Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi
movie screening (http://sdvsf.org/) was four
episodes of the brilliant, compelling 1963-1965 science-fiction TV series The
Outer Limits, selected by the proprietor
because they were the highest-rated episodes from the series’ first season on
imdb.com — though there was also an odd coincidence in that the first three of
the four shows he ran all featured actors who later in the 1960’s achieved
stardom in TV series in which they played secret agents: Robert Culp, later
Kelly Robinson in I Spy; David
McCallum, later Ilya Kuryakin in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (and my first boyhood Gay crush object, though I didn’t
realize it at the time!); and Martin Landau, later Rollin Hand in Mission:
Impossible. Also, the first two shows
were obvious offtakes on the Frankenstein
premise: scientists attempt to improve the lot of humanity by tweaking with the
human genome, only their experiment goes awry and they’re unable to control the
monster they have created. The first show, “The Architects of Fear,” originally
aired September 30, 1963, dealt with a secret research group and begins, Citizen
Kane-style, with a group of people
watching a movie of people fleeing in terror while the unctuous narrator — the
one listed as “the Control Voice,” actually actor Vic Perrin, who told us at
the beginning of the show that for the next hour “we” were taking control of
your TV set (probably a lot more people sat through the opening narration than
actually stuck around for the show itself!) — announces, “Is this the
day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time for wonder, no time to
ask why is it happening, why is it finally happening. There is time only for
fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray now, or do we merely run now
and pray later? Will there be a later,
or is this the day?” Then the house lights go on and we realize that we have
merely been watching a film-within-the-film, and the people screening it in the
story are a group of scientists who reason that the only way to bring about
world peace is to stage a phony “alien invasion” that the world’s nations will
need to come together to repel. Accordingly they arrange for a fake spacecraft
— actually a real spacecraft, though it’s launched under the guise of a weather
satellite — to fly back to earth bearing one of their number who’s been
surgically altered to look like a monstrous alien. They draw lots to determine
which one will have to undergo the transition — of course when the head of the
group was picking the (un)lucky winner I couldn’t help but joke, “Today’s
MegaSuperLotto jackpot winner is … ”.
The “winner” is Allan Leighton, Ph.D.
(Robert Culp), who’s put through a series of injections, operations and other
medical treatments to remodel him so that he looks like he’s got cream cheese
stuck all over his arms, leading to his final “horrifying” appearance in an
immobile rubber-and-plastic mask that fortunately director Byron Haskin,
showing the same Lewtonian restraint that marked his brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it
depiction of the Martian invaders in his 1953 film of H. G. Wells’ The
War of the Worlds, doesn’t let the young
Conrad Hall’s camera linger too long on. The Outer Limits had an eccentric but often marvelous talent list
behind the cameras as well as in front of them: the show’s overall producer was
Leslie Stevens, who made one of the worst movies of all time — Incubus, a 1966 would-be horror-thriller set in the
California mission country and done entirely in Esperanto, and badly pronounced
Esperanto at that — which makes it mysterious indeed that he could have created
a show this good, which rivals Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone for inspiration and in some ways comes off better
because its episodes were an hour long and therefore left more room for character
development and real emotional identification. One of his assistants was
Lindsley Parsons, Jr. — I’ve never heard of him in any other context but
Lindsley Parsons, Sr. was a
producer and sometime director for Monogram in the 1940’s — but in addition to
talents with cheesy backgrounds like that, they had some people with excellent
credits on their résumés.
