Turning to the Bard

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I like comedy.

Given a choice, I would prefer to watch a sitcom on TV than any other kind of show. Being a writer myself, I appreciate the well–crafted dialogue that is the hallmark of truly great comedy. But if the show is not a sitcom and it tries to do a crossover, it usually falls flat.

That was the problem for Twilight Zone on a few occasions. It was designed to be a dramatic program, and its comedy episodes generally did not work. A case in point is "The Bard," which first aired 55 years ago tomorrow night.

It was written by series creator Rod Serling and served as the finale for the fourth season. It was also Twilight Zone's final one–hour episode; the fifth season marked a return to the half–hour format. As I have mentioned on this blog, there were some excellent episodes in the one–hour format. "The Bard" was not one of them.

Jack Weston, whose work I usually enjoy, was a streetcar conductor–turned–aspiring TV screenwriter whose efforts kept getting rejected by TV executives. He was a shameless — and talentless — self–promoter who jumped at a chance to write a screenplay about black magic — even though he had no knowledge of black magic.

To make up for this deficiency he went to a bookstore in search of a book about black magic — and one literally flew off the shelves. It was loaded with spells, and Weston took it home with him. With the help of the book, Weston conjured up William Shakespeare (John Williams), who offered his services, and Weston took him up on it, intending to pass off Shakespeare's work as his own.

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Well, that was the plot in a nutshell.

Weston's play was accepted for production on a weekly TV playhouse program, and he was invited to appear on a program that featured all the hottest names in the industry.

But there were problems afoot, chiefly with Shakespeare, who resented not receiving credit for his considerable contributions. He agreed to stay until he had had a chance to assess the performances of the cast in a rehearsal the next day.

One of those cast members was Burt Reynolds.

Reynolds is known today as a movie actor, but in 1963 his experience was exclusively in television. His was not a new face — but it was a somewhat familiar face, having appeared in nearly two dozen TV series, almost always as a guest star.

He was a guest star in "The Bard," playing — fittingly — an actor named Rocky Rhodes, and he kept making noises about his "motivation."

It was all too much for Shakespeare, who decked Rhodes with a right cross and walked out on the rehearsal.

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That was a bit awkward for Weston, who had already been given his next assignment — an extensive program on American history. To meet it he conjured up several figures from American history — folks like Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Pocahontas and others.

A Nose for News

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One of the things I enjoy doing when I watch episodes of the Twilight Zone is to look for people who were famous at the time or became famous later on.

Robert Redford, for example, appeared on the Twilight Zone early in his career. So did Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall.

But not all the guest stars were up–and–comers. Some were already famous, like Burgess Meredith, who didn't appear in the most episodes, but the ones he was in have a tendency to be lumped among the series' best.

With the exception of the one that first aired on this day in 1963, "Printer's Devil."

Meredith appeared in four episodes in all, and "Printer's Devil" was the only one made in the one–hour format of the fourth season. Is that why fans routinely rate it fourth of the four episodes Meredith made? And is that why it seldom comes close to making the top 10 episodes on anyone's list? Was it too long?

I don't know, but I do know that I have always liked "Printer's Devil." It was a rare example of a Twilight Zone episode that benefited from the one–hour format. The episodes that were made in that season frequently seemed to have filler in them that added little to the story but helped to fill the time. There wasn't much filler in "Printer's Devil." That isn't a surprise, given that Charles Beaumont wrote it.

Maybe I like it because it is about journalism, and it had nice little touches that few people outside the Fourth Estate would recognize. Like, for example, the source of the title of the episode.

Do you know what a printer's devil is (or was)? A printer's devil was a printer's apprentice, sort of a go–fer. Some pretty noteworthy fellows got their starts as printer's devils when they were young — Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain.

I don't know the exact origin of the name. No one knows for certain. There are several theories about that, none of which has ever been established. But that really isn't important. You already know enough to appreciate the play on words.

Meredith played Mr. Smith, a linotype operator/reporter who came along at just the moment when the editor of a struggling newspaper was about to commit suicide — and saved the day with his scoops. All he had to do was start setting the type and whatever he wrote came to pass. That's a pretty neat talent, one that could come in handy at a newspaper, especially in 1963 when technology was not as advanced as it is today.

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"Some people have a green thumb. I have a green nose," Smith said. "Wherever there is news, this old nose smells it."

The editor told him there wasn't much news to sniff out, and Smith replied, "There will be."

No one in the story had figured out the truth yet, but you may have — Smith was the devil. (OK, the title of the episode sort of gave that one away, huh?) And he engineered a series of scoops that tripled the newspaper's circulation in a couple of weeks.

The competitor was hurting and made an offer for the resurgent paper, but it was rejected.

Then the competitor's building burned down. It was the biggest scoop yet.

And the editor's girlfriend was suspicious.

The editor had figured out Mr. Smith's true identity and had signed a document that turned over his soul in exchange for Smith's continued services.

After he fired three shots at Smith from point–blank range and did no damage whatsoever.

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Now, I have never been in a situation like that, even after many years in newsrooms, but I would guess that the editor figured if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Not an injudicious conclusion.

But it wasn't very good for his love life.

I don't want to spoil the finish if you haven't seen it. I will say that I thought it could have been a lot better — but that took nothing away from the quality of the rest of the episode.

And Robert Sterling deserved praise for his performance as the editor.

It's a Small World

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

A Flying Dutchman of the Space Age

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In 1993, "Groundhog Day" was a truly clever premise for a movie.

But it wasn't truly original.

With apologies to Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, I would submit for your approval the suggestion that Twilight Zone explored the concept of re–living something repeatedly less than a week after Groundhog Day in 1963 — 55 years ago today, in fact — in the episode "Death Ship."

