by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I stuck a
half-hour crime drama in last night between the end of Elementary and the beginning of Stephen Colbert’s program,
and it was the next in sequence from the James Dean TV boxed set, a Danger episode called “Padlocks” which according to the
opening commentary from Dean’s cousin Marcus Winslow, Jr. (though since Dean
was orphaned and Winslow’s parents Marcus and Ortense raised him, they grew up
more like brothers than cousins) had long since been thought lost and only
surfaced shortly before the boxed set was assembled. It turned out to be one of
the best items in the set and a real surprise given that my only knowledge of
the Danger program had been from John
Frankenheimer’s recollections of it as an associate producer in the early
1950’s in the book The Celluloid Muse, in which he called it a dumping ground for directors who had bombed
out on other shows: “I was put on the show to try and help these bums, to try
and 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 ever
started, and they’d 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.”
My surprise was that “Padlocks” turned out to be
a great little piece of filmmaking
even though the director, Byron R. Kelley, isn’t even listed on the imdb.com
page for it (or anywhere else on the site); unless he had Frankenheimer or
someone else “ghosting” the show for him he actually turned in a marvelous job,
and though some of the opening shots and scenes of the police stalking out the
New York apartment building where most of the action takes place might have
been filmed inserts, Kelley seamlessly blends a wide variety of locales for a
quite stunning effect, especially by the standards of live TV that all too
often reduced potentially compelling stories to just a bunch of people talking
in a cheaply built set of a room. “Padlocks” was originally aired on CBS-TV
(not NBC, as the credits on the Dean box falsely claim) on November 9, 1954 —
just two months after the immediately preceding item in the Dean box, “Run Like
a Thief” from the Philco Television Playhouse, and likewise a product of the interregnum during
which Dean had already completed his first starring feature film, East of
Eden, but was waiting for it to
be released — and it’s interesting that after his performance in “Run Like a
Thief,” in which he’s playing a sympathetic character and speaks in a clear,
distinct tone of voice, here he’s back to playing the out-and-out crook he
usually got typecast on in his TV shows and is mumbling à la Brando in the curious voice Dean adopted to express
alienation. The plot is simplicity itself: a middle-aged woman (Mildred Dunnock
— the final credits identify her simply as “The Woman” and James Dean as “The
Man”) who lives in a seedy apartment in a section of New York City so run-down
the building next to it is condemned is suddenly accosted, while opening the
padlocks that are the only way she has to secure her apartment or anything in
it, is suddenly accosted by a young man who’s just fled the scene of an
attempted armed robbery of a local store where he shot and presumably killed
the clerk.
For half an hour of screen time director Kelley and writer Louis S.
Peterson maintain the suspense — will the woman be able to talk the man out of
shooting her? Will she be able to hold him off until the police arrive? Will he
kill her before the police can get to her apartment, and when the police do
come will they merely arrest him or kill him? They also maintain the suspense
around Dunnock’s character, who has a series of rooms in her apartment, each of
them separately padlocked, that contain what she calls her “treasures,” though
the only one she sees is a large old Raggedy Ann-type doll and Dean’s character
can’t stand the thing and can’t understand why Dunnock’s reveres it so. We get
the impression that it’s probably a souvenir from Dunnock’s childhood — though
Peterson doesn’t spell this out for us, and indeed he keeps the situation
ultra-simple, employing that marvelous economy of narrative that made it
possible for 1950’s TV to do quite enthralling half-hour crime dramas (and, for
that matter, half-hour dramas in all sorts of genres), where today the half-hour TV drama is as dead as
the Hudson Terraplane. I particularly liked the ambiguity over to what extent
Dunnock’s character is genuinely crazy and to what extent she’s merely pretending to be crazy to mind-fuck Dean into letting her
live. Eventually the ending is predictable — the cops storm the place and shoot
down Dean before he has a chance to kill Dunnock or anyone else (the final
credit roll lists only three actors — Dunnock, Dean and Ken Konopka as the cop
who finally takes Dean out, though the imdb.com page lists a fourth actor,
Robert Snively, playing “Charlie”) — but “Padlocks” is an excellent little
mini-drama that keeps the suspense going and also ends up surprisingly moving.