The line producer (and sometimes writer) was Joseph
Stefano, who’d written the script for Hitchcock’s Psycho; the directors included Byron Haskin; the
cinematographers included Conrad Hall (though even the episodes he didn’t shoot
have a marvelously atmospheric quality far beyond what most TV shows of the
time were attempting — or what most TV sets of the time were capable of reproducing); and though
Dominic Frontiere’s music contains the words “Production Supervisor,” hinting
that he was hiring other people to write the scores rather than doing it all
himself, the music sounds pretty consistent throughout the episodes and is of a
remarkably high quality, suggesting alien-ness without overusing the theremin
(as so many sci-fi scores of the period did) or trotting in other electronic
effects. Anyway, the “treatments” Professor Culp goes through to make himself
look “alien” couldn’t help but remind me of what Transgender people go through
during gender-reassignment surgery, but the chief intrigue in Meyer Dolinsky’s
script deals with Mrs. Leighton
(Geraldine Brooks), who’s convinced her husband isn’t really “Gwiabout what
happened to him. Needless to say, in the best Frankenstein tradition of man-made monster stories, nothing ends
the way it’s supposed to — or at least anywhere near what the people in charge
of the experiment were hoping for — and that unctuous narrator preaches to us
at the end of the episode, “Scarecrows and magic and other fatal fears do not
bring people closer together. There is no magic substitute for soft caring and
hard work, for self-respect and mutual love. If we can learn this from the
mistake these frightened men made, then their mistake will not have been merely
grotesque; it will have been at least a lesson — a lesson, at last, to be
learned,” before telling us the mysterious “we” are now returning control of
our TV set to “you” until we tune in next week.
••••••••••
The next Outer Limits
episode on the program, “The Sixth Finger,” directed by James Goldstone from a
script by Ellis St. Joseph (it’s nice that the episodes of this series — at
least the ones we were watching — were by just one writer; it’s long been
Mark’s General Field Theory of Cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely
proportional to its number of writers), is another Frankenstein-style tale of a scientific experiment gone horribly
wrong. This time the setting is a Welsh coal-mining town and the central
character is Gwyllim Griffiths (David McCallum), who when we see him is
virtually unrecognizable, given that his hair is tousled and he’s covered in
coal dust (as is his brother, who’s so covered in the stuff at first I thought his character was supposed to
be Black), as the blond cutie-pie from The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He’s got a chip on his shoulder and a The
Corn Is Green-style desire to escape from a
life in the coal mines. His girlfriend Cathy Evans (Jill Haworth) gives him his
chance when she introduces him to a middle-aged man on her route of bread
deliveries: Professor Mathers (Edward Mulhare), who’s invented a process to
speed up evolution and hopefully create the Nietzschean Superman. Mathers tests
Cathy’s blood but decides she’s the wrong “type” for his experiment, but
Gwyllim fits his needs perfectly; he locks Gwyllim into a metal box and
irradiates him with something or other, pushing a control marked “Forwards”
forwards (if you pull it back you go “Backwards” and the evolutionary process
is reversed). He’s already tried this with an experimental ape, who retained
his ape appearance even though he learned simple human tasks like filing
folders in alphabetical order. With Gwyllim, the transformation changes him not
only mentally but physically as
well: at first it just washes off the coal dust, straightens his hair and makes
him look (except for the dark hair) like the David McCallum we know from The
Man from U.N.C.L.E. Then he starts to go
bald as his cranium swells to accommodate the increasing brain power he’s developing
— he can read stacks of books in one night, and when he stumbles upon a book of
musical score paper he deciphers it instantly and the next thing we hear is him
playing that piece (one of the preludes and fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach’s
The Well-Tempered Clavier) on
what at first sounds like a harpsichord but turns out to be a piano. He’s also
developed a psychopathic personality and coolly dismisses Mrs. Ives (Nora
Marlowe), the maidservant who threatens to report him to the villagers, by using
his mental energy to make her heart stop beating, thus chillingly off-handedly
killing her.
By the end of the movie he’s changed appearance so much he looks
like one of the Talosians from “The Cage,” a.k.a. “The Menagerie,” the very
first Star Trek film (originally
rejected but later expanded to a two-part show for the series’ first season),
and like them — and the Krell in Forbidden Planet — Gwyllim is talking about using his huge brain
energy to dispense with a physical body altogether and become pure mental
energy. (If whatever movie theatre that little Welsh coal village had had ever
shown Forbidden Planet, Gwyllim
would have known that was a bad
idea.) The resemblance is probably not a coincidence: Robert H. Justman worked as an assistant director on 20
Outer Limits episode and then
repeated that function on the first few Star Trek episodes, and I suspect it was he who brought Gene
Roddenberry that makeup. In order to do that, Gwyllim needs another exposure in
Dr. Mathers’ evolution machine, and he needs Cathy to run it for him, only in a
plot twist we could see coming a mile away Cathy, who just wants her normal
boyfriend back, pulls the lever “Backwards” again and Gwyllim reverts all the
way back to a rather hirsute cave person before she pushes the lever forwards
just enough to turn him into the normal David McCallum. (This is also
reminiscent of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, published in 1961 — two years before this show was
filmed — and itself filmed as Charly
in 1968, which is likewise about an experiment designed to make someone
super-intelligent that goes horribly wrong.) The Outer Limits, like The Twilight Zone (and Tales of Tomorrow, a precursor to The Twilight Zone which didn’t achieve its successor’s cult reputation
mainly because it was aired live and all that survives are lousy-quality
kinescopes), is proof that there was
intelligent science fiction on TV before Star Trek — even though the show got cancelled after only two
seasons (The Twilight Zone lasted
five and the original Star Trek
three, and there were massive hues and cries when their cancellations were
announced), though it was rebooted for three seasons in the 1990’s and some of
the scripts were remakes of the original episodes. What was unique about Star
Trek was that it was the first serious
sci-fi show on TV that had continuing characters, rather than an anthology show
with different characters (and actors) in each episode.
