This one is based on a fairly well known stock scam, but maybe it was fresh in 1957. Since the synopsis gives it away, it is really up to the performances and surprise ending to carry the episode — and they do.

Jack Klugman and EG Marshall are drones in an insurance company.  After 17 years, they are still sitting at the same desks they started at.

One morning, Marshall gets a letter from a J. Cristiani marked “personal.”  In the letter, Mr. Cristiani claims to have supernatural powers and want to share the fruits of his powers with Marshall, a complete stranger.  Even the Obama press corp would question something this fishy.

Cristiani predicts the outcome of a local political race, favoring the underdog.  Marshall believes the letter to be some sleazy plot by the candidate, and really who could say a politician was above any sleazy trick?  But the predicted candidate does prevail.

Another letter arrives predicting the winner of a championship fight.  Cristiani again favors the underdog and is proven correct.

Having squandered the opportunity on the first 2 predictions, Marshall places bets based on the next 3 letters and wins every time.  Klugman tries to convince him that it is just a lucky run, but EG Marshall is convinced that Cristiani can see the future.

The next letter suggests that Marshall might be interested in kicking a few bucks back to the oracle.  Since, he is up $1,000 at this point, it seems reasonable.  In exchange, Cristiani says he will provide a stock market tip and which will return Marshall’s money ten-fold.  So Marshall writes him a $200 check (misspelling his name, for no reason I can detect).

Seeing the fool-proof opportunity for a major score, Marshall makes a big stock purchase on margin backed with bonds he has “borrowed” from work.  He is not 100% confident, though, because in the next scene, we hear him reading back a suicide note he has prepared just in case the stock takes a dive.

Klugman is astounded at how far Marshall has extended himself, helpfully calling him a “poor, stupid slob.”  Marshall has a bottle labeled POISON in his coat pocket just in case.  When the stock market closes, Marshall is stunned to learn that he has made $140,000.

Klugman wants to track down Cristiani, but the Postal Inspector tells him that he has been put in the slammer for mail fraud.  Cristiani had sent out thousands of letters to strangers offering to make them rich (since the letters were handwritten, this was quite an undertaking).  Half of the letters would predict A is the winner, and half would predict B as the winner.  The winners would then get letters again predicting A or B as the winner in the next contest.  And so one until a small group of consistent winners could be hit up for a commission.

Marshall just got lucky.  And now that he has big money (at least in 1957 dollars) and is relaxing on a yacht, I think he will be getting lucky quite a bit.

Meanwhile, Klugman is forced to share an apartment with a childhood friend who was asked to remove himself from his place of residence; that request came from his wife.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  No survivors.
• E.G. Marshall was last seen in A Death in the Family.
• There is a strange bit of business when Marshall is placing his stock order.  Klugman takes a paper bag from his desk and carries it to a door marked MEN.  So is he eating lunch in the Men’s Room?  Is that a men-only lunchroom?
• Why is Marshall translucent when pictured aboard the yacht?

Rosemary Harris and William Shatner are boxing up the possessions of their cousin Julia who just died.  Julia died alone, never married, and Harris wonders if she ever dreamed of leaving the room and escaping her loneliness.

That opens the door for Shatner to tell her story.  It all begins with a glass eye.  Actually, it ends with a glass eye, but that is enough to launch his tale.

Julia (Jessica Tandy) was an aged, decrepit spinster, which in the fifties meant she was 30 and unmarried.  Her only social engagement is taking a local neighbor boy to the music hall.  The insufferable brat goes with her to a ventriloquist act where she is entranced by the ventriloquist Max Collodi.

She asks the brat twice if he thinks Collodi could be Italian.  I don’t know what that meant in the fifties.  She immediately buys another ticket to return alone to see the show again that night.  Now obsessed, she quits her job and begins following him to other theaters like the world’s first Deadhead.

Finally she gains the confidence to try to meet Collodi.  He resists her, saying that he never gives interviews.  She counters, like any good Match.com customer and sends him a photo that is 10 years old.  She wears him down to where he agrees to meet her.  Under certain conditions.

He will only promise her 5 minutes in a dimly-lit room — hey, that’s my line!  She accepts his conditions and nervously gets her self dolled up to meet Max Collodi.  She knocks and Collodi calls for her to enter.  They have a short chat, then Harris sees that her allotted time is just about up.  But she can’t resist just touching his hand.

This leads to one of the great reveals in TV history.  The dummy is actually a Vertically-Challenged American, and Max Colloid is merely a mannequin.  I’ll admit that this caught even me off-guard, but then I hadn’t ready any spoilery blogs.  The mannequin falls over and she runs away in horror, inexplicably scooping up an eyeball as a souvenir.

She kept the eye for the rest of her life as a reminder of her one great love.  Shatner says Collodi went on to be a clown in a small travelling circus.  We cut to him driving a horse-draw wagon, sporting an eye-patch.

The patch really makes no sense as it was the mannequin that lost the glass eye. Maybe the short story explains this.  Other sites claim this is a tribute in honor of “Max” but that doesn’t really makes sense either.

