What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was directed by Paul Nickell and written by Ellis St. Joseph.. “A Passenger to Bali” stars Francis Compton, Colin Keith-Johnson, Berry Kroeger and Harry Cooke. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, March 27, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.
What happened: We open amidst a smoky and foggy scene, with men in straw hats loading cargo for Bali. The