It wasn't as clear in "Death Ship" as it was in "Groundhog Day." But that is how Twilight Zone operated. Viewers frequently had to wait until the very end to understand what had been going on.

A three–man crew (Jack Klugman, Ross Martin and Fred Beir) was on a mission to explore space in search of planets to analyze and determine if they could be colonized. In the course of carrying out this mission, the astronauts spotted a shining light from a planet. The possibility existed that the planet might be more than merely capable of supporting life; it might actually be doing so, and the astronauts decided to land on the planet and investigate.

On the surface of the planet, they discovered a crashed spaceship had been responsible for the sparkle they had seen from space. The spaceship looked remarkably like their own. Upon closer inspection, they determined that it was a ship from Earth — and they decided to enter it and assess the damage.

When they did so, they had a revelation — the ship was theirs, and their lifeless bodies were inside.

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It goes without saying that this was an unnerving experience, and the crewmen were understandably shaken by it. But the commander (Klugman) kept his head and insisted that there had to be a logical explanation for what they had seen.

The commander concluded that they had bent time in such a way as to peek into the future. He reasoned that they could escape their fate by remaining on the planet and not going back into space, thus averting the entire crash. The crewmen grudgingly accepted the commander's version of events.

At that point, Beir's character was transported to a country lane on Earth where he met up with people from his past who were known to be dead. He ran to the home in which he and his wife had lived, but he found no one there. All he found was a telegram reporting his death.

Klugman brought him back and told him he had been having an hallucination.

Martin was having an hallucination of his own. In his hallucination, he was reunited with his wife and daughter, who had been dead for some time. Klugman intervened in that one as well.

But his theory of what had happened had changed. He believed the planet was inhabited by creatures with telepathic power but little else they could use against intruders. To avoid being colonized, they were using this power to plant terrifying visions in the minds of the astronauts to discourage them from recommending the planet for colonization.

He also believed that they should return to space. That would break the spell. So that is what they did — except when they returned to the planet, they still found the wreckage of the spaceship there. The crew members were convinced that they were dead, but Klugman wasn't, and he insisted that they would repeat the procedure as many times as it took for him to figure out the truth.

Thus the similarity between "Death Ship" and "Groundhog Day." in "Groundhog Day," the audience actually saw Bill Murray re–living the same day, and the humor (and, at times, poignance) was in the variations. In "Death Ship," the repetition was not seen, only anticipated — and there was nothing funny about it.

The first time I saw this episode, I had high hopes for it when I saw in the credits that the story was written by Richard Matheson, and he didn't let me down.

Not only was Matheson the writer responsible for "Death Ship," but he also wrote more than a dozen of the Twilight Zone's top episodes. Most were from the original series although Matheson did write an episode in the mid–'80s series reboot as well as some work for the 1983 Twilight Zone movie.

Whenever I see Matheson's name in the credits — for Twilight Zone or anything else — I am always assured of the quality of what I am about to see. His stories never had wasteful filler, which was frequently a problem for the one–hour episodes of the Twilight Zone in its fourth season.

If you are a fan of the Twilight Zone, you are sure to recognize some of Matheson's episodes. Probably the most famous was "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," in which a young William Shatner played a man recovering from a nervous breakdown who believed he saw a monster tampering with the wing of the airplane in which he was traveling.

My favorite Matheson–penned episode was "A World of His Own," the finale of the first season.

A Stop in Peaceful Valley

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"You've seen them. Little towns, tucked away far from the main roads. You've seen them, but have you thought about them? What do the people in these places do? Why do they stay? Philip Redfield never thought about them. If his dog hadn't gone after the cat, he would have driven through Peaceful Valley and put it out of his mind forever. But he can't do that now because, whether he knows it or not, his friend's shortcut has led him right into the capital of the Twilight Zone."

Opening narration

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In the episode of Twilight Zone that was first shown on this night in 1963, "Valley of the Shadow," a reporter (Ed Nelson) got lost and found himself in a small, out–of–the–way town called Peaceful Valley just as his car was about to run out of gas. When he stopped to get more fuel, his dog jumped from the car to chase a cat that was being held by a little girl. The girl pulled out a palm–sized remote control–like device (many years before such devices existed), pointed it at the dog and made him disappear — and the odyssey began.

A good reporter is always in an inquisitive mood, and an already–suspicious Nelson began nosing around Peaceful Valley. What he found only made him more suspicious. The town's hotel supposedly had no rooms available yet all the keys still hung on the wall. The restaurant was closed. The residents of the town were not friendly.

Well, on that last one there, I can say, having grown up in a small town, that is not terribly unusual. Small–town folks are often suspicious of outsiders and their reasons for being there.

Consequently Nelson didn't receive a lot of cooperation from the town's residents. Well, there was one — a pretty young woman (Natalie Trundy) — who seemed to want to tell him more than she could.

But she didn't.

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What he learned about the town and its strange powers he learned from the town's elders.

Perhaps the most important thing he learned was that the gadget the little girl used was a device that could manipulate atoms. It could make things disappear, disassemble and then reassemble people, animals and things. It was a limitless supplier of food, clothing, all the necessities of life. Everyone in this little town seemed to have one.

This device could also heal and even raise from the dead.

When Nelson tried to escape the town, his car collided with an invisible wall, and his dog was thrown from the car and killed. A rather dazed Nelson was led away from the wreckage by onlookers who thought he should be examined by a doctor, but one of the onlookers stayed behind. He pulled out his device and aimed it at the dog, and the animal was instantly revived.

The device also had incredible potential to eliminate human suffering.

To demonstrate this, the mayor of the town stabbed one of his associates in the chest with a letter opener, then calmly aimed the device at the victim while Nelson watched. The blood and wound disappeared as if nothing had happened.

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Nelson couldn't believe the town refused to share this technology with a world that sorely needed it.

