by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi screening (
http://sdvsf.org/) consisted of seven 25-minute
episodes from the first season of a quite compelling science-fiction anthology
series from 1955 to 1957 called
Science Fiction Theatre — which ironically went off the air just before
The
Twilight Zone came on. In yet another
example of what I call “first-itis” —the tendency of historians to attribute
something as being the first of its kind, or someone as the first to do
something, even though earlier examples exist —
The Twilight Zone is often cited as the debut of serious
science-fiction on TV, but even before
Science Fiction Theatre there was
Tales of Tomorrow, a short-lived 1951-1953 anthology series on ABC in
the early 1950’s and got revived on the Sci-Fi Channel in the early 1990’s long
before it acquired the ridiculous but trademarkable name “Syfy.” I saw it then
and got the impression that
Tales of Tomorrow would be as well known today as
The
Twilight Zone if it had been shot on film
instead of being done live — which means the only recordings of it that survive
are kinescopes (crude copies that were made simply by sticking a movie camera
in front of a TV monitor and were used to air the shows on the West Coast; East
Coast viewers would see the show live and then the networks would fly the
kinescopes cross-country so they’d be seen on the West — so even that early in
the history of broadcasting we West Coasters were made to suck hind tit by the
East Coast-based media mavens, and one reason Desi Arnaz insisted on doing
I
Love Lucy on film was so they could remain
in Los Angeles and the show would be seen at the same level of visual quality
everywhere in the U.S.).
Science Fiction Theatre was done on film — at the pioneering TV production
company of Henry Ziv, who in the 1950’s made quite a few TV series and sold
them on a syndicated basis to stations without national network affiliations.
His biggest hit was
Sea Hunt,
with Lloyd Bridges starring as a deep-sea diver, but he also produced quite a
few other series.
Last night’s program consisted of the seven episodes from
season one (1955-1956) that got the highest ratings on imdb.com, and it kicked
off with the second show of the series — and one of the best, “Time Is Just a
Place.” This was the one with probably the most competent behind-the-camera
help — the director was Jack Arnold (best known for
Creature from the
Black Lagoon and
It Came from
Outer Space, the latter a story with quite
obvious similarities to this one) and, though Lee Berg wrote the screenplay,
the story was by
Invasion of the Body Snatchers author Jack Finney. Many of the
Science
Fiction Theatre episodes, including this
one, begin with a normal suburban family to whom something untoward is about to
happen: in this case, it’s the Browns, consisting of father Al (Don DeFore),
mother Neil (Marie Windsor) and their two boys, who make the acquaintance of
the young daughter of their new neighbors, the Hellers: father Ted (Warren
Stevens) and mother Ann (Peggy O’Connor). The girl starts a game of catch with
the boy Browns but says she can teleport the ball instead of having to throw it
normally — though when they start giving her a hard time she agrees to play
catch the usual terrestrial way instead. Even before that Al Brown has dropped
in on the Heller home and seen a robot vacuum cleaner — the Hellers call it a
“sonic broom” but it looks astonishingly like the modern-day Roomba product (a
great call from this show’s production designers!) — and later Ted Heller has
trouble starting his car and doesn’t know where the lever is under the
dashboard that releases the hood so Al Brown can look at it for him.
