by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, the next General Electric Theater from the James Dean TV box — originally aired
December 12, 1954, a month or so after “I’m a Fool” — was considerably less
interesting. It was called “The Dark, Dark Hours” and I suspect writers Henry
Kane and Arthur Steuer deliberately gave it that title because Paramount was
about to make a film of Joseph Hayes’ successful, and similarly plotted, novel The
Desperate Hours, with Humphrey Bogart as an
escaped convict who leads a home-invasion robbery and Fredric March as the
father of the family whose home Bogart and his two fellow gangsters, one of
whom is mortally ill from a shoot-out, invade. An imdb.com “Trivia” contributor
states that the same script had previously been done on another TV show, Suspense, called “I’m No Hero,” aired June 20, 1950 with Hume
Cronyn, of all people, playing James Dean’s role as a gangster who crashes the
home of a doctor demanding treatment for his sidekick, fatally injured in a
shootout, and threatens both the doctor and his wife with a gun if the doc
fulfills his legal obligation to report a gunshot wound to the police. The
doctor, who in the 1950 version was someone named Mark Roberts, is played here
by … Ronald Reagan, who not only hosted this version of General
Electric Theater but also starred in it as
Dr. Joe (his last name isn’t given on the credits), who’s awakened one night by
a visit from Bud (James Dean) and his sidekick Peewee (Jack Simmons, a quite
talented actor who holds his own with Dean — what happened to him? He got a
part in Rebel Without a Cause but
then nothing in the industry until he executive-produced an Andy Warhol/Paul
Morrissey movie called Madame Wang’s
in 1981 and then got interviewed for the documentary James Dean:
Forever Young in 2007 — and with all these
connections one wonders if the homoerotic body language between him and Dean in
The Dark, Dark Hours was purely
coincidental).
Peewee has just been shot by police after he and Bud broke into
a store and then fled by car (all of this established by stock footage on film
in what was otherwise pretty clearly a live show), and the two invade the
doctor’s home. In vain Dr. Reagan protests that he really isn’t a surgeon,
doesn’t have the expertise in removing bullets from bodies, and in any case
Peewee really should be looked after in a hospital, especially once doc
determines that he’s lost so much blood he really needs a transfusion. Dean,
who had turned in such a sensitive, beautiful performance a month earlier on
this same series in I’m a Fool,
here seems on autopilot: “Oh, well, another punk kid gangster. I know what they
want, and I’ll deliver it.” He shouts, he blusters, he waves his gun around and
he wakes up not only Dr. Joe’s wife Betty (Constance Ford in a role that really
needed someone more like Donna Reed) — Joe enlists Betty to help with the
operation even though Betty faints at the sight of blood, and Betty wants to
throw the pan of hot water in Bud’s or Peewee’s face but Joe insists that they
stoically survive the invasion as best they can because … well, he’s no hero.
The commotion wakes up Joe’s and Betty’s daughter, who wanders into the living
room and wonders why these two strange young men are there and one of them is
holding a gun on her dad — though she seems oddly nonplussed by the whole
experience instead of freaking out and panicking the way one might expect a
girl of her age (especially a TV character) to do — and the show moves to a
close when Betty tries to grab Bud’s gun, only Bud is too fast for her; later
Joe announces that Peewee is dead, and in a final sequence that’s supposed to
represent Joe finding his courage at last he’s able to overpower Bud and get
him to drop the gun, then chew him out for being a punk coward helpless in the
face of a real man.
In a way
Reagan’s worm-turning weirdly anticipates what happened to him in his political
career, in which he was at first dismissed as a lightweight but turned out to
be an effective leader who succeeded in pushing American politics dramatically
to the Right. It’s also worth noting that on these General Electric
Theater shows Reagan pronounces his last
name “RAY-gun,” the way it was pronounced in his political career; there was a
brief mini-controversy since in his actor days a lot of people had called him
“REE-gun,” and Reagan himself got a mild amount of public criticism when he
insisted that the name had always been “RAY-gun” and the other pronunciation
was a mistake. What was most disappointing about The Dark, Dark Hours is not only that it was a far more prosaic story
than I’m a Fool — its derivations
not only from The Desperate Hours but
the 1935 Warners programmer Dr. Socrates (starring Paul Muni as a doctor who gets awakened in the middle of the
night to treat gangster Ward Bond; his wife/assistant/nurse gets shot and
killed but he goes on to a career as doctor to the gangsters until he finally
regains his conscience and gets them captured or killed) and its 1939 remake King
of the Underworld (with the doctor
sex-changed into a woman, played by Kay Francis, with Humphrey Bogart as the
gangster — thereby making the 1941 Maltese Falcon a “doubles” movie since Bogart starred and Bond
played the small role of a cop) —but it’s told in a far more ordinary way.
