What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based off a play by Luigi Pirandelli and adapted by Maurice Valency. The Studio One adaptation stars Richard Purdy, Catherine Willard, Berry Kroeger, and Virginia McMahon. It was directed by Paul Nickell. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, December 5, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.
the Cloisters at Ft. Tryon Park
What happened: We open on a medieval castle, complete with porticullis and courtiers. One of the courtiers,a newcomer, is introduced to the other servants — but they all speak in American accents, and smoke cigarettes. It quickly emerges that all these men are playing the role of courtiers to Herny IV, the eleventh-century emperor of Germany. Their employer is a wealth Italian aristocrat who has gone mad and believes himself to be the medeival king. The new guy, foolishly, has spent the whole week researching the sixteenth-century Henry IV of France.
The “king’s” nephew Carlo comes in with a doctor, in his best Freudian get-up. The doc believes that the man’s delusion can be cured by shock therapy, counteracting the “shock” of a car accident which began the delusion. We learn through some exposition that Henry views the image of his wife as two women: his long-lost wife and the bride of his mortal enemy. We are then introduced to the real woman, his ex-wife Matilda (Willard). She and her new husband Tito (Kroeger) are skeptical of the treatment, while her daughter Frida (McMahon) doesn’t want to come at all. This is because she’s an ex-flame of Carlo, who doesn’t like her new aristocratic fiance. Such are the days of our lives.
Everyone gets into costume, and Matilda notes that the painting of her looks more like Frida these days. She describes the accident that caused his illness: being thrown from a horse during a re-enactment. In his psyche, she’s not his wife, but his mother-in-law. We finally get to meet the “Emperor”, a scenery-chewing Richard Purdy. (We never learn his real name, but I’ll call him Henry for the sake of convenience.) He ignores Tito’s costume and accuses him of being his enemy Peter of Gallione. He comforts Matilda over the supposed loss of her child, and imagines that he is still 26 years old. This is part of a long monologue about memory and identity. After threatening to disrobe in a moment of madness, he asks the “Contessa” to withdraw the “excommunication” that separates him from the rest of society.
Between the acts, a woman instructs the men in the audience how they can get a “thank-you kiss” by getting their wife a toaster or waffle iron for Christmas. Back in the play, Matilda interprets his monologue as a love letter to her. The doctor says that Henry is at least able to distinguish “between his make-believe and ours”, but that his fantasy is no longer holding together and he is beginning to see elements of reality. The shock, then, will be a mental one: seeing Frida to impersonate his young wife. Medicine!
Outside, Carlo confronts Frida, who says that she sees her mother’s indifference to love as her future. She intends to marry the Duke as a way to compensate for him paying off her family’s debts, but fears the actual love of Carlo more than a sham marriage In the king’s candle-lit hall, the “Contessa” makes her goodbyes. After she leaves, he curses her for parading her new lover in front of him, suggesting that he has an inkling of her true identity. But he forces his servants to grovel, so he’s still kinda nuts.
Henry says that he’s not mad, but uses the guise of the king to tell people what they truly are, and to resist the passage of time and age. He then berates the servants for not truly buying into his historical recreation. Henry then brings in an old man in the guise of the friar to take dictation of his memoirs — the memoirs, of course, of the historical German king.
As the third act begins, the doctor and the “sane” adults are still launching their plan, with Frida and Carlo forced into a live-action tableau of the diptych that Henry has kept in his castle. When Frida calls to him, he freaks out and collapses. The doctor thinks he’s cured, but Matilda realizes that he was already sane. Henry says that he was mad for the first ten years, but suddenly came back to his sanity and decided to keep up the illusion after being horrified by how much he had aged. He berates Matilda again for her infidelity. After everyone else leaves, she says she understands, but he denies her even that and stumbles to his throne. The final shot is of the phony king once again donning his crown and proclaiming that “We shall act it out to the end.”
What I thought: Like “Of Human Bondage” before it, “Henry IV” is another example of Studio One‘s bid for prestige. I mean, it has the same title as two Shakespeare plays! The drama in question here, however, is not from the Bard but rather a 1920s Italian psychodrama. Nevertheless, there is a Shakespearean feel to the whole production, complete with long monologues from supposedly mad people about the nature of existence. By transporting its action to the present day, Pirandelli recognizes that such drama is antiquated and nostalgic — how can we still use the trope of the mad king in the age of psychiatry?
The answer, apparently, is by shackling it to a 50s-Freudian conception of trauma. Here, the beginning and end of Henry’s trauma is a clear-cut response to external stimuli, and the nature of his self-delusion is similarly prosaic. Given this, the doctor’s attempt to cure him with a quick surprise almost makes sense. It’s only a little more sophisticated than giving a cartoon character a second bonk on the head to make them normal.
But ultimately I suspect Henry’s trauma has nothing to do with falling off a horse. Rather, his suffering is that physical assault we all suffer from: getting old. More than being a German Emperor, his fantasy is of being young again. In this case, the passage of age is linked to Oedipal (or Electral) theme. Henry’s juxtaposition of daughter-figure Frida with his wife is designed precisely to maintain the image of himself as a young man. Perhaps this is the temptation of patriarchal incest — the wife is resigned to the role of mother-in-law, with the youthful image of the feminine preserved forever. Ultimately, however, his problem is insoluble because aging is insoluble.
In Pirandelli’s script, or at least the Studio One version of it, Henry’s problems get a kind of resolution by recourse to misogyny. The problems of age and decay can be projected onto his no-longer beautiful wife. Henry, it turns out, just “wanted to be free” of her nagging and infidelity. This is a frustrating trend with Studio One — just about every episode we’ve looked at so far has featured a shrewish and impulsive woman who is ultimately the source of the protagonist’s problems (although in some of the scripts she receives at least a little redemption.) Even “Flowers from a Stranger”, which I thought was quasi-feminist, had that crazy lady. I’m not sure if this was a fixation of Worthington Miner or just a sadly representative survey of mid-century highbrow fiction.
As an hour of television, “Henry IV” offers some good performances, and a lot of strangeness. Nevertheless, condensing a two-act play down to one hour has its difficulties, and as a result the plot is sometimes hard to follow and the characters’ relationships obscure. The TV version appears to have worsened this problem by adding the character of Carlo, I suppose because we need a conventional romantic lead to balance out all the weird psychodrama. Nevertheless, the episode certainly gave me a lot to think about, and made me really want to see a full version of the play. After watching so many shows that try to stretch out a thin script, it’s nice to watch one that has to cram everything in.
Coming up next: After a brief holiday break, we’ll get back to the workaday world with The Life of Riley.
The Eternal Couch Potato 