by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I broke out the James Dean Lost
Television Legacy boxed set and watched the
next two episodes in sequence from it: a CBS-TV Danger episode from August 25, 1953 called “Death Is My
Neighbor,” starring veteran character actor Walter Hampden and about the
earliest evidence of how studying at Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio was
transforming Dean’s acting and remodeling him from the nice young man he’d been
in his early Hollywood days to a refraction of Marlon Brando; and an episode of
an NBC show called The Big Story
in which real-life reporters who had broken big crime-related scoops were
honored by having their stories dramatized in a half-hour crime-show segment. Danger was an oddball show because it was essentially the
dumping ground for all the people who were about to wash out of the industry altogether.
As John Frankenheimer, a TV producer and director in the early 1950’s, recalled
to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid
Muse, “Danger — very aptly titled — was the show they would put
all the directors on that they were going to can. Just to give a final test of
their ability — if they failed there, they were out. I was put on the show to try and help these bums,
to try and help get these damned things on the air. And of course they would
know they were on the verge of being fired, and they’d be very tense before the
rehearsal even started, and they would give me these ridiculous sums of money
to help them keep their jobs. I didn’t want their money, but they insisted on
it. And no matter what I did, I couldn’t help them keep their jobs, because
they were just terrible.”
Actually, one Danger director
Frankenheimer’s screed did not
apply to was John Peyser, director of “Death Is My Neighbor,” who had begun as
a TV director in 1950 on the show Suspense and not only wasn’t fired, but worked steadily on TV until he retired
in 1985 (his last two credits on imdb.com are on the 1980’s version of Ripley’s
Believe It or Not) and lived in retirement
in L.A. until he died in 2002. The brief opening commentary by Marcus Winslow,
James Dean’s cousin (though they were probably emotionally more like brothers
than cousins because after Dean lost his parents early Winslow’s parents,
Dean’s uncle and aunt, raised him on their farm) said that Dean and actress
Betty Phillips were unhappy with each other but that Walter Hampden, the aging
character actor who was the original star of the show, stuck up for Dean and
told the producers to keep him on because Hampden could see his potential.
Aside from the Campbell Soundstage
episode “Something from an Empty Briefcase,” an “inspirational” faith-based
drama we’d watched previously from an archive.org download (the titular
something James Dean’s character puts in the empty briefcase is a Bible, and it
inspires the ex-con he’s playing to turn straight — in the legal as well as the
sexual meaning of the term — and refuse his former associates’ demand that he
join their latest caper, even though it also means they beat him up in the
process), this was the first show in the box that actually featured James Dean, and by this time the mannerisms the
world would know from his three starring films were already in place: the
hyperactive, almost balletic movements; the scratchy Brando-esque mumbling
voice; and the burning intensity with which he broke the usual rules of screen
acting and achieved his strongest results by simply staring at the camera as if
he were trying to face it down. He’s playing ex-con (again!) “J. B.” — neither
the actors in the show nor the credits list his character as having any other
name than that — whose uncle has landed him a job as assistant to the live-in
manager of a small, rather dowdy New York apartment building. The live-in
manager is Mr. Clemens (Walter Hampden), who points out the similarity of his
name to Mark Twain’s original one and who proclaims that he’s also a writer,
albeit far from Twain’s level; he’s working on a compilation of stories he’s
clipped from newspapers for the last 50 years and intends to weave into a
social and cultural history of New York during that period. Only what he
doesn’t know is that his days in that job are numbered: J. B.’s uncle, who just
bought the building, wants to install J. B. as the live-in manager and evict
Clemens from the rent-free manager’s apartment so Netta (Betsy Palmer) and her
boyfriend Walter (Frank Marth) can move in together as soon as they get
married.
J. B. sees Netta and instantly has the hots for her; he steals into
her room while she’s playing a record of Irving Caesar’s song “Unforgettable”
on her phonograph (though the turntable isn’t moving and the tone arm is
clearly just sitting there and not actually tracking a record). He wants to
dance with her in the middle of the room, and she’s O.K. with that; then he
wants more than that, and she’s decidedly not O.K., warning him that her boyfriend is on his way
up and he won’t take too kindly to another man trying to have his way with her. Bobby sneaks into her room later, accidentally
breaks the phonograph, picks it up and takes it to the office to see if Clemens
can replace it, and ends up so upset with Netta for spurning her advances that
he works out a way to kill her. He’s supposed to be fixing the gas stove in her
apartment, and instead he rigs it up so it will fill her place with gas, which
he can let in through a valve in another room in the building, and she’ll
asphyxiate. Fortunately her boyfriend calls her on the phone before she loses
consciousness, and she comes to long enough for Clemens to figure out what’s
happening, break into her apartment, smash the windows to ventilate the place,
and thus save her life. In the end the mysterious, unseen uncle decides to let
Clemens stay on as manager after all, and Netta’s boyfriend gets a raise that
enables him to find them a nicer apartment elsewhere in the city. “Death Is My
Neighbor” is actually a quite well done show, marvelously acted by Dean —
showing the first indication of how the Actors’ Studio was remodeling his
approach to his craft and how he was turning from the nice young man he’d been
playing in previous bits to the moody Method star we know from his big films — and
by the other two principals. Hampden is a bit schticky in the usual mold of veteran character actors like
he, but he’s perfectly credible in the role (and of course I couldn’t help but
respond to the whole idea of him being such a pack rat he’s filled a normal-sized
room with a lot of bizarre stuff anyone else would just consider junk!), and so
is Palmer even though one can’t help but wonder why she’d want someone as
homely as Frank Marth when James Dean is out there flashing his jeans-clad
basket all over the small screen! One does get a properly world-weary aspect from Palmer when Netta is fighting
off J. B.’s advances and we get the impression she’s thinking, “I’ve been in
New York a long time. I’ve had to deal with your kind before.”