Later one
of the Brown kids looks through the Hellers’ window and spies Ted Heller
talking into a tape recorder, describing a futuristic vision of himself as a
being from another planet sent to live among Earth people and observe them. In
the show’s most intense moment, the Hellers’ daughter is run over by a truck
but feels no pain — not from the truck and not from the iodine one of the
Browns pours onto the wound on her arm. Ted Heller insists that there’s a
normal explanation for all this and the conclusion the Browns have come to that
he’s an alien from outer space is
incorrect: he’s a science-fiction writer who dictates his stories into a tape
recorder so his wife can transcribe them, and his daughter is an otherwise
normal Earth human who lacks the ability to feel pain. (In the 1960’s I read an
article about people who can’t feel pain — and wish they could, since pain is
an early-warning signal that you’re doing something dangerous to yourself. One
person interviewed for this story remembered having their hand in a fire and
feeling nothing but a vaguely itchy sensation; it wasn’t until they
saw their hand burning that they realized they were in
danger.) Then, just as the writers and director have seemingly assured us that
nothing is going on here and the Hellers are perfectly normal humans, Ted
Heller gives a speech and has some furrowed-brow close-ups as he delivers it,
and these hint that he and his family are outer-space aliens after all. One of
the nice things about
Science Fiction Theatre that became apparent through all seven of these
episodes was that the show’s writer and show runner Ivan Tors (a name on a
lot of speculative projects in the 1950’s, including the
fascinating films
The Magnetic Monster and its sequel
Gog — though
he’s best known today as the creator and show runner for
Flipper, and he’s got a bad name since the trainer who
coached Flipper turned against the whole idea of making marine mammals perform
for human audiences and gave a series of interviews denouncing how Tors and his
crew had allegedly mistreated and abused their dolphin star) were consciously
building their stories as extrapolations on then-current scientific researches
and speculations in hopes of making them seem like logical extensions of
current technology.
The second show on the screening program was “The Stones
Began to Move,” a weird show that benefited from the presence of Basil Rathbone
at the head of the cast. It begins in a penny arcade, in which a mysterious
stranger named Dr. Paul Kincaid (Robin Short) goes into a recording booth that
allows you to make a one-sided, one-minute 78 rpm record for 10¢. (I remember these
from my childhood in the early 1960’s, though by the time I encountered them
the price had gone up to 75¢,) He starts saying he needs to get in touch with
the eminent scientist Dr. Victor Berenson (Basil Rathbone, a bit older and
seedier than he was in his prime but still acting with the same imperturbable
authority he had when playing Sherlock Holmes), who’s made a discovery he
thinks could explain how the ancient Egyptians built the great pyramids without
access to modern construction equipment that could have lifted those two-ton
blocks of sandstone into place. Alas, just as he’s finishing the recording an
unseen sniper picks him off and he dies — and in a pretty dumb plot twist, the
sniper does not go back to the recording
booth, pick up the record and destroy it. Instead the cops recover the record
and, since it mentions Dr. Berenson, seek him out. Apparently the ancient
Egyptians were able to build the pyramids because they had a now-lost mineral
(the sort of thing the New Yorker
review of the film Black Panther
called “MacGuffinium”) that could literally reverse the force of gravity, and
two tiny chunks of that material survived in the eyes of a statue of a panther
in the tomb of Pharoah Cheops. An archaeological team co-sponsored by the
British and Egyptian governments has recovered the panther statue, but its eyes
are missing — though they’re eventually recovered when Dr. Berenson deduces
(just like Sherlock Holmes!) that Dr. Kincaid hid the two panther’s eyes in a
double light switch in his basement (and he’s somehow able to extract them
without either turning off the power to the circuit or shocking himself), only
just as he recovers them he ends up with a gun held to his head by Dr. Ahmed
Abdullah (Richard Flato) — of course
the Arab from a Muslim country would be the villain! — who demands them. But
Dr. Berenson uses a Holmesian trick to get Dr. Abdullah to turn away, grabs the
gun, gets Abdullah arrested for Kincaid’s murder and tests the eyes. They have
a very weak anti-gravitatioal effect — apparently they’ve worn down over
thousands of years —but enough to demonstrate that the minerals worked and
could have been the secret of how the pyramids were built. The
behind-the-scenes personnel on this episode were far less illustrious than
those on “Time Is Just a Place” — this time the director was “B”-movie schlockmeister Lew Landers and the writer was Doris Gilbert, who
did the screenplay solo from a story by her and Ivan Tors — and it showed in
the flat scripting and the plot holes, but this was still a show worth
watching.
