by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I just watched an interesting little half-hour show on
Turner Classic Movies: “One Against Many,” an episode of the woefully
short-lived (only 35 episodes during the 1955=1956 season) TV series Screen
Directors’ Playhouse. This was a Hal Roach
production during the time in which Roach had suffered business reversals —
notably from the failure of his idea of producing 45-minute “streamliner” films
to bridge the gap between the old two-reelers his studio had specialized in
during its glory days and full-length features. He was trying to reinvent
himself as a TV producer, notably
with The Gale Storm Show, and
this was an effort to launch a prestige project: the gimmick was that each
episode would be shot on film by a major movie director, and the scripts would
also be by “name” feature writers. This one was aired March 7, 1956 and seems
almost bizarre in its typecasting: Lew Ayres, famous both for playing Dr.
Kildare in MGM’s “B” series in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s and for serving
as a medic in World War II after asking for (and, controversially, receiving)
conscientious objector status regarding actual combat, gets cast as real-life
veterinarian Dr. John Mohler, who in California in 1924-25 demanded
extermination and destruction of whole herds of cattle, sheep and other
cloven-hoofed animals to stop an epidemic of hoof and mouth disease (called
“foot and mouth disease” in the script by Malvin Wald, John Jacobs and Donald
F. Sanford).
The Wikipedia page on foot-and-mouth disease reports, “Foot-and-mouth
disease (FMD) has severe implications for animal farming, since it
is highly infectious and can be spread by infected animals through aerosols, through contact with
contaminated farming equipment, vehicles, clothing, or feed, and by domestic
and wild predators. Its containment
demands considerable efforts in vaccination,
strict monitoring, trade
restrictions, and quarantines,
and occasionally the killing of animals.” The Wikipedia page states that the
disease is caused by a virus — as does the script of this program, something I
wanted to check on given how many things these days are blamed on viruses (I’m
still reeling from the reference I read recently to syphilis being a “sexually
transmitted virus” — it’s sexually transmitted, all right, but it’s a
bacterium) — and the plot of this show deals with an epidemic that threatened
the entire livestock industry in California. The famous director who was
assigned to this was William Dieterle — the actor who played Dr. Kildare
working for the director of the biopic of Louis Pasteur (who gets mentioned at
least three times in the dialogue), though oddly the announcer who introduces
and narrates the show didn’t mention The Story of Louis Pasteur in his intro and instead hailed Dieterle as “the
director of great films like The Life of Émile Zola and Elephant Walk.” (Well, great films like The Life of Émile
Zola, anyway.)
The show depicts Dr. Mohler
first treating a dog named “Taffy,” the pet of a young girl he’s befriended (these days we’d be asking, “What’s that dirty old man
doing with that young girl and her dog?,” but the 1950’s were more innocent
times), just so we know he’s generally compassionate towards animals and
therefore he wouldn’t make the recommendation he does make that whole herds of
cattle, sheep and pigs consisting of over 100,000 animals must be destroyed to
contain and ultimately eliminate the foot-and-mouth epidemic if it weren’t absolutely
necessary for health reasons. Dr. Mohler — who’s being played by an actor whose
conscientious-objector status during “The Good War” had truly made him “one
against many” in real life! — appears before a Congressional committee and
convinces them that his genocidal
war against California’s farm animals is necessary. Then he has to go convince
the farmers themselves to consent to the destruction of their herds, and though
the federal government is compensating them that’s still small beans compared
to the years — sometimes decades — the farmers have put into breeding their
herds, work which will die with the animals themselves. Mohler’s first target
is his old friend, farmer Ed Rawlings (Wallace Ford) — who, unlike his fellows
in central California, always prided himself on using scientific methods — only
this time he goes ballistic and, in words similar to those used by Cliven Bundy
and other defiant ranchers who have become Right-wing culture heroes for
threatening to shoot federal agents who dare suggest they pay grazing fees to
feed their cattle on public land, he threatens to shoot Dr. Mohler if the doc
dares set foot on his ranch. Only Rawlings’ cute, tow-headed son (Rudy Lee) —
there had to be a cute,
tow-headed kid in it somewhere! — agrees to hand over his own pet calf for
destruction and that softens dad’s heart.
The Rawlingses (he’s also got a
long-suffering wife, played by Emlen Davies with the sort of hang-dog
expression that’s standard for all
Hollywood depictions of farmers’ wives) are ultimately mollified that they’ll
only be out of business for three months; after that the U.S. Department of
Agriculture (which gets a special-thanks credit at the end) will introduce test
animals, and if they survive the
Rawlingses and their fellow ranchers will be able to use the government
compensation money to restock. Only the test animals end up catching the
disease, and Dr. Mohler traces it to mountain deer, who are carrying the
disease and, fleeing the winter snows, are coming down to the farms and infecting
the farm animals. This requires another confrontation with a whole bunch of men
with guns, following which Mohler sends out teams of hunters to wipe out the
deer population so they can’t keep reinfecting the farms. (“Oh, great,” I
thought. “As if wiping out the cattle isn’t bad enough, he’s going to have to
kill Bambi.”) In a marvelous scene he has the deer hunters served a dinner in
enclosed plates which, when the covers are lifted, contain oranges — he
persuades them to go along by pointing out that Nevada and other neighboring
states are refusing to allow any
California agricultural products in even though foot-and-mouth disease doesn’t
affect plants. “One Against Many” is a pretty standard tale, and the writers
were good enough Hollywood pros they hit virtually all the accepted cliché
points for their type of story, but it’s still an oddly moving piece even
though the “herds” are obviously stock clips and the burial of the infected
cattle and the shooting of the deer are kept off-screen, which actually makes
the scenes more powerful and heart-rending since they’re indicated Val
Lewton-style by sound alone.