••••••••••
The two other Outer
Limits episodes shown at last
night’s Vintage Sci-Fi screening (http://sdvsf.org/)
included one that immediately followed “The Sixth Finger” on the show’s
original schedule, but some probably long-forgotten show pre-empted it in the
intervening week. It was called “The Man Who Was Never Born” and was the third
show in a row run at the screening which starred an actor who later became
famous on TV playing a secret agent: Martin Landau from the original cast of Mission:
Impossible (and from Alfred
Hitchcock’s North by Northwest before that — so Joseph Stefano wasn’t the only person involved with The
Outer Limits who had a Hitchcock
connection — in which, at least .as I read the film, he played the Gay lover of
James Mason’s Bisexual villain; at the end, when Landau’s character tries to
warn Mason’s that his girlfriend, played by Eva Marie Saint, has betrayed him —
which she has — Mason drawls out, “Leonard! I do believe you’re jealous!”). “The Man Who Was Never Born” starts out with
astronaut Captain Joseph Reardon (Karl Held — “Held” is the German word for
“hero,” incidentally) going out for a flight that is apparently bound for a
Mars orbit, only he crosses a time barrier and lands on Earth in 2148. No, he
doesn’t see a wreckage of the Statue of Liberty on a beach, but he does see a creature with rock-like skin (something like
the Thing in the Fantastic Four comics and movies) ambling around. The creature is named Andro (and
it’s pretty obvious writer Anthony Lawrence picked that name to make him a
representative of the entire human race of his time), and he explains to
Reardon that Earth has become a post-apocalyptic wasteland not from nuclear war, the usual popular apocalypse in
1960’s science fiction, but from a genetically engineered disease inadvertently
created by a scientist named Bertram Cabot, Jr.
The few remaining humans (all
of whom presumably look like Andro, though we never see any others) have
memorized the details of Cabot’s life, including the fact that his mother was
named Noelle — of course Andro savors the irony of a woman named for the
Christmas holiday giving birth to a son who, instead of redeeming humanity,
destroyed it. Reardon offers to take Andro back with him to the Earth of 1963,
reasoning that they can intervene to make sure Bertram Cabot, Jr. either never
exists at all or never embarks on that horrendous experiment that will kill off
most of the human race and leave the few survivors looking like animate rocks.
Only it turns out that Earth of 1963 is too far back in time to intervene:
Andro, who like the radio version of the Shadow can hypnotize people into
viewing him differently — though instead of making himself appear invisible he
makes people think he looks like the ordinary humanoid Martin Landau — has
moved into a boarding house (shades of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Teenagers from Outer Space) and Noelle is a fellow roomer there. Noelle is
expecting to marry her boyfriend, Bertram Cabot, Sr. that weekend while he’s on leave from the Army,
and he’s going to settle in that town and work for the local university once
his Army hitch ends in a year. Andro makes himself an asshole horning in on
Bertram’s upcoming marriage and demanding that Noelle must not marry him — of course, Bertram gets jealous and
has reason to believe, for aside from his motive in making sure Bertram Cates,
Jr. never gets conceived and therefore isn’t around to create the microbe that
destroys the human race, he’s also falling in love with Noelle himself. The
sequences between them are dramatized in a wooded area, including a lake into
which Noelle releases a frog she’s caught (evoking memories of Little Maria
beside the creek in the original 1931 Frankenstein film) and encounters the monster — or, rather,
Andro in his actual form, with director Leonard Horn and cinematographer Conrad
Hall (again!) going all Griffith and Sternberg on us to dramatize the growing,
and thoroughly mutual, attraction between Noelle and Andro.