The third Science Fiction Theatre episode we were watching was called “The Strange
People at Pecos,” a title which had me wondering if it would be a
science-fiction Western like the 1935 Gene Autry serial The Phantom
Empire and the recent Cowboys
& Aliens. No: it’s yet another tale set
in modern (then) suburbia in which the central character, Jeff Jamison (Arthur
Franz), is at a NASA (or whatever it was called that early) base in Pecos, New
Mexico monitoring test launches of a new U.S. missile called “Big Sam” (though
what we actually see are stock shots of the German V-2 rockets from World War
II which the Americans captured along with their inventor, Wernher von Braun,
and used for missile tests). He’s supposed to be monitoring the path of these
rockets via radar, but each time there’s a launch two other radar blips appear
on his screen, which he takes to be flying saucers (the script by Doris Gilbert
— her again! — at once uses the term “flying saucers” and mocks it, and I joked,
“It’s more like a flying samovar”) from another planet following Big Sam and
therefore keeping an eye on the U.S. missile program. He progressively
alienates his family, including his wife Celia (Doris Dowling, playing a
typical suburban housewife: a far cry from her best-known role as the faithless
wife, fooling around at home and killing her son in a drunk-driving accident
while her husband, good-guy servicemember Alan Ladd, was away at war in Raymond
Chandler’s The Blue Dahlia) and
their sons Jeff, Jr. (Barry Froner) and Terry (Andrew Glick), and becomes
convinced that their neighbor Arthur Kern (Dabbs Greer) and his family — wife Amy (Judith Ames) and daughter Laurie
(Beverly Washburn) — are the spies from outer space coordinating with the alien
spacecraft flying alongside Big Sam. Directed by Eddie Davis, “The Strange
People at Pecos” kind of lumbers along and peters out into an inconclusive
ending far weaker than the one of the quite similar “Time Is Just a Place.”
After “The Strange People at Pecos” came one of the very
best shows on the program: “The Human Equation,” which begins with a respected
elderly scientist named Dr. Albert Finch (George Meader) suddenly attacking and
killing a cleaning woman in the hallway of his building. Dr. Finch was working
on a research program to develop a new antibiotic that could save thousands of
people’s lives, and writer Norman Jolley creates an interesting greater-good
issue in the scene in which Dr. Lee Seward (Macdonald Carey), who’s been
assigned to take over the project in Dr. Finch’s absence, lobbies the state’s
governor (Herbert Heyes) to pardon Dr. Finch on the grounds that a) everyone at
the lab who worked for him attested to his kindly disposition and said he couldn’t have possibly murdered someone, especially the
cold-blooded killing of someone he barely knew; and b) even if he is guilty, the thousands of lives Dr. Finch could save
if he were set free and allowed to continue his researches far outweighed the
one life he took. (I found myself wondering why Dr. Seward didn’t suggest that,
instead of setting Dr. Finch free — which the governor was clearly unwilling to
do — the governor commute his sentence to life imprisonment and order him to be
provided a research lab within the prison hospital, so he could continue his
researches while still being punished for his crime.) Dr. Seward takes over at
the lab but finds the other staff members incredibly hostile to him — Nan Guild
(Jean Byron), a widow with a cute tow-headed son (not another cute tow-headed son!) and someone Dr. Seward is
clearly interested in both professionally and personally, chews him out and
calls him a “scavenger” for taking over Dr. Finch’s work — only the next day
everybody couldn’t be nicer to him and Nan even accepts his dinner invitation.
Dr. Seward eventually figures out what was going on: just as penicillin was
derived from bread mold, the new antibiotic is being made from ergot, a fungus
that afflicts rye and is known to have hallucinogenic properties.
Jolley’s
script here is scientifically accurate; I first heard of ergot and its effects
in a PBS documentary on the witch scares of the Middle Ages (and since,
including the Salem witch trials of the 1720’s and a more recent one in France
in 1948 that was recorded and photographed) that suggested the witch scares
were triggered by people eating ergot-contaminated rye bread and the people
“seeing” each other become witches were actually accurately testifying as to
what they were perceiving under ergot’s influence, even though it wasn’t real.
