Twilight Zone Companion (34 page)

Director: Richard L. Bare

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast: Chambers: Lloyd Bochner Kanamit: Richard Kiel Pat: Susan Cummings Citizen Gregori:

Theodore Marcuse Reporter #1: Will J. White Reporter #2: Gene Benton Colonel #1: Bartlett Robinson Colonel #2: Carlton Young Secy. General: Hardie Albright Senor Valdes: Robert Tafur M. Leveque: Lomax Study Scientist: Nelson Olmstead Man #1: Charles Tannen Man #2: James L. Wellman Woman #1: Adrienne Marden Woman #2: Jeanne Evans

Respectfully submitted for your perusal a Kanamit. Height: a little over nine feet. Weight: in the neighborhood of three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin: unknown. Motives? Therein hangs the tale, for in just a moment we’re going to ask you to shake hands, figuratively, with a Christopher Columbus from another galaxy and another time. This is the Twilight Zone

The Kanamits arrive on Earth with seemingly one purpose in mind: to aid mankind in every possible way using their superior technology. They end famine, supply a cheap power source and provide defensive force fields. Armies become obsolete. Although some distrust them, the Kanamits appear totally altruistic, a fact supported by a Kanamit book left at the U.N. Once translated, the title reads To Serve Man. Thousands book passage to the Kanamits home planet, including Michael Chambers, a U.S. decoding expert. Meanwhile, however, his assistant Pat is trying to translate the Kanamit books text. As Chambers prepares to board ship, Pat frantically rushes up. Shes succeeded in her attemptsTo Serve Man is a cookbook! Chambers tries to escape, but a Kanamit forces him into

the ship, which then blasts off. Helplessly, Chambers finds himself bound for another planetand some aliens dinner table!

The recollections of one Michael Chambers, with appropriate flashbacks and soliloquy. Or more simply stated, the evolution of man, the cycle of going from dust to dessert, the metamorphosis from being the ruler of a planet to an ingredient in someones soup. Its tonights bill of fare on the Tzvilight Zone.

Adapted by Serling from the short story of the same name by Damon Knight  To Serve Man has one of the most shocking punchlines of any episode.

Damon Knight: To Serve Man was written in 1950, when I was living in Greenwich Village and my unhappy first marriage was breaking up. I wrote it in one afternoon, while my wife was out with another man. Serling kept the basics of Knights story, but made some changes, the first of which was in the aliens themselves. In the story, the Kanamit (singular: Kanama) look something like pigs and something like people. In his script, Serling made them nine feet tall and essentially humanoid, noting, At the moment, no one knows whether we cast this part, or make it! As they appear in the show, the Kanamits (singular: Kanamit) resemble angels gone to seed, with full-length robes, high-domed heads, and just a hint of corruption about the eyes and mouth. The effect is striking, with seven-foot-two Richard Kiel (later to play the character Jaws in several James Bond films) playing the various Kanamits.

Damon Knight found this all to his liking. I thought the adaptation was kind of neatit made me famous in Milford, Pennsylvania; suddenly everybody knew who I was. I didnt mind the aliens being acromegalic giants, because I knew they couldnt film my pig-people without making it look like a Disney film. The only thing that bugged me was Serlings treating the alien language as if it were just another kind of code.

In Knights original story, a friend of the narrators, both of whom are U.N. translators at the beginning of the story, manages to steal a Kanamit book. Using material from Kanamit bulletin boards and an extremely limited English-Kanamit dictionary issued by the aliens to the human staff members at the Kanamit Embassy, the two are able to translate the title of the book into How to Serve Man. The narrator goes off to a vacation in Canada. He returns to find that his friend has decoded the first paragraph of the book and discovered, of course, that its a cookbook.

For some reason, Serling decided to change this. In the show, the Kanamit deliberately leaves the book at the U.N. A staff of cryptographers led by Lloyd Bochner attempts to decipher the alien language as though it were some secret code, which is utterly ludicrous. Without some sort of interplanetary Rosetta stone, deciphering an unknown language would be impossible.

This isnt to say that Knights story isnt without dubious assertions, too, such as the fact that the word serve would have the same double meaning in Kanamit as in English. About the double meaning of to serve, says Knight, I tried to cover myself by having the narrators friend remark that some of the idioms were very much like English. (In fact, French and Italian have the same double meaning, and in German and Swedish the word is almost the same; but I didnt know that then.)