Though it had the same director (Don Melford) and production designer (John
Robert Lloyd) as “I’m a Fool,” it’s staged on simple, relatively realistic but
cheap-looking sets — just about the whole story, after the filmed introduction,
takes place in Dr. Joe’s living room and it’s clear the writers yielded to the
convention of live TV of having everything take place in cramped, enclosed
spaces instead of the artful way of doing a live TV show with a variety of
locations Melford and Lloyd had worked out for “I’m a Fool.”
About the only
distinction of “The Dark, Dark Hours” is that writers Kane and Steuer made the
Dean and Simmons characters essentially beatniks — though the beatnik craze
didn’t really start until the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the
Road in 1957, two years after Dean’s death
(and On the Road would have made
a great film vehicle for Dean if he’d still been alive!), one can hear both men
spitting a lot of jazz slang at each other, including “crazy,” “man” (as a
particle) and “cool,” and Peewee demands to hear music on the radio while he’s
being operated on and even tells Bud to find a jazz station — which, amazingly,
he does, playing quite advanced music for a TV show in 1955, including a
Jackie-and-Roy style bop vocal duet and a quite moving version of the Don
Raye-Gene de Paul song “You Don’t Know What Love Is” featuring a Parker-esque
alto sax (my guess would be Phil Woods) that’s also heard over the closing
credits. It’s interesting that the two forms of music Dean is known to have
liked are progressive jazz and Black R&B — one of Dean’s friends
interviewed by David Dalton recalled Dean’s joy when Black singer Lavern
Baker’s recording of “Tweedle Dee” started moving up the charts, followed by
his frustration when the white cover by Georgia Gibbs caught up with and
overtook Baker’s — and the use of jazz in this show only underscores the
bizarre and totally unwitting irony of Dean and Reagan working together: Dean
the avatar of the 1960’s who didn’t lived to see them but was one of the people
who set the model for youth alienation and rebellion (one of the most fascinating
aspects of Rebel Without a Cause
is that after the chickie-run his parents want him to lie about it and cover it
up, and it’s Dean’s character who wants to ’fess up and admit the truth of what
happened, the way young people in the 1960’s confronted the social evils of
racism, sexism and warmongering their parents either accepted or covered up)
and Reagan who built his political career on upholding the values of the 1950’s
against the rebels of the 1960’s.
To add irony on top of irony, the General
Electric Theater shows were produced by
MCA, whose logo here is their initials over a map of the world and the
proclamation that the initials stood for “Management Corporation of America.”
MCA originally began in the 1930’s as a talent agency that handled big bands —
the initials back then stood for Music Corporation of America — and in the 1940’s they expanded to represent
Hollywood actors and soon pioneered the so-called “package deals,” in which an
agency would put together a writer, director and cast from their talent list,
have them develop a story and then sell the package to a studio on a
take-it-or-leave-it basis. MCA also started Revue Productions, a TV subsidiary
that went beyond managing and packaging and actually produced shows (the most
famous was Alfred Hitchcock Presents),
and in 1959 in order to do that better they bought the physical plant of
Universal Studios. Within a few years they had absorbed all of Universal and were therefore both a major studio
and a talent agency — until 1962, when President John Kennedy’s Justice
Department brought an antitrust suit against them and forced MCA and its
principal shareholders, Lew Wasserman and Jules Stein, to give up the agency.
Reagan had such a close business association with MCA, first via their representing
him as a film actor and then hiring him to do this show, that when he became
president of the Screen Actors’ Guild he made a deal with the studios that was
widely considered a sweetheart contract: it specified that from 1959 on actors
would get residual payments for reuse of their work, but to cover the years
before that the studios would make a lump-sum payment to the Guild. It was a
controversy that dogged Reagan through much of his political career as a lot of
labor people suggested it showed Reagan had always been anti-union — even though he answered by
accurately pointing out that he was the only labor-union president in history
who had ever become President of the U.S. and saying that meant he couldn’t possibly be anti-labor in his policies.