The town's elders argued that if the outside world obtained the technology, it would not be used for good but would be exploited for evil purposes. They said this technology had been given to them by a "great man of science" who came from some distant planet, and they would not share it until "men learn the ways of peace."

Nelson could not be allowed to leave so the initial plan was to execute him. But if they did that would they be any better than the outside world, resorting to violence to achieve a goal? They modified their sentence, giving him the option of remaining in Peaceful Valley for the rest of his life — and he chose that over execution.

But he yearned for freedom, and he and Trundy made a break for it one evening. He stopped at the town hall to use the technology to build a handgun, then grabbed the book containing all the equations for the technology so he could share it with the outside world. In breaking into the box that contained the book, though, he triggered an alarm, summoning the elders, who tried to stop him and were shot.

Then he and Trundy left the town, but once they were outside the city limits, he looked at the book — only to find blank pages. The next thing he knew he was back at the town hall and the elders were alive and well. They told him it had all been a test, and he had proven what they expected — that the first use of the technology by an outsider would be for violent purposes. He would have to be eliminated.

But the elimination did not take the form he expected. In the blink of an eye, he was back at the gas station where the story began.

And perhaps that was the way it should be. The elders had explained that the core of the technology was based on time reversal. Perhaps that is what they did to Nelson — reversed time. That would certainly be preferable to ending his life.

But was all that had gone before a dream or reality? At the end of the episode, Nelson and the viewers saw Trundy with what appeared to be tears in her eyes. That strongly implied that it had been real.

This episode was part of the Syfy Channel's annual New Year's Eve Twilight Zone marathon recently. Inclusion in that marathon can be misleading; there were only 18 hour–long episodes of the Twilight Zone, and few are seen in syndication.

If you do get the chance to see this one, though, watch for a pre–Star Trek James Doohan (known to Trekkies as "Scotty"). He played the father of that little girl.

A Second Chance at an Imperfect Life

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The original Twilight Zone ran for five seasons, and episodes were 30 minutes long in four of them. But in the fourth season, episodes ran for a full hour.

In September 1962 Twilight Zone was replaced on the CBS schedule by an hour–long program — then Twilight Zone was brought back in midseason to replace the replacement. For the remainder of the 1962–63 season, episodes would have to be one hour in length to fill the time slot, which did not sit well with the writers. Creator Rod Serling said the series was "the perfect half–hour show" and warned that the quality would be adversely affected by the expansion.

The quality of most of the episodes was hurt, but there were exceptions. Such an exception could be found in the episode that heralded the program's return to the prime time schedule 55 years ago tonight, "In His Image" starring an up–and–coming George Grizzard who had appeared on Twilight Zone a few years earlier.

Grizzard's character was returning to his hometown, accompanied by his fiancée. They had known each other for only four days; nevertheless they fell in love and became engaged, and Grizzard was eager to show her his hometown.

The only problem — and it was a doozy — was that nothing was like he remembered — not people, not places, not anything.

His home was occupied by someone he had never seen before, and the occupant claimed to have lived there for several years. People he thought he knew turned out to be names from the distant past; some were dead, including one person with whom he believed he had shared a meal less than a week earlier. The local college where he believed he was employed had never existed.

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Then when he went in search of his parents' graves, he found a different couple buried there.

In an inexplicable homicidal rage, Grizzard ran off his girlfriend — and then he was struck by a car while he stood in the road. That was when he began to discover the truth about himself. He wasn't killed, but the impact caused a cut in his arm that wasn't bleeding. When he peeled back the skin, he found wires and rods, not flesh and bone.

Concluding that the name on the tombstone held the key to his problems, Grizzard looked up the name in the phone book and went to the address he found there. Its occupant looked exactly like him.

That person held the answers that Grizzard was looking for. He had created Grizzard a week earlier, giving him all the qualities that he believed he lacked and sending him out into the world. He had also given him all of his memories of his hometown, but those memories were quite dated. Some of the people were deceased. Some of the buildings no longer existed. Some of the people and places had never existed at all.

The two got into a fight. One survived and left in search of the girlfriend. Turned out that the one who survived was the creator; his creation lay lifeless in his abandoned home.

The creator picked up with the girlfriend where the creation left off — and that may be what I liked best about this episode. For the most part the episode lived up to Twilight Zone's reputation for creepy stories — but at the last minute it became a tale about redemption, loneliness and second chances.

I have always felt that the longer format allowed this story to successfully pull off the old switcheroo. I didn't think it could be done as effectively in 30 minutes.

Perhaps the one false note in the episode came at the beginning when Grizzard encountered — and eventually killed — an old woman who wanted to save his soul. Its relevance to the rest of the story was never clearly established. I got the sense that it was largely there to fill time, the writers not being accustomed to writing hour–long scripts, but it did manage to set the table for the primary character's homicidal urges, perhaps an unintended consequence of the creator's attempts to duplicate human life.

OK, some of the shifts in the story were a little too implausible, but it had the twist ending that Twilight Zone fans had come to expect.

"There may be easier ways to self–improvement," Serling said in his closing narration, "but sometimes it happens that the shortest distance between two points is a crooked line — through the Twilight Zone."

Turning the Page

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"Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity."

Horace Mann

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My parents were both teachers. My mother taught first grade, and my father (who is still living) taught on the college level. Early in their marriage they were missionaries in Africa.

Neither of them ever spoke to me of whether they felt they had left their marks on their students — although I am sure that they, like all other teachers, must have wondered about that from time to time. I can understand that because I, too, have been a teacher, and I must confess that there have been times when I have wondered if I have influenced my students.

Well, I know I influenced some of my students but not all — and most teachers probably aren't satisfied with a batting average that low.

