by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” was a
half-hour episode of the Campbell’s SoundStage (that spelling, with a capital letter in the
middle of a compound word, anticipates the nomenclature of computer programs by
at least three decades!) drama anthology from July 17, 1953 called “Something
for an Empty Briefcase,” notable mainly for the identity of the male lead:
James Dean. As I’ve already mentioned in these pages, it seems bizarre to me
that no one has ever sought
to do a full inventory of all of James Dean’s TV appearances, collect them and
make them available in a single package; instead probably some of them have
been totally lost, while others have drifted into the public domain and been
made available piecemeal (this and the 1957 documentary The James Dean Story seem to have been the only Dean items that have made
it to archive.org; virtually everything else that comes up when you search the
site for “James Dean” is rock bands doing tribute songs about him). Dean’s
death at age 24 was a real tragedy, but he did leave behind considerably more work than just
three starring films and it’s a cultural tragedy that it’s been so hard to see
so much of it.
The show is introduced by a narrator that recommends that in
addition to buying Campbell’s soup, you should also buy the book Joe (the Dean
character) purchased to put in his briefcase — and given the heavy-duty
religiosity of the period (this show aired just one year before the U.S.
government, eager to define itself as “God-fearing” in opposition not only to
communism but “Godless Communism,” defaced our coins and currency with “in God
we trust” and defaced the Pledge of Allegiance with “under God” — and yes, I do resent that for all but a few months of my life my
country has told me that I can’t be fully a part of its polity unless I
subscribe to a belief in God, and the monotheistic Abrahamic “sky god,” as Gore
Vidal called it, at that) it’s no surprise that the book turns out to be the
Bible. Directed by Don Medford (whom I’d heard of) based on a script by S. Lee
Pogostin (whom I hadn’t), “Something for an Empty Briefcase” casts Dean as Joe,
a thief recently released from a two-year prison sentence for petty larceny. He
sees a man walking down the street carrying a briefcase, and instantly the
briefcase becomes a symbol for Joe of the kind of non-criminal life he’d rather
lead — only he’s broke (he only has $1.37 to his name) and his old pal Mickey
(Don Hanmer) is trying to get him to do the proverbial “one last job” for their
former criminal boss, Sloane (Robert Middleton, looking surprisingly different
from the way he’d been made up in his role on the right side of the law as the title character in the 1959
Columbia TV pilot The Fat Man).
Desperate to get enough money to buy a briefcase, Joe makes an inept
attempt to hold up Noli (Susan Douglas) — she’s innocent and guileless enough
to believe his story about needing her money for a sick mother — but when a
motorcycle cop (Pete Gumeny) drives by the site of the holdup (a construction
site with a sign reading “Century Construction Company” — I joked that they
build only one building every hundred years) Joe makes it look like he and Noli
are a couple and are just hanging out together (at 2 a.m.!) talking. Joe is
astonished by Noli because she’s literally a totally different sort of person from anyone he’s ever known before —
she’s in New York City to study dance and is willing to live an economically
poor life to make sure she has money for her lessons; when he questions why she
wants such an odd ambition for her life, she calls him a “Philistine.” Later he
comes to her apartment (he got her address when she gave it to the cop that had
stopped them earlier) and she lends him a dictionary until he can buy one on
his own. She also yields to his diffident advances — which makes the story seem
like an eerie presentiment of that case a few years ago in which a woman calmed
down a multiple murderer by reading to him from Rick Warren’s book The
Purpose-Driven Life. Later he wins the money
to buy his briefcase by hustling his friend Mickey at pool (as William K.
Everson pointed out in his book The Detective in Film, pool halls had been identified with movie
criminals ever since D. W. Griffith made what was virtually the first gangster
movie, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, in 1912) and buys not only a briefcase and a dictionary but a Bible as
well, only he’s confronted in his apartment by Sloane, who insists he do the
crime he has planned for that night or else. Joe’s moral dilemma gets even worse when he finds
out that the crime is a series of robberies, and the first one is targeting a
drugstore where Joe and Noli had planned to meet on a date.
Sloane beats the
shit out of Joe to get him to participate in the robberies (hurting him so
badly as to render him pretty useless even if he changed his mind and did join Sloane and Mickey in the crimes!) and then
the two of them abandon him. He and Noli join each other and she nurses him
back to health while they read the Bible together. It’s certainly ironic that
Dean is shown here doing a Biblical allegory two years before he became a movie
star in East of Eden, another
Biblical allegory, and while he’s still unformed as an actor (he alternates
between speaking in a normal tone of voice and adopting the Brando-esque mumble
he used through much of Eden and, less so, in his two subsequent films) one thing that’s immediately
impressive about him is his physical control of his body. Indeed, though it’s
Susan Douglas that’s supposed to be playing a dancer, it’s Dean, with his
extraordinarily fluid movements (his body language gives more of his performance
than either his voice or his gestures), that looks more like one. The other
noteworthy aspect of “Something for an Empty Briefcase” is that it indicates
how at least some of 1950’s TV had genuine intellectual aspirations: it’s a
show that grapples with Big Issues of morality and faith, and while its
presentation of them approaches silliness and sometimes goes over, it’s a
marvelous attempt and way beyond virtually anything being done in TV, especially commercial TV,
today!