Finally, there is the curiously apt name of Kanamit. But Knight asserts, Kanamit isnt intentionally a pun on cannibal. Perhaps not but then again …

THE JUNGLE (12/1/61)

Written by Charles Beaumont

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: William Claxton

Director of Photography:George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast: Alan Richards: John Dehner Doris Richards:

Emily McLaughlin Chad Cooper: Walter Brooke Templeton: Hugh Sanders Hardy: Howard Wright Sinclair: Donald Foster Taxi Driver: Jay Overholts Derelict: Jay Adler

The caracass of a goat, a dead finger, a few bits of broken glass and stone and Mr. Alan Richards, a modem man of a modem age, hating with all his heart something in which he cannot believe and preparing although he doesnt know it to take the longest walk of his life, right down to the center of the Twilight Zone.

Returned home to New York from a hydroelectric project in Africa, engineer Alan Richards scoffs at the voodoo lion curse placed on him by a group of witch doctors who are angered because he plans to erect a dam on their ancestral land. However, he is taken aback when a dead goat appears

on his doorstep. To protect him, his superstitious wife surreptitiously slips him an anti-lion charm, but he inadvertently leaves this in a bar late at night, then discovers his car wont start. A wind comes up, accompanied by jungle sounds. Feeling pursued, Richards boards a taxi, but when it stops at a red light the driver slumps over dead. The sounds grow louder. Richards desperately races through the park on foot until he reaches his apartment. Inside, all is quiet. Then a low growl issues from the bedroom. A lion has killed his wife. Seeing him, the beast springs.

Some superstitions, kept alive by the long night of ignorance, have their own special power. Youll hear of it through a jungle grapevine in a remote comer of the Twilight Zone

Charles Beaumonts first contribution to the third season was this tension-filled little tale about a voodoo curse that reaches all the way from the heart of Africa to the streets of New York City. The original short story appeared in 1954 in If magazine and later in his collection Yonder (Bantam, 1958).

The Jungle takes place entirely in the city, and one senses that it might be more effective if we were shown a bit of Africa, in the beginning, so that the threat might seem less obscure. Even so, the episode has its effective moments, such as when John Dehner (last seen in The Lonely) is riding in a cab that has stopped for a red light. A moment passes on the dark street. The light turns green. No movement. Driver, says Dehner, the lights green. You can go now. No reply, no movement. Driver, the lights green Dehner reaches over to touch the man on the shoulder. The man slumps over sideways … dead.

Another forceful moment (well directed by William Claxton) is when Dehner finally reaches the sanctuary of his apartment. The drums have stopped, all is quiet. Out of breath but feeling secure, Dehner pours himself a drink. As he raises it to his lips, a low growl issues from the bedroom. Slowly, he opens the bedroom door. Sprawled on the bed is the dead body of his wife, above which stands a lion. The lion sees him and springs (a very effective point-of-view shot in which the lion jumped entirely over the camera).

The Jungle plays upon our instinctual fear of being alone, of being chased, of the darkness, of the night. More than most people, Charles Beaumont was especially in tune with these fears, having often experienced them himself. A glimpse is provided by William F. Nolan: One night, I remember, we had gone to a late-night horror movie. Id parked my car that night in the parking lot of one of the big stores along Wilshire. We came out of the theater and we were walking back to the car, two

supposedly sophisticated adults. And we got ourselves so hyped up talking about the horror film that wed seen and other horrors, and the kind of crazy people that are wandering the streets and can strike at you from the dark, from any building front, any alley, they could be there. Chuck was fascinated with all that stuff.

When we got to the lot, we saw a car parked right next to mine. There were only two cars on the whole lot, my car and this other car, and some kind of figure was sitting there, kind of slumped over sideways and just kind of staring. I said, Oh shit, Chuck. That guy looks like some kind of maniac to me. Chuck said, Here are the possibilitiesChuck would always take his fingersHe could be, one, dead. He could be a dead man, and we certainly dont want to get involved with that. And I said, No, I dont want to get involved with some dead guy. Two, he could be some kind of pervert or killer, waiting for us to get in your car to strike. I said, Its possible he could be. I know this sounds crazy, but at that time of night, after what wed gone through, it seemed perfectly logical Or, three, he could be just an ordinary person waiting for his wife to come out of someplace. But if you were an ordinary person, what are you doing in a parking lot alone at three in the morning? I said, I dont know, Chuck, but I tell you one thing: were taking the bus home tonight!

