by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched James Dean’s final TV Mshow, a Schlitz
Playhouse of Stars episode called “The
Unlighted Road,” first aired May 6, 1955 (a bit under five months before Dean’s
death and therefore the last work of his anyone got to see while he was still
alive) and which, because it came out after the release of his first starring
film, East of Eden, was
introduced by Dean himself. Alas, this was not included in the boxed set of Dean’s surviving TV
work and my source for it was a YouTube download someone posted in the wrong
aspect ratio. Still, “The Unlighted Road” turned out to be good melodrama and a
nice showcase for Dean, who plays Jeffrey Latham, a Korean War veteran who’s
drifting across the country looking for a place he can settle down. He seems to
have found it when he walks into a diner owned by Mike Deegan (Murvyn Vye) and
fixes the diner’s broken coffee machine. Mike immediately offers Jeffrey a job
and tells him not to worry about the two guys who hang out there regularly,
Matt Schreiber (Edgar Stehli) and Roy Montana (Charles Wangenheim). Jeffrey has
guessed they’re bookies because Schreiber is always studying a racing form and
Montana is passing him envelopes full of cash, but Matt says Schreiber is only
a casual horse-player and used-car dealer, and the cash is payment for cars
he’s sold through auto garages. Jeffrey’s first instinct that these guys were crooks
is, of course, correct: Schreiber is really a dealer in stolen goods and the
cash Montana is collecting for him is the proceeds from the sales of those
goods. When Schreiber and Montana have a falling-out, Schreiber offers Jeffrey
the job of making the cash pickups and, despite his initial misgivings, Jeffrey
takes the gig on Matt’s assurance that it’s all perfectly up-and-up. Meanwhile
Jeffrey has met a local girl, Ann Burnett (Patricia Hardy), for one of those
diffident courtships like the ones Dean’s characters had with Julie Harris in East
of Eden and Natalie Wood in Rebel
Without a Cause; they’ve gone to a square
dance in the nearby (about five miles distant) town of Stanton (and the Schlitz
commercial is worked into the plot by having it take place at the dance). Only
when Jeffrey makes his first run picking up the cash envelopes, he’s chased by
a state trooper’s car whose driver not only turns on his siren but starts
shooting at him.
This would be odd behavior for a real cop — a real cop would try
to pull Jeffrey over instead of just pulling his weapon and shooting — but as a
typical James Dean character Jeffrey is too naïve to realize that. Instead he
leads the “trooper” on a chase; his car makes a difficult turn in the road but
the trooper’s doesn’t, and later Jeffrey finds out that the trooper’s car went
down a 42-foot cliff and he was killed. Matt encourages Jeffrey to remain
silent about the affair, but the cops (the real ones) figure it out anyway.
Jeffrey tells Ann that he’s in trouble and he’s going to turn himself in and
take his chances, and by doing so Jeffrey learns the truth: the “trooper” who
was chasing him was really Montana, who bought a siren for his car in an
attempt to trick Jeffrey into stopping for him so he could rob him of the
illicit cash at gunpoint. When that didn’t work, Mike and Schreiber decided to
cover up the crime by making it look like Jeffrey had killed the trooper: they
shot Montana, who had a broken leg but was still alive after the crash, and
pushed his car down the cliff. At the police station, Jeffrey at first tells an
incomplete version of the story to shield Mike, who after all was his
benefactor, but when he learns that Mike has confessed Jeffrey tells the truth
and is told by the lead detective on the investigation that it’s a lucky thing
he did because he was able to get free of Schreiber’s criminal scheme instead
of having Schreiber hold a dark secret over him for the rest of his life, just
as he had something (unspecified) on Mike which he used to force this basically
good man to participate in his crimes. What’s fascinating about The
Unlighted Road is how it anticipates a lot
of Dean’s subsequent work (as little of it as there was); in both The
Unlighted Road and Rebel Without
a Cause a car goes off the road and down a
cliff, and Dean’s character feels responsible (and of course the importance of
a car crash in this story can’t help but provide a chilling anticipation of
Dean’s real death in a car crash on a winding mountain road!), and there’s
something decidedly macabre about the confluence of car crashes as important in
both these fictional stories as well as the end of Dean’s actual life.
