world.  Is there anything they can’t do?
  • There is a preacher in the episode played by an actor named French Tickner.  I wonder if he ever had a nickname.