It's probably hard for 21st–century viewers to imagine Robert Duvall playing a timid character, but that is exactly what he did in the episode of Twilight Zone that premiered on this night in 1963, "Miniature."
It was still early in Duvall's career. He had made his movie debut the year before in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and he had made guest appearances on TV series for a few years. Duvall hadn't really been typecast yet, I suppose, unless it was as odd characters, and his character in "Miniature" certainly was odd.
He lived with a domineering mother, and he had just lost his job. I'm sure you know the type — thoroughly bewildered by the world around him, a misfit. You've probably seen such a person in movies and on TV shows hundreds of times and encountered them in your daily life on countless occasions. Perhaps you are such a person.
I would call Duvall's character zombielike, but he didn't fit the zombie image that we have today. Zombies weren't really new in 1963 — they had existed in literature for a long time — but they were sort of new to the screen, both large and small. At least, they were still evolving, but they probably didn't achieve the form we know today until "Night of the Living Dead" was released a few years later.
Duvall's character didn't stagger around in a kind of daze, but he might as well have. He was totally lacking in emotion no matter what happened. He lost his job; his boss told him that he didn't fit in. No response, which proved his boss' point. He was never unpleasant; he was always polite, but he showed no signs of being an ordinary guy. He never smiled or interacted with his co–workers. He was a square peg in a round hole.
He came home to his mother and her smothering ways. Again no response. He was never unpleasant to her, either. In fact, he showed no emotion of any kind.
Such a person usually has someone who tries to help in some way. In Duvall's case it was his sister (Barbara Barrie). She wanted to help him find a nice girl and get married — and move out of his mother's house. But he stayed where he was.
That didn't mean he didn't crave an escape — and he found a suitably unlikely one in the Twilight Zone.
Actually, it was in a museum he frequented, not in search of permanent escape so much as temporary solitude. There he found a dollhouse with the tiny figure of a woman (Claire Griswold) seated behind a piano. The figure seemed to be moving, and music could be heard.
But a guard assured him that the figure couldn't possibly have moved. It was carved out of wood.
He returned to the museum the next day and made a beeline for the dollhouse. But everything was changed. The woman was no longer seated behind the piano. She was upstairs, preparing for an evening out with a male figure. Duvall watched the scene play out as the two went out the door and disappeared from view.
Duvall kept returning to the museum and even began talking to the figure. She never responded to him, but he kept talking. And he observed.
His family became suspicious, and his sister followed him one day to see what he was doing. She found him at the dollhouse. When she got him away from the museum, she persuaded him to go on a blind date, but it didn't work out.
The museum guard was willing to overlook Duvall's idiosyncratic behavior, but then one day Duvall saw the male figure being abusive to the female figure, and he shattered the glass that separated him from the dollhouse. That was too much, and Duvall was taken in for medical treatment. His psychiatrist (William Windom, who also made his movie debut in "To Kill a Mockingbird"), tried to convince him that he had been having hallucinations, but Duvall insisted that wasn't true.
Eventually, though, Duvall's character concluded that the way to be released would be to give the psychiatrist what he wanted so he did what he had to do to convince the doctor that he was cured.
But what Duvall wanted was to go back to the museum, which he did at his first opportunity.
He hid in the museum until it closed, then he came out from hiding and went straight to the dollhouse.
By that time, his family had figured out what was going on, and they went to the museum with the psychiatrist in search of Duvall. But they never found him.
The guard did, but he didn't say anything — because he saw Duvall in the dollhouse with the female he had tried to defend, and he knew no one would believe him.
It was perhaps the most moving episode in Twilight Zone's five–season run — and a great example of Duvall's remarkable acting range.