From the rapid alternations of support and hostility he’s getting from Nan and
the rest of the research staff, Dr. Seward deduces that they’re inhaling spores
from the ergot they’re working with, and to test his theory he injects himself
with the stuff and becomes belligerent and homicidal — and on that basis he’s
able to prove to the governor that Dr. Finch should be pardoned because, though
he did commit the murder, he was under the influence of ergot and therefore was
not legally responsible. He also institutes new safety precautions in the lab
so the staff can work on ergot without inhaling it and going crazy. The Science
Fiction Theatre episodes were all
introduced by a narrator, Truman Bradley, and while most of the narrations were
pretty obvious and just repeated things we had seen (or would see) happening on
screen, the one at the end of “The Human Equation” was surprising and
fascinating: Bradley announces that there’s a new synthetic chemical called LSD
which researchers were hoping to use to study mental illness. The original
intent behind the invention of LSD (in 1938 by chemist Albert Hofmann at the
Sandoz drug company in Basel, Switzerland) was to produce something called a
“psychotomimetic” — a drug that would artificially induce the same chemical
changes in the brain schizophrenics undergo when they have attacks of altered
consciousness — and the narration on this show repeats that original hope for
the drug. Alas, later research showed that while the effects of LSD were
superficially similar to the symptoms of schizophrenia, the brain chemistry was
totally different and therefore it was not helpful to researchers seeking to develop a drug that could reverse
the chemical manifestations of schizophrenia and therefore treat it.
The next Science Fiction Theatre episode up was “Project 44,” an historically
interesting story by Lou Huston about preparations to assemble and train a crew
of eight — four men and four women, which in itself makes it far more progressive than the actual U.S. space program
(which sent its first astronaut up in 1961 but didn’t fly a woman until 1983 — 20
years after the Soviet Union sent their first woman into space) — for a human-piloted
mission to Mars. Like a lot of movies and TV shows about space flight in the
years before we started actually doing it, this one emphasized the physical and
psychological training and testing would-be astronauts were put through,
including the centrifuges in which astronaut trainees were whirled at high
speeds to simulate the effects of acceleration, particularly the increased
gravity (up to 12 to 14 times normal Earth gravity) people aboard a spaceship
experience as it accelerates to escape velocity and finally breaks free of the
Earth’s gravitational pull. In addition to the centrifuges, the trainees are
put through psychological testing, being locked in a small room with each other
in teams of twos or threes to see how they’ll fare in confined spaces that
they’re not allowed to leave (though this was already a problem the Navy had
had to address with crews in nuclear submarines, which sustained undersea
voyages for six months or more without any need to surface and put into a port
to refuel). The program is being directed by a husband-and-wife team, Dr. Al
Bryan (Bill Williams, whose wife Barbara Hale was then playing secretary Della
Street on Perry Mason) and Dr.
Janice Morgan (Doris Dowling again — why this woman didn’t parlay her indelible
characterization in The Blue Dahlia
into a run of femme fatale roles
is a mystery to me, though at least here she’s independent enough not only to
keep her own last name instead of using her husband’s but to tell him off
during one of his meetings with the would-be crew and make it clear what a
stupid and dangerous program she thinks a staffed mission to Mars is), and Dr.
Bryan has some typical furrowed-brow worrying when the crew members who have
previously passed the tests with flying colors suddenly start washing out on
them and he’s ready to call the project off on the ground that humans can’t
actually survive in space. I was beginning to wonder if the payoff in Huston’s
script was that a sinister foreign power had a “mole” inside the crew and was
sabotaging the training, but the “mole” turned out to be closer to home — Ed
Garrett (Biff Elliot), a medical student who had signed up for the Mars mission
simply because the pay for it had included a free ride for the rest of his
education, and who had violated the requirements of the program by attesting he
was single when he signed the application when he’d really married a woman in
Germany when he was stationed there in the post-World War II occupation and
wanted to become a doctor and make enough money to bring her over and start a
family without being burdened by crushing student debt. (Sounds all too familiar!)
In the end Dr. Bryan washes out Garrett and one of the women from the program —
his demand was that all the astronauts be single when they entered the training
but he wouldn’t mind if they started dating each other and even got married to
each other — and he and his wife
take the places so there’ll be a full crew of eight when the Mars spaceship
launches during the right window in which Earth and Mars are closest to each
other in space.