But there are so many variables in education. Sometimes it seems to me that teachers have to be happy with what they can get. It's a lesson most of us learned in Little League. You'd like to bat 1.000, but you can't. Sometimes the best you can hope for is to make contact with the ball. Maybe our problem was we learned that lesson in the context of the baseball diamond, not the classroom.

In the episode of Twilight Zone that premiered on this night in 1962, "The Changing of the Guard," an aging literature professor at a boys school (Donald Pleasence) pondered that very question after being informed that he had been terminated — although he was told to regard it as retirement, not termination, since he was well past the traditional retirement age.

Later that evening, after contemplating his years in the classroom and the countless boys who had paraded through it, the professor concluded that he had wasted his life, that he had left no mark on the young men he had tried to teach.

Despondent, he went out into the cold of Christmas Eve night with the intention of killing himself near a statue of educator Horace Mann in the campus courtyard. But just as he was about to pull the trigger, he was interrupted by the ringing of a phantom bell and he was inextricably drawn into his classroom — where he encountered the ghosts of some of his students.

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One by one they told him how he had influenced them. Some had shown great heroism or courage when they died. Others had sacrificed themselves in pursuit of knowledge that could benefit future generations.

And the professor was persuaded that, while he may not have won one of Horace Mann's victories for humanity, he had helped others to do so and could, therefore, claim to share those victories.

It was kind of an interesting twist on the theme of "It's a Wonderful Life." The protagonist comes to realize the influence he has had on the lives of others. In that movie, of course, George Bailey discovered how different life would have been if he had not been there. In the episode of Twilight Zone that aired 55 years ago tonight, the professor discovered the difference his presence had made. It didn't imply a world in which he hadn't existed at all.

Nor did it suggest that the course of history would have been changed if he had not been there, only that he made his contribution. I guess that is the one thing we all crave — the reassurance that the efforts of our lives have not been in vain.

The title of the episode is a reminder to me of all the changes in life. Sometimes we're prepared for them, sometimes we are not.

A change is happening in my own life this weekend that makes this anniversary particularly poignant for me. I think I am prepared for it, but I guess I won't know until it happens. My father, a retired professor, is moving into a senior living facility, and I will be helping him with his move. I remember, as a teenager, helping him move my grandmother (his mother who was also a teacher when she was a young woman) into such a facility. It turned out to be the last stop for her, but she functioned independently for another year or so, driving her car and spending time with her friends, until her health would no longer permit it.

I expect this will be the last stop for my father, too, but there really is no reason he cannot continue to function as he has for awhile yet. He is in good health. He still drives. He enjoys the company of friends — and, even though he has made new friends in the place where he is moving, he continues to see the friends who have been part of his life as long as I can remember — and I am sure he will continue to see them, to have dinner with them, to attend the symphony with them.

At some point that will end. Everything does. And when it does, it will simply be another changing of the guard.

Earning Your Wings

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"What's the signal for 'I'm sorry'?"

Agnes (Carol Burnett)

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I really like Twilight Zone. There aren't many episodes I won't watch. In fact I have seen most of them multiple times.

I like Carol Burnett, too. There aren't many things that she has done in her career that I won't watch.

But you can't combine the two — although the powers that be tried to do that very thing 55 years ago tonight in an episode called "Cavender Is Coming." Such a combination is definitely an acquired taste, much like Richard Nixon's favorite food (cottage cheese with ketchup).

For my money it was the worst of the Twilight Zone episodes. It just wasn't a comedy series — although it did have its amusing moments. "Cavender Is Coming" always struck me as a slapstick kind of episode, not really a typical Twilight Zone episode.

It wasn't an isolated case, either. There were a few other Twilight Zone episodes that were silly and slapstick in nature as well, but "Cavender Is Coming" didn't straddle the line the way the others did. It went well past it.

In my mind, that is probably Twilight Zone's greatest shortcoming. From time to time, Twilight Zone's writers felt compelled to veer into comedy — and always fell flat on their faces in the attempt, too.

Anyway ...

I presume, gentle reader, that you have seen "It's a Wonderful Life," the Christmas classic starring Jimmy Stewart. Well, "Cavender Is Coming" followed a similar premise. An angel named Cavender — played by Jesse White, who was probably better known to people of my generation as the Maytag repairman even though he had a rather extensive career in movies and TV programs before he started making TV commercials — was trying to earn his wings. His assignment was to help a clumsy woman (Burnett) improve her life in 24 hours. The thing was that, while her life wasn't perfect, she wasn't unhappy.

Cavender had had other opportunities to earn his wings, but he had failed to do so, and it was taking longer with him than it had with any other angel. Consequently, failure to achieve this objective would result in demotion.

But a good performance would cause his superiors (one of whom was John Fiedler, who always played mousy parts but nevertheless was in several of the best movies of his time, including "12 Angry Men," "True Grit" and "The Odd Couple") to reconsider his case.

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As you can probably imagine, this put Cavender under some pressure. Things weren't helped by Burnett's response, which was (to put it mildly) skeptical.

But he persuaded her that he was the real deal through a few "miracles" that were predicated on the belief that wealth equals happiness. That was an easy assumption to make, given that Burnett was unemployed and behind on her rent when he was given his assignment.

Burnett disabused him of that after he had transformed her into a wealthy socialite living in a mansion. He arranged for her to have a big party with lots of debutantes and celebrities — all the things he thought should make her happy.

One of the guests at the party was future Beverly Hillbillies star Donna Douglas, who was making her second appearance on Twilight Zone. She had a bit part as a debutante in this episode; she was the star (although someone else spoke her lines) in "The Eye of the Beholder" in the previous season.

Douglas spoke her own lines in "Cavender Is Coming," but she only had a couple of them.

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It is a shame, really, that Twilight Zone made the episode so slapstick because it had a pretty good message about happiness that kind of got lost.