Today, Nolan recalls such events only with fondness. Thats the kind of stuff youd do with Beaumont. I would never do things like that with other people; Id just go and get my car. But he made a drama out of everything, and thats why people loved to be with him. He brought just a walk home from a movie into the realm of the Twilight Zone. He utterly convinced me that if we went to that car, we would probably die.

STILL VALLEY (11/24/61)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: James Sheldon

Director of Photography: Jack Swain

Music: Wilbur Hatch

Cast: Paradine: Gary Merrill Old Man: Vaughn Taylor Dauger: Ben Cooper Sentry: Addison Myers Lieutenant: Mark Tapscott Mallory: Jack Mann

The time is 1863, the place the state of Virginia. The event is a mass bloodletting known as the Civil War; a tragic moment in time when a nation was split into two fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation… . This is Joseph Paradine, Confederate cavalry, as he heads down toward a small town in the middle of a valley. But very shortly, Joseph Paradine will make contact with the enemy. He will also make contact with an outpost not found on a military mapan outpost called the Twilight Zone.”

Confederate scout Paradine ventures into town and finds it filled with Union soldier sall frozen in place. They are under a spell cast by an old man wielding a book of black magic. Knowing he will soon die, the old man gives Paradine the book, urging him to use it to win the war. Paradine returns to camp and convinces his commanding officer to let him cast a spell that will freeze the entire Union Army. But when he starts to read it aloud, Paradine realizes it will force him to call upon the Devil and renounce God. He throws the book on the fire; if the Confederacy is to die, he wants it to be buried in hallowed ground.

On the following morning, Sergeant Paradine and the rest of these men were moved up north to a little town in Pennsylvania, an obscure little place where a battle was brewing, a town called Gettysburg and this one was fought without the help of the Devil. Small historical note not to be found in any known books, but part of the records in the Twilight Zone.”

Still Valley, Serlings adaptation of Manly Wade Wellmans short story, The Valley Was Still, is a cliched and unconvincing Civil War story. As in Elegy, the illusion of stillness was accomplished by casting extras who could remain motionless and by using still photographs. In long shots this works, but in closeups it fails utterly. In the original story, the hero decapitates the old man who gives him a book of black magic, and this bit of gruesomeness might have added a little excitement had it been retained but then almost anything would have helped. But as it is, Still Valley is merely a rehash of themes The Twilight Zone had done before, and better.

A QUALITY OF MERCY (12/29/61)

Written by Rod Serling

Producer: Buck Houghton

Director: Buzz Kulik

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens

Music: stock

Cast:

Lt. Katell/Lt. Yamuri: Dean Stockwell Sgt. Causarano: Albert Salmi Japanese Capt.: Jerry Fujikawa Japanese Non-Com: Dale Ishimoto Hansen: Leonard Nimoy Watkins: Rayford Barnes Hanacheck: Ralph Votrian Dean Stockwell and Jerry Fujikawa Jeep Driver: Michael Pataki

Its August, 1945, the last grimy pages of a dirty, tom book of war. The place is the Philippine Islands. The men are whats left of a platoon of American Infantry, whose dulled and tired eyes set deep in dulled and tired faces can now look toward a miracle, that moment when the nightmare appears to be coming to an end. But theyve got one more battle to fight, and in a moment well observe that battle. August, 1945, Philippine Islands. But in reality its high noon in the Twilight Zone.

New to the battlefield and desperate to prove his manhood before the war ends, Lieutenant Katell orders his platoon to make a near-suicidal assault on a group of starved Japanese soldiers holed up in a cave. War-weary Sergeant Causarano tries to convince him to bypass the cave, but the lieutenant is determined to show the enemy no mercy. Suddenly, Katell finds himself on Corregidor on May 4, 1942. He is Lieutenant Yamuri, a Japanese officer, and his captain is about to order an assault on a cave holding a handful of wounded American soldiers. He pleads with the captain to show mercy and bypass the cave to no avail. Abruptly, Katell is returned to the Philippines, just in time to hear that an A-bomb has been dropped on Japan; the platoon is to fall back and not attack the cave. Katell, having seen both sides of the coin, feels an overwhelming sense of relief.