Jack Klugman stars in the thirty-second episode of The Twilight Zone and he carries the episode on his back. Klugman is very strong here, delivering several monologues and playing off other actors that can not or will not respond to him.
“Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, whose life is a quest for impossible things like flowers in concrete or like trying to pluck a note of music out of the air and put it under glass to treasure. Joey Crown, musician with an odd, intense face, who, in a moment, will try to leave the Earth and discover the middle ground – the place we call The Twilight Zone.”
Joey Crown is a depressed trumpet player with an alcohol problem. Life was getting him so down that he decided to commit suicide by stepping in front of a speeding truck. That was when things got weird.
Joey found himself walking around the area, but unable to interact with anyone. Everyone he came across reacted as if they could not see Joey. Joey made the reasonable assumption that he was dead… that he was a ghost.
However, he comes across a man playing the trumpet that lets him know that is not the case. In fact, he says that Joey was in a limbo state and he could choose to go back or remain in the land of shadows. Joey goes back and things get much better.
Klugman was the reason to enjoy this episode. Joey did not seem to mind being in limbo so his choice to return to a world where he tried to leave by suicide did not make much sense. Still, the acting was strong and the message of stick with life is a good one.
“Mr. Bevis”
…with Butthead nowhere to be seen.
This was a second episode in a row that depended on the lead performance of the actor. This was Orson Bean and his semi-comedic role as Mr. James B.W. Bevis was excellent stuck into an episode that was strange and that had a message that did not feel very well done.
“In the parlance of the twentieth century, this is an oddball. His name is James B. W. Bevis, and his tastes lean toward stuffed animals, zither music, professional football, Charles Dickens, moose heads, carnivals, dogs, children, and young ladies. Mr. Bevis is accident prone, a little vague, a little discombooberated [sic], with a life that possesses all the security of a floating crap game. But this can be said of our Mr. Bevis: without him, without his warmth, without his kindness, the world would be a considerably poorer place, albeit perhaps a little saner.”
Loved the word ‘discombooberated.’
Mr. Bevis is a carefree, kind-hearted, fun-spirited man who could not hold a job because of his idiosyncrasies. We see him go through a day where he loses his job, has his car ruined and ends up in a bar getting drunk.
He is approached by his guardian angel, J. Hardy Hempstead, who has been guardian angelling Mr. Bevis’s family for years.
He told Mr. Bevis that he could redo the day and everything would turn out differently, but he would have to change the way he lived. No more funny suits, no more weird car, no more sliding down the bannister, no more playing on the street with the kids.
When he went through this day with the new way of acting, Mr. Bevis realized that he did not want to have a life where he could not do those things, even if it meant he would not be successful.
So I guess the message is that it is best to be yourself, but get used to failing if you do. The only way to success is by being something you are not, suppressing your true nature. That does not seem like a very positive message.
This was clearly inspired by “It’s A Wonderful Life” but it fails to reach that level of entertainment. Orson Bean does everything he can with what he is given and nearly pulls it off. Unfortunately a disappointing message and a lackluster story derailed this performance.
“The After Hours”
This is probably the most frightening episode of The Twilight Zone to date. There were some really anxiety creating shots as poor Marshal White struggled to remember what was going on.
“Express elevator to the ninth floor of a department store, carrying Miss Marsha White on a most prosaic, ordinary, run-of-the-mill errand.
Miss Marsha White on the ninth floor, specialties department, looking for a gold thimble. The odds are that she’ll find it—but there are even better odds that she’ll find something else, because this isn’t just a department store. This happens to be The Twilight Zone.”
I immediately spotted that there was no 9th floor on the elevator that Marsha White got on and I knew something was going on. What happened from here on out was weird.
Marsha White was here to buy a gold thimble for her mother (which at the end is strange considering the twist). After purchasing the thimble, she realized that it was scratched and dented and tried to return it, but the manager told her there was no 9th floor in the store.
This started Marsha’s psychological problems, afraid of what she saw… especially when she saw the woman who sold her the thimble… as a mannequin.
The twist at the end I did see coming, but that did not make everything around it less creepy. The strong performance by Anne Francis made up for any problems that might have been in the episode and the twist, the fact that Marsha was a mannequin too, was creative and probably very effective for the time.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 