No matter, this is one of the greats.

  The Post-Post:

• Rosemary Harris played Aunt May in the Maguire Spidermans.  And William Shatner, c’mon . . .
• AHP Deathwatch:  Pretty lively group.  Rosemary Harris, Patricia Hitchcock, Paul Playdon and, of course, “The Shat” are still kickin’.
• [Update] Coincidentally, I was just reading an article about Disney’s animated Pinocchio and learned the source of Collodi’s name — Carlos Collodi was the author of The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Bellefontaine enters the train station as a siren whoops in the background.  In the office, another man is warming himself next to a pot-belly stove.  Bellefontaine tries to start a conversation, but the other man — Jones — doesn’t seemed interested.

The clerk in the station tells him the siren is coming from the Home for the Criminally Insane.  They had one go over the wall today.

Bellefontaine observes Jones’ tattered clothes, and the way he muses about the criminally insane as he fondles a fireplace poker.  He concludes that Jones might just be the escapee.  In a panic, he goes to the restroom and loads a pistol that he was carrying in his bag.

In the second act, Jones begins ruminating on the possibility that Bellefontaine is the escaped lunatic.

And that’s when he developed his drinking problem.

There are lots of voice-overs as we hear each man’s rationale for believing the other is the escapee.  I’m not sure if it helps the story that we know neither of the men is the escapee, but maybe there is no other way the story could be told.

It is just a very dull slog. Bellefontaine gives a good performance, but the episode’s strength is that unnerving siren that periodically whoops in the background.

The titular danger here is being bored to death.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch: Only bit-player David Armstrong seems to be among the living.
• Jones was Danny Noonan’s father in Caddyshack.
• Last episode of Season 2.

Barbie Hallem is pulling a Zou Bisou Bisou, making herself the center of attention at a proper conservative 50’s party where all the men are wearing ties and the dames have not a tattoo to be seen.

For a straight-laced house party (and episode of a 50 year old TV show), Barbie’s dance is very seductive.  She is swinging them hips and showing off some skin in that spaghetti — or at least linguine — strapped little number.  But, everyone seems to be enjoying her display, smoking cigarettes, drinking cocktails, snapping fingers, clapping along, laughing.

All except the chick on the top-right.  She is immediately identifiable as the heavy in this piece — alone, self-absorbed, jealous.  The strange thing is, after this obvious bit of wordless exposition, that’s it for her.  She is never seen again.

Barbie begins dancing with one of the men, then orders him to go fix her a Horse’s Neck. While he obediently fetches her drink, she goes out on the balcony and swaps spit with an older man (an action I encourage in young blonde floozies).

When her dancing partner finds her with the drink, he asks why she does things like that.  She very reasonably explains, “I did it because I wanted to.”  Despite being 1:00 in the morning, Barbie decides she wants to go to the mountains to see a cabin which she recently inherited.  Her boy-toy tags along.  When he complains about her driving, she ditches him and drives off.

Unfortunate composition as the visor makes her head look flat.

She pulls up at Ed Mungo’s Cabins & Food and orders a black coffee.  Ed tells her the other customers there have just come off the mountain where they have been searching for his brother Benny, who killed a girl; and her little dog, too.  Which would explain why they are all packing rifles.

When she arrives at the cabin, she finds a man (Vic Morrow) trespassing there.  Quite the dapper host, he is eating a can of beans opened at the wrong end, and offers her a generic beer.  After taking a swig, she turns on the record player and starts dancing again.  When he tells her his name is Benny, she thinks it might be time to leave.

He can tell she is scared and thinks it is because he killed the girl’s dog which, to be fair, had bitten him.  He seems to not know the girl has been murdered.  When Ed shows up there is a confrontation when Barbie tells Benny that Ed actually killed the girl.

Benny and Ed get into one of the best fights I’ve ever seen on TV.  The hits look real, the sounds are not quite the usual fake slaps, they take some good falls — really good stuff.

There is a nice twist which might have played out better had TV not been so restrained in the 1950s. Benny is clearly intended to be mentally challenged — in the bar, Ed refers to him not being a boy “in most ways,” and he doesn’t seem to know what is going on with his brother or the girl; plus, he is named Benny.  But his condition is so subtly implied that it is very easy to miss.

The audience makes certain assumptions based on believing Benny to have all his marbles.  This ends up undermining the ending.  However, it still ends up being a nice story.

What really carries the episode, though, is Barbara Cook as Barbie Hellam.  She is attractive, but not classically beautiful, and not the standard Hitchcock blonde babe. However she is something much more that the sum of her parts.  When she is dancing at the party, or even just driving in the car, she is absolutely smoking.

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  Barbara Cook is hanging in there at 87.  She had no IMDb acting credits after 1962, but was a big star on Broadway and singing in cabarets.  In 2011, she was one of the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors.
• Vic Morrow was less fortunate, dying in 1982 when a helicopter crashed on top of him while filming a scene in The Twilight Zone Movie.
• Was the upside down bean can a sign of Benny’s mental issues?