The bewildered and exasperated Cavender, desperate to get his wings, demanded, "Don't you want to be happy?" after Burnett told him she didn't want to live in the mansion and throw parties for debutantes.

"You don't understand me," she replied. "I was happy. I want it the way it was."

Cavender couldn't understand that. "The way it was? Unstable, unresolved and unemployed?"

Burnett smiled and nodded. "Disconnected, discombooberated and behind in my rent. But that's for me."

In other words, the happiest people aren't the richest people. They're just happy with what they have — and that makes them rich, as Cavender conceded near the end of the episode.

"You are the richest woman I know," Cavender told her. "You have an abundance of wealth. And it seems that I've had to travel a very long distance to find out that cash and contentment aren't necessarily synonymous."

That is probably true although it may also be true that, as Mrs. Howell once said on Gilligan's Island, "Whoever says money can't buy happiness doesn't know where to shop."

Power to the Little People

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"All right, my little friends, comes now the new age, the age of — the age of Peter Craig. Let us begin to build the statue again. Let us commence to begin."

Peter Craig (Joe Maross)

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Whether one believes in God or not, I suppose we have all wondered at some time in our lives, however fleetingly, what we might have done differently if we had been the Creator. Such musing is rooted in a desire for power. Ultimate power.

Perhaps we don't go quite that far in our musing. Perhaps we fantasize about being the one giving the orders instead of the one taking the orders. While it may be more muted in that scenario, it's still about power, though, isn't it?

Peter Craig (Joe Maross) didn't like being bossed around and not–so–secretly wished to be the boss. In the episode of Twilight Zone that premiered on this night in 1962, "The Little People," he was the No. 2 man in a two–astronaut crew in a spaceship exploring the heavens. As the No. 2 guy, clearly, he took his orders from the No. 1 guy, played by Claude Akins.

And he didn't like it.

When the episode began, the astronauts were stranded on some planet that viewers were told was millions of miles from Earth. They were in what appeared to be a canyon with no vegetation in sight. But the planet had oxygen, and it was quite warm with two suns blazing during the day.

The ship needed some repairs, and Akins set about the task. Craig, meanwhile, went on hikes that kept him away all day.

Akins became suspicious when he never saw Craig drinking from his canteen.

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When pressed about it, Craig confessed. He had found a source of water, a little stream; as Akins pursued the matter, he learned that Craig had discovered a race of tiny people. They had built a tiny city on the banks of that "stream," which was a river to them.

Craig said he had been communicating with the little people. He didn't know their language, and they didn't know his, but they had managed to communicate through a form of language that appeared to be primarily mathematical.

The little people had been quite accommodating — mostly out of fear. Whenever angered Craig stomped on something in the little people's world, causing considerable carnage while devoting no more effort to it than one would give to stepping on an ant hill.

The little people were terrified, and they did everything they could to appease this "giant." They built a huge (in their estimation) statue of Craig overnight. He was becoming a god — their god through whose benevolence their destinies were determined.

And he didn't want to leave this planet where he was revered as a god — even though Akins had repaired the spaceship and was preparing to leave.

Craig told Akins to go — but, as far as he was concerned, Craig had no intention of leaving. Probably an ordinary–sized man on Earth, Craig was so big he could blot out the sun for the little people. He could cast them into eternal darkness with only his shadow.

The power was entirely his.

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Until two space travelers arrived. They were as big compared to Craig as Craig had been to the little people. One reached down to pick up a ranting Craig and crushed him to death. Then the travelers left.

The little people, liberated by Craig's death, immediately tore down the statue they had built to Craig.

The ending always makes me think of something Florence Eldridge said to Fredric March in "Inherit the Wind" when he told her that a victory in that court case would be "a monument to God that would last a thousand years."

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"Every man has to build his own monument. You can't do it for them. If you do, it becomes your monument. Not theirs. And they'll topple it the minute they find a flaw in it."

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Where Nobody Knows Your Name

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"Either I am crazy or somebody's going to an awful lot of trouble to blot me out."

David (Richard Long)

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I enjoy Twilight Zone episodes for many reasons, much the way I like the works of Stephen King.

I enjoy good entertainment, and one of the ways I like to be entertained is to see or read something that sends a little chill down my spine. Folks from my parents' generation called it the heebie jeebies, which is still probably the best way to describe it.

It's probably what made the "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th" movies so popular — although I have always preferred thrillers that had more going for them than merely shower slasher attacks that shamelessly borrowed the famous shower scene from "Psycho."

Twilight Zone specialized in heebie jeebies. It didn't always achieve heebie jeebie status — neither does King, for that matter — but it came close on many occasions if it didn't hit the bull's eye.

The episode that first aired on this night in 1962, "Person or Persons Unknown," was one of the episodes that hit the bull's eye.

Richard Long, a familiar TV actor from those days (in addition to his many appearances on other programs, he appeared in another Twilight Zone episode two years later), played a character who woke up one morning after a night of heavy partying to discover that no one — not his wife, his mother, his friends, his colleagues at work — knew who he was.

The opening narration observed that he had "just lost his most valuable possession" — his identity. There was no evidence of his existence anywhere.

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For sure that will send a chill down your spine.

And as that fact dawned on him, things began to get worse. He was taken into custody and eventually taken to an asylum.

I suppose it is the kind of thing that most people think will never happen to them, and I'll grant you that it seems pretty far–fetched. But it's been my experience that most people never think really terrible things will happen to them, that they only happen to other people — until something terrible does happen to them or someone they know.

And make no mistake about it — losing your identity is a terrible thing.

Most people in 1962 were probably like Long's character, giving little thought to their identities, simply assuming that when they woke up in the morning everything would be just as it had been when they went to sleep the night before. They might have further assumed that a person like Long was suffering from amnesia, but the only problem with that was that he knew who he was. It was the other people who didn't know who he was.

A person's identity has become a much bigger topic of conversation than it was 55 years ago. Identity theft is a thriving business in the criminal world, and people are becoming increasingly proactive about protecting their identities.

Identity theft may have been a legal issue in 1962 as well, but without things like the personal computer and the internet, it is hard to imagine how it could have been pulled off. Of course, that is 21st–century thinking being applied to the mid–20th century.

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Anyway, Dave Gurney devoutly believed that he could find evidence of his true identity. He believed someone was trying to blot out his existence, and he believed that he could find the one detail that would support his claim. He thought he had found the proof of his identity — a photo of him with his wife from a roll of film he had taken in to be developed. He went to pick up the picture, and the photo he got did, indeed, show him with his wife, the one who now claimed she did not know him.

But when he showed the photo to the psychiatrist who had been treating him and the police who were looking for him, it only showed him. His wife was no longer in the picture.

He slumped to the ground in despair, and in the next second he was seen back in his bedroom. It appeared that the whole thing had been a dream. This time his wife recognized him — but he didn't recognize her.

The nightmare continued. It just took a different turn.

Incidentally, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling apparently liked this theme so much that he revisited it in an hour–long format the following year.

A Bewildering Disappearance

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The episode of the Twilight Zone that first aired on this night in 1962, "Little Girl Lost," tapped into that fear that every parent must experience when a child is missing — and, while I have never been a parent, I can imagine both that every parent must have had this experience at one time or another and that it must be a moment of indescribable terror and panic.

For, it seems to me, there are few things on this planet that are more vulnerable than a small child. It is a parent's responsibility to protect that child. The inability to do so must be the source of a sense of helplessness that I can't imagine.

The majority of the time, I suppose, the child is only missing temporarily — in a crowded place for a few minutes, maybe an hour, but long enough for a parent to imagine all kinds of things and none of them good.

But there are parents whose children go missing — and are never heard from again.

Somewhere in between were the parents in that episode of the Twilight Zone. Their young daughter was missing — but they could hear her whimpering and her plaintive cries for "Daddy!"

It began as cries in the night that every parent has heard when a child awakens from a bad dream or wants a drink of water. The parents were roused from their sleep by her cries, and the father went into her room, fully expecting to see her in bed — as any parent surely would.

But Tina wasn't in her bed. Her father presumed that she had fallen out of bed, but she couldn't be seen. Then he figured she had rolled under the bed, but she wasn't there, either.

The only thing the father could think to do was to call a friend who was a physicist (played by Charles Aidman, who appeared in another Twilight Zone episode as well as episodes of many other TV series). He agreed to come over right away.

The family had a pet dog who had been in the back yard barking hysterically. The father went to let him in; the dog ran under the little girl's bed and disappeared. Like the girl, only the sounds of the dog barking could be heard.

After the friend arrived, the men moved the bed so they could have an unobstructed view of the floor and the wall. The friend explored the area and discovered some kind of opening in the wall.

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And then he used a piece of chalk to mark on the wall the points where the opening appeared to be.

The father reached his hand through the opening in hopes that his daughter would come to it, but then he seemed to fall in. His friend told him to stay where he was and call for the girl and the dog. They came to him, and the friend pulled them out.

Turned out they were pulled out just as the opening was closing.

You know, it's a lot handier having a physicist for a friend than I thought — especially one who will come to your house in the middle of the night.

Literary scholar Camille Paglia has called the story the "first great script" of the original Twilight Zone series. And I agree it was good, but I don't know if I would go that far.

I must admit, though, that I was surprised that the episode was not remade when Twilight Zone had its second incarnation in the mid–1980s. Several original episodes were remade with varying degrees of success, and I thought "Little Girl Lost" would be a natural.

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But it was not remade.

Still it would be hard to improve on the performances of the parents. Their reactions rang so true. I could see myself, faced with an incomprehensible riddle and a missing daughter, reacting as they did — confused, frustrated, anxious.

Yes, I agree with Paglia that it was well written. But the series' first great script? Hmmm.

Hidden Faces

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"I've always believed that we have two faces, one that we wear and the other that we keep hidden. The problem has always been to find some method to make people reveal their hidden faces."

Fitzgerald Fortune (Barry Morse)

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Have you ever wished that merely by being near a commonplace item a person could be compelled to reveal what was really lurking in his/her heart and mind?

Wouldn't it be nice to know what makes the people around you tick?

Well, I guess it would be nice — sometimes. But sometimes I could see where it wouldn't be so nice.

In the episode of Twilight Zone that first aired on this night in 1962, "A Piano in the House," Barry Morse played a cruel, bullying theater critic who came across a player piano while searching for a birthday gift for his much younger wife (played by Joan Hackett). His wife had been showing an interest in learning to play the piano, and Morse's character had concluded — for his own reasons — that the ideal gift would be a piano that played itself.

He thought she had no musical talent and later explained to her how thoughtful he had been, saving her the time and effort of taking lessons only to learn that she had no talent for that — or any other — instrument.

(A short lesson in the history of player pianos is in order at this point. Player pianos were quite popular in the early 20th century, but production waned in the 1920s with the advent of the radio and the development of recorded music. The stock market crash nearly wiped out the industry, but the interest of collectors during the 1950s sparked a revival and production resumed in the 1960s — so player pianos made a rather timely topic for Twilight Zone in 1962.

(Personally my experience with player pianos is limited to one that was a fixture of a popular pizza joint in Little Rock when I was a boy. I loved to go there — but I must confess it had little if anything to do with the player piano and just about everything to do with the thin crust pizza that was served there. On the other hand, I can't hear a player piano today without thinking of that pizza joint.)

The proprietor of the store was a rather grumpy old man — until he and Morse tried to operate the player piano, and it began playing a sentimental piece. Immediately, the store owner's demeanor changed. He became a sentimental softie, even giving Morse a discount on the price of the piano because it was a gift.