Finally Noelle
decides she’s not going to marry Bertram after all because she’s in love with
her hot young spaceman (at least he’s reasonably attractive when he doesn’t let
his guard down and reveal himself in his natural monster state — one conceit in
the story is that Andro needs time to hypnotize people into seeing him as a
normal human, so if he’s taken by surprise, as the landlady does in one scene,
he appears in his monster form and they usually run screaming from him), and
rather than stay behind, marry the Army jerk she doesn’t love and who if she does marry him will be the father of the kid that will
destroy humanity, she gets on board the spaceship (Reardon was killed on the
way back to 1963 Earth because he’d appeared in a time line in which he was not
supposed to be) and she and Andro flee — only they both disappear in mid-space
because by making sure Bertram Cabot, Jr. never exists, they’ve altered the time
line so that they don’t exist. I was sure
the plot would have a different resolution and the apocalypse would happen
after all — either Andro would carry the plague microbe with him and that’s what would infect the human race, or he would have
sex with Noelle before she married Bertram and therefore he’d be the father of the sinister humanity-destroying
scientist Bertram Cabot, Jr. — but the way it turns out has a certain jagged
appeal even though we’re disappointed that we never get to see how the earth of
2148 turned out without the
apocalyptic disease. (Then again, on a 1960’s TV budget it would have been
foolhardy even to try to
depict that.) Though the derivations in the Outer Limits scripts are obvious, so are the influences this
show left on later science-fiction stories; one of the guests at the screening
pointed out the similarities between the 1980’s graphic novel Watchmen (and its 2015 film) and the plot of “Architects of
Fear” (acknowledged within Watchmen by the appearance of a panel showing one of the characters watching The
Outer Limits), and “The Man Who Was
Never Born” seems to anticipate “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the
beautiful Star Trek episode
written by Harlan Ellison (though, typically, he couldn’t stand the way it was
rewritten by the usual suspects in Gene Roddenberry’s writers’ room), which is
also about a human from the future who has to let his girlfriend die to prevent
the entire human race from an evil future fate. Though Ellison contributed to The
Outer Limits, he had nothing — or at
least nothing credited — to do with this episode, yet the air of bittersweet
longing and the pathos of the self-sacrificing leads is very similar.
••••••••••
The last Outer Limits
episode shown last night at Vintage Sci-Fi was one I actually remembered from
when it first aired when I was 10 — particularly yet another awesomely
wrenching and self-sacrificing ending. It was called “A Feasibility Study” and
was directed by Byron Haskin (again!). This time the script was by show runner
Joseph Stefano himself, and it dealt with a sorry little planet out in the
middle of nowhere on the edge of our galaxy. The planet is called “Luminos”
and, judging from its overall environment, it appears to be in about the same
position relative to its sun as Mercury is to ours. The Luminites, as the
inhabitants are known, are the victims of a devastating disease similar to that
which afflicted the Earthlings of 2148 in “The Man Who Was Never Born”: they
are born normal and active, but in their teens they start to develop lesions
that grow over time to cover their skin completely and progressively deprive
them of the ability to move. In the intermediate stage of the disease they can still
walk slowly, though they lose defined fingers and with them the ability to
manipulate objects. At the end they become like rocks, capable of speech but
rooted down in one location and unable to move at all. Like the Krell in Forbidden
Planet and the Talosians on Star
Trek (and the various versions of the
initial Star Trek pilot that
involved assistant director Robert Justman, who worked in that capacity on 20 Outer
Limits episodes and even acts in this one,
playing the head Luminite who explains all this to us, were clearly influenced
by this story just as the Star Trek
episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” was obviously influenced by “The Man
Who Was Never Born”!), the Luminites have used their inability to move as a way
of becoming ever-more powerful intellectually, making their minds as powerful
as possible in order to make up for having useless, immobile bodies. Among the
things they’ve figured out how to do is move matter through space almost
instantaneously — though they do this not with an effervescent sparkle machine
like Star Trek’s transporter, but
with a spacecraft (how did they build it?) that looks like a giant badminton
shuttlecock and scoops up six ordinary blocks of a Beverly Hills suburb, which
it transports to Luminos. The principal Earth characters are two childless
married couples who’ve lived next door to each other for at least a year but
have never got to know each other until now. Ralph and Rhea Cashman (David
Opatoshu and Joyce Van Patten) are the picture-perfect representatives of
suburban bliss, while their neighbors the Holms are anything but.