I had suspected that there’d be a problem with a program of
seven episodes of the same TV show — that it might be too much of a good thing
and watching so many of them, without the one-week break between shows the
original audience had, might start to get dull and the repetition of similar
effects and plot tropes would jar. So it was that we plunged into “Operation
Flypaper,” which starred Vincent Price — though it looked after a while like
Price, like Basil Rathbone in “The Stones Began to Move,” was simply being used
as gimmick casting and there wasn’t much in the role that really played to his
special talents. He’s Dr. Philip Redmond, head of a secret research project to
develop ways to mine and drill for minerals on the ocean floor (after the
Deepwater Horizon disaster this seems like a far less benign plot point than it
no doubt did in 1956!) that’s being carried out at the Scripps Institute of
Oceanography in La Jolla (and yes, for a San Diego resident it’s fascinating to
see the establishing shots of what it looked like then). Only both important
research papers and models of the equipment keep mysteriously disappearing — literally! — and no one can figure out how or why. Not only are
objects being stolen from people who are never out of their physical presence,
but every time it happens they lose between 45 minutes and an hour and a half
of their lives. Eventually Dr. Redmond and the staff overseeing the project
from Washington, D.C. set up a phony research project and a special room which
will be monitored with tape recorders, TV cameras and still cameras to record
who the thief is and how he’s doing it. The live action suddenly freezes and a
man enters the room carrying a long glass wand with an electrical charge that
is emitting a high-pitched sound that instantly hypnotizes everyone in the room
into unconsciousness — like the victims of the incapacitating gas in the film Dick
Tracy Meets Gruesome, they simply freeze in
place and remain in position, unconscious and paralyzed, until the thief takes
whatever items he’s looking for and then leaves, following which everyone comes
to when they’re no longer exposed to That
Sound. Dr. Redmond call the security people, who arrest the culprit —
Dr. Richard Owen (William Vaughan), a former assistant Redmond had to fire when
he went crazy — who smashes his glass wand to smithereens and is blown away by
police, thereby taking the secret of how the wand works with him. In the
closing frames, both Redmond and narrator Truman Bradley lament that the wand
was destroyed, and the knowledge of how to make it died with Owen — on the ground
that it could have been an effective anesthetic for surgical operations and
eliminated the need for chemicals in that application. (Apparently the writer —
Doris Gilbert again — didn’t stop to think that that high-pitched sound would
incapacitate the doctors and nurses doing an operation as well as the patient;
or did she think they could just wear earplugs?)
The last Science Fiction Theatre episode on last night’s program was “The Other Side
of the Moon” (where Pink Floyd will see you — just kidding), in which a
scientist, Lawrence Kerston (played by Skip Homeier a decade after he played
the fanatical German-American teenager turned dedicated Nazi in Tomorrow,
the World! on both stage and film) at an
observatory (represented by stock shots of Mt. Palomar) discovers unusual
amounts of radiation on the dark side of the moon. Alas, he’s made that
discovery with a new camera of his and the staff members he’s working for,
including is direct supervisor Dr. Carl Schneider (Philip Ober), don’t trust
him, his camera or the pictures of the moon he’s taken with it. Kerston — who
like most of the male leads in this series is saddled with a wife, Katherine
(Beverly Garland), who can’t stand how much time his particular sort of
scientific investigation is taking from her — insists that the radiation on the
moon is evidence of an alien invasion and the authorities need to be concerned
about it. Kerston does indeed see evidence that a group of spaceships is
landing on the moon — but they they go away again, and he and everyone else in
the show realize that these are beings from another planet looking for a way to
dispose of their radioactive waste and using the dark side of our moon to do
so. Truman Bradley’s narration at the end explains that the U.S. government was
itself thinking of disposing of radioactive waste on the dark side of the moon,
since it’s too dangerous to get rid of the stuff anywhere on earth — one
prediction this show made that turned out to be 100 percent accurate: though we
haven’t started firing it off into space (yet), there is no way to store nuclear waste on earth safely, which
is one more reason why we should stop producing it and consign nuclear energy,
as a weapon or as a power source,
to the scrap heap of history where it belongs — though some idiotic so-called
“environmentalists” have claimed we need nuclear power to replace fossil fuels.
Not only does the entire nuclear fuel cycle (including mining and smelting
uranium, enriching it to a sufficient concentration of fissile material to be useful
for energy and shipping it safely to nuclear power plants) consume an enormous
amount of energy that comes from fossil fuels, it is also so inherently
dangerous and so unforgiving of human error it should not be used under any
circumstances.