But when the music stopped, he became his old grouchy self. When Morse asked him if he got sentimental about anything other than birthdays, he sniffed, "Birthdays? They're a stupid waste of time and money."

Morse began to suspect that there was something unusual about this player piano, but he had to be sure. After the piano was delivered to the house, he began playing another roll of music — and it transformed his rather glum butler (Cyril Delevanti, who appeared in two other Twilight Zone episodes) into a cheery, laughing sort who claimed he wasn't bothered by his employer's abusive behavior. To the contrary, he said, he could hardly keep from laughing out loud when Morse flew into a rage — "one of your tantrums," he called it (an appropriate word, given how the rest of the episode played out).

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Again, when the music stopped, he abruptly returned to normal.

Morse's final test was on his wife. For her, he chose a frantic sounding piece that elicited her confession that she hated him. "I was a stupid child when I married you," she said. "I thought you were a great man. But you aren't. You're just a sadistic fiend."

Morse was ready to use the player piano on the unsuspecting guests who were coming over for his wife's birthday party.

The first guest to arrive was an actor (Don Durant) who had been having an affair with Morse's wife. Morse got him to confess to that thanks to the music roll he selected. When the music stopped, the actor apologized if he had been indiscreet, but Esther insisted that it was all right, that she had never been comfortable with deceiving her husband, who in turn insisted that she was incapable of deceiving him, that he had known she was having an affair but didn't know the details until that moment.

When the guests were assembled, Morse turned the player piano on them, starting with Marge, a character played by Muriel Landers who was only 5–foot–2 and weighed 200 pounds. She made a career for herself in comedy, largely poking fun at her size. In her 40s at the time this episode was made, she died of a stroke almost exactly 15 years after it first aired.

For Marge, Morse played a music roll of Claude Debussy's "Clair de lune," and she told him that her name was not Marge but Tina and that she was a little girl who loved to dance. After persuading her to demonstrate her dancing abilities, Morse coerced her into revealing her innermost desire — to be a tiny snowflake melting in the hand of a man who loved her. The song ended with the guests laughing, and Marge sat down, humiliated.

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Things turned on Morse then.

His wife put in a roll that played a tune that evoked thoughts of childhood, of childish (not childlike, which is a different thing) behavior. And Morse confessed to behaving badly to everyone in the room. He was jealous of their talent because he had none. They all made their way out of the house as Morse yelled that he didn't want them to leave.

In the end the final insult came when the butler returned to the room and a chastened Morse told him, "Don't laugh at me."

"I'm not laughing," the butler replied. "You're not funny anymore."

I thought it was a good, albeit flawed, episode. The party guests, including Esther and her secret lover, came off as worse than the villain of the episode — at least as far as I was concerned — when they abandoned him upon learning of the inner child he had tried to restrain but ultimately was powerless against.

Until that was revealed, Morse could be seen as cruel and selfish, an abuser, and it is generally seen as defensible to punish a character like that because such a character is responsible for his/her actions. Such a character chose to behave as he/she did.

But by revealing his powerlessness to restrain his inner child, Morse became human again in the eyes of the viewer, and the ones who abandoned him became judgmental and hateful — not the sympathetic victims they had been.

It seems to me there was a comment to be made about human nature. If Twilight Zone tried to make that case 55 years ago tonight, though, it failed.

Oh, well, I suppose there really is only so much that can be said in 30 minutes.

A Way of Looking at Things

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"All kids play those games, and the minute they stop they begin to grow old. It's almost as though playing Kick the Can keeps them young."

Charles (Ernest Truex)

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I suppose everyone — at some point and for some length of time, however brief — wishes it was possible to turn back the hands of time.

The writers for the Twilight Zone seemed to spend much of their creative energy focusing on this very concept. One of the most interesting twists on that theme aired on this night in 1962. Called "Kick the Can," the story was about the residents of a senior citizens' home. One of those residents (Ernest Truex) was convinced that the fountain of youth could be found in children's games like Kick the Can, and he persuaded most of the residents of the home that he was right.

The idea was inspired by watching the neighborhood children playing Kick the Can on summer evenings.

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"Maybe there are people who stay young," Truex's character mused. "Maybe they know a secret that they keep from the rest of us. Maybe the fountain of youth isn't a fountain at all. Maybe it's a way of looking at things, a way of thinking."

One night he set out to find out. He assembled most of the residents in the home for a nocturnal game of Kick the Can. He insisted that he knew there was magic in the world, and most of them went along with him, perhaps more out of curiosity than conviction that he was right.

They had to get past the night nurse at the front desk so they lit some firecrackers and tossed them outside. The sound drew the nurse away, and she helpfully called out for the superintendent, leaving an unobstructed path to the outdoors.

Once outside the old folks began playing Kick the Can. And, lo and behold, Charles' "magic" really did exist. They were all transformed into the children they had once been. Older adults can't be magically transformed into children. Can they?

Obviously it was mere musing on the part of Twilight Zone's writer, George Clayton Johnson, who went on to co–write "Logan's Run," the novel upon which the movie of the same name was based.

Johnson also penned a few other episodes of the Twilight Zone — one of which, "Nothing in the Dark," I wrote about recently.

Man's Best Friend

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The episode of the Twilight Zone that first aired on this night in 1962, "The Hunt," was a tribute to man's best friend, the dog.

In typical Twilight Zone fashion, you couldn't tell that right off. You saw the dog (it was a hound dog) and you saw his owner, an old mountain man played by Arthur Hunnicutt, but you couldn't tell where the story would take you.

(I guess I have a soft spot in my heart for movies and TV episodes that include Hunnicutt. He was born about 70 miles west of the small Arkansas town in which I grew up — and he went to college in my hometown.)

