by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened Charles an unusual item from an archive.org
download: an episode of the 1950’s TV series Climax! from 1955, sponsored by the Chrysler Corporation
(featuring their five lines of cars — Plymouth, Dodge, De Soto, Chrysler and
“the Exclusive Imperial” — with push-button automatic transmissions, full power
steering and the so-called “Forward Look” of sloping hoods, tail fins and lots of grille and hood ornaments — oddly the physical
look of these cars is the most dated and least “forward” aspect of them!), called “A Promise of
Murder.” I’d downloaded this because I’d been looking for TV credits for Peter
Lorre, and he’s here, heavier-set than we’re used to seeing him but with his
hair still black instead of grey. He plays a man named Dr. Vorhees, and though
he’s a palmist rather than a spirit medium he’s nonetheless suspected of being
a con man by the show’s protagonist, Brandon “Randy” Townsend (Louis Hayward).
He’s a big-shot attorney who’s trying to protect his Aunt Bertha (Ann Harding)
from being bilked by Vorhees — even though Vorhees has so far refused her
offers of money. Vorhees reads Randy’s palm and makes five predictions — he’s
going to have trouble with a dark-haired woman; “a precious link with your past
will be shattered,” he’s going to suffer a major financial loss; he’s going to
suffer a loss of love; and the final prophecy — which isn’t revealed until much
later in the program than the other four — is he’s going to kill someone.
Randy
is already engaged to a blonde woman, played by an actress oddly unidentified
on imdb.com, but prophecy one is fulfilled when she shows up at Aunt Bertha’s
place having suddenly and impulsively dyed her hair black. The fulfillment of
the first of Vorhees’ prophecies unnerves Randy; the quality of his legal work
declines and his boss Arthur (Tristram Coffin) loses a major client, and he and
his fiancé argue and break up. Then Aunt Bertha tells Randy and Arthur that she
wants to change her will to leave $50,000 to Vorhees — if they refuse, she’ll
just find other lawyers willing to do it — and the show ends in an elaborate
party sequence in which Vorhees plans an elaborate plot to kill Aunt Bertha for
his new inheritance. He takes a pointed metal staff from a toy soldier in
Randy’s old playroom, which Aunt Bertha has kept exactly as it was when Randy
was a boy, and loads it into a toy cannon, intending to have Randy fire it as
part of a celebration and thereby kill his aunt — only Randy realizes what’s
going on when Vorhees keeps moving both Aunt Bertha and the cannon because for
his plot to work she has to be sitting in just the right place and the cannon
has to be pointed directly at her (and Vorhees has even left chalk marks on the
table to make sure the cannon is positioned properly to be lethal) — only Randy
moves the cannon, so it’s Vorhees who’s killed by his own plot.
“A Promise of
Murder” is announced by the show’s host, William Lundigan, as being based on a
story by Oscar Wilde, though I can’t place it and Charles (who’s more up on
Wildeana than I am) can’t either; it was scripted by John Kneubuhl and directed
by Allen Reisner, who both do their work competently enough within the limits
of live TV (the duration of the TV business’s insistence on doing live shows
even after Ralph Edwards on Truth or Consequences in 1950 and, even more importantly, Desi Arnaz and
Lucille Ball on I Love Lucy in
1951 demonstrated the superiority of film as a medium for TV production is a
mystery; it was a holdover from the days of radio, when live broadcasts had
sounded obviously superior to records, but the opposite was true between live
telecasts and film — especially on the West Coast, where viewers were relegated
to watching “kinescopes,” crudely filmed images of the shows shot off a TV
monitor and flown cross-country for Pacific time zone airing), though there’s a
politeness to the acting that rubbed one imdb.com reviewer the wrong way:
“[A]ll those fifties people behaving in perfect fifties fashion, it is such a
time capsule. Watching things like this helps one appreciate just how uniformly
the entire population of America copied the mannered behaviours of the people
they saw on TV and movie screens. ‘Fifties homogenization’ began on the screen
and was too precious and artificial for words, helping to cause the backlash of
sixties youth.” To me the story seemed less reminiscent of Wilde than of
Cornell Woolrich’s The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, magnificently filmed by director John Farrow (Mia’s
father) in 1948 and dealing with a psychic (Edward G. Robinson) whose gifts
only make him miserable — and the story ends with him dying and the people who
go through his pockets after his death find a sealed envelope containing his
final prediction: that he would die that very night. With that precedent I was
expecting this show to end with Peter Lorre’s death — and indeed it did.