Dr. Simon
Holm (Sam Wanamaker, returned to the U.S. after years of working in England
because he was blacklisted for his Left-wing politics) is often out seeing
patients well into the night, but he expects his wife Andrea (Phyllis Love) to
be waiting for him at home with dinner ready whenever he gets back. Andrea was
a globe-trotting magazine photographer before they married and she wants to
continue her career and resents being expected to be a stay-at-home wife and
give up her career ambitions for her husband. This show originally aired April
13, 1964, 14 months after the publication of Betty Friedan’s The
Feminine Mystique — the criticism of men’s
attitudes towards women and the inferior social role women were expected to
assume which helped launch second-wave feminism — and it seems to me that in
the way he created the Holms Joseph Stefano was dramatizing the issues raised
by Friedan’s book and incorporating the social debate it had sparked into his
script. In the end the principals realize that the rulers of Luminos have
imported them as slaves as part of a “feasibility study” to determine whether
they should kidnap the entire population of Earth and set them to the tasks the
Luminites can no longer do for themselves since they require manual dexterity —
and as the Earthlings realize what’s happened to them (a realization they come
to inside a church, in yet another example of how the quasi-official religion
the U.S. adopted in the 1950’s — the one which led us to identify our Cold War
enemy not merely as Communism but “Godless Communism” and got our money and the
Pledge of Allegiance polluted with words like “under God” and “in God we trust”
that have told atheistic and agnostic Americans, as well as Americans who don’t
believe in an Abrahamic “sky god” religion, that they are at best second-class
citizens and at worst not “real” Americans — seeped into quite a lot of science
fiction, including the portrayal of the microbes that felled the Martian
invaders in The War of the Worlds
as a form of divine intervention in the 1953 film — which would have appalled
the famously agnostic H. G. Wells if he hadn’t conveniently died seven years
before the film was made), they decide the only way they can stop the Luminites
from abducting and enslaving Earth’s entire population is to touch each other,
thereby giving themselves the Luminites’ disease, rendering them useless as
slaves, and letting the Luminites know enslaving Earthlings en masse is “unfeasible” because any other Earthlings they
bring to their planet will resist similarly.
That was the part of this show
that has stayed with me all these years — particularly Dr. Simon Holm’s last
speech: “We are their guinea pigs. But we are human guinea pigs, which gives us
some choice in this experiment... human choice. We can choose to make their
enslavement of our Earth infeasible. We can choose not to escape infection. We
can deliberately become what they are. My wife has already been infected. I’m
going to take her hand. Will someone take mine?” It’s an obvious forerunner not
only to “The Cage”/“The Menagerie” on the initial Star Trek — in which the Talosians realize that Earthlings are
too rebellious, too attached to freedom, to be anyone else’s servant race — but
to the original Alien, which I
read as Sigourney Weaver’s character nobly sacrificing her life to keep the
alien species from reaching Earth and wreaking havoc on us. (That’s why I was
so disappointed when they started making sequels to Alien, with Sigourney Weaver’s character still in them,
and resorted to increasingly ridiculous expedients to explain her continued
presence — leading up to the fourth one in the sequence, in which she played
her own clone.) The Outer Limits
remains one of the most compelling science-fiction TV series ever — indeed, I’d
rate it ahead of The Twilight Zone
if only because its writers didn’t go for the annoying trick endings Rod
Serling slapped onto so many of the Twilight Zone scripts — and though the screening proprietor picked
these four shows because they were the highest-rated episodes on imdb.com, they
were only relatively so — 8.0 ratings instead of 7.2. It’s a show that deserved
its cult reputation and, despite the tacky effects (remember that all those
rubber-masked monsters were originally meant to be seen on blurry
black-and-white TV’s receiving signals over the air), it still holds up
surprisingly well.