Initially, the viewers were introduced to the old man, his wife of half a century and his dog. His wife didn't like having the dog in the cabin, but she put up with it because the dog had saved the old man's life once, and they were virtually inseparable.

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They were also frequent hunting companions, and that was where they were bound after eating their supper. They went coon hunting, a frequent nocturnal pastime that usually resulted in at least one trophy to take home. But on this occasion the dog dived into the water after a raccoon, and the old man dived in after him. The only creature to emerge from the water was the raccoon.

The next morning the old man and the dog woke up on the bank of the pond, and the old man worried about what he would tell his wife — and what she would say to him. When they returned home, though, they found that no one could see or hear them. While trying to get to the bottom of things, the old man and the dog found themselves on an unfamiliar road that took them past a gate that was tended by a man who told them that beyond the gate was the afterlife.

But when the old man tried to bring his dog in with him, the gatekeeper refused, saying there was an afterlife for dogs just down the road. The old man wouldn't go in without the dog, though, and they proceeded along the road.

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They encountered a young man — and learned from him that the first gate had actually been the gate to hell.

"They don't never give up," the young man said. "Always tryin' to get folks in there right down to the last minute."

He explained that dogs weren't allowed in for fear they would warn their masters. "And he woulda," the young man said of the hound dog, "time he got a whiff of that brimstone."

And then came the punch line: "A man will walk right into hell with both eyes open — but even the devil can't fool a dog."

I think I have mentioned here before that my mother and grandmother were fans of The Waltons. It was created by Earl Hamner Jr., who also wrote "The Hunt," which predated The Waltons by a decade or so.

Anyone with any familiarity with The Waltons could see numerous elements in "The Hunt" that would resurface on The Waltons.

Many were subtle, but perhaps the most obvious was the way the old mountain couple called each other "Old Man" and "Old Woman" in much the way Will Geer and Ellen Corby did as the Walton family's patriarch and matriarch.

And the dirt roads the old man and his dog walked were straight out of Walton's Mountain.

Hamner died last year at the age of 92.

The Many Faces of Death

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"An old woman living in a nightmare; an old woman who has fought a thousand battles with death and always won. Now she's faced with a grim decision — whether or not to open a door. And in some strange and frightening way, she knows that this seemingly ordinary door leads to the Twilight Zone."

Opening narration

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No subject fascinates people so much as the topic of death. For centuries, man has been asking the same questions and is really no closer to definitively answering them today than ever.

We may think we know what happens when we die, but no one who is living can say for sure what happens — and none who have died have returned to tell us what lies beyond. There is a lot of speculation, but there is no real evidence. Well, nothing that would hold up in court.

On this night in 1962, Twilight Zone presented one of its philosophically themed episodes, "Nothing in the Dark," that sought to make a profound statement on the subject. It starred Gladys Cooper, in the first of her three Twilight Zone appearances, as an elderly woman who had been on the alert for Mr. Death all her life.

She was living in a condemned building when a young man (Robert Redford in one of his early television roles) was shot in front of her door and was laying in the snow, bleeding. Cooper's character believed he was Mr. Death, but he persuaded her that he was not; she reluctantly opened her door and helped him inside.

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She cared for him as best she could, but he kept telling her that he needed a doctor. She said she couldn't call anyone because she had no telephone, and she couldn't let anyone in for fear she might be letting Mr. Death enter her home.

They talked, and she told him how she had been on the alert for Mr. Death all her life, ever since seeing him sit down next to a woman on a bus, then getting up and exiting the bus. Not long after, it was discovered that the woman was dead. She had seen him frequently since.

But, Redford protested, if she knew what he looked like, she had the advantage on him. She rejected that. Mr. Death was always changing his appearance, she said. She could trust no one. Lately she had been tormented by people who came to her door claiming to be from the city, telling her the building was condemned and she would have to move. She was certain they had been Mr. Death.

"Oh, he's clever," she told Redford.

She wondered why she could always spot him, but no one else could. She concluded that it was because the end of her life was approaching. Even when, as a child, I saw this episode for the first time, I thought that was kind of a whimsical, poetic way of looking at it — and not likely to be the way it really was or could be. I have known many people who have died, and none mentioned (to me, anyway) seeing ominous figures hanging around.

When a contractor from the city came by to try to get her to vacate her apartment before the wrecking crew arrived and the woman realized he wasn't Mr. Death after all, she soon concluded that Redford was Mr. Death. He had tricked her.

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He conceded the fact, but he told her that he had to make her understand that death wasn't such a terrible thing.

Transitions are difficult things sometimes — most of the time, in fact, even if they turn out to be good things in the long run — and death is the biggest transition humans face because everything about it is unknown. That was what bothered Gladys Cooper's character the most.

But Redford reassured her that it was not what she had feared, and he led her from her apartment, presumably guiding her in the direction of her destination.

Death was a subject the Twilight Zone explored on many occasions, and it reached many conclusions. Sometimes they contradicted each other. But an element of the episode that first aired on this night 55 years ago may ultimately prove to be correct. Redford was one of many actors who played Death — or some offshoot thereof. As in Gladys Cooper's experience, they were all different — old, young, male, female, you name it.

Sometimes in the Twilight Zone Death was the devil. That opens up an entirely different conversation, but that concept fits neatly with the general premise of this episode — that Mr. Death changed his appearance — and writings about death and the devil that have been part of the culture for hundreds of years.

After all, William Shakespeare wrote that "the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape." Gladys Cooper didn't necessarily find any of Mr. Death's shapes pleasing, but perhaps that is the subject for another conversation as well.

This episode is generally highly regarded by most devoted Twilight Zone fans. I guess I'm the exception. Maybe it is because of my thoughts on the premise of the episode, but I never really cared for it much.

And I consider myself a devoted Twilight Zone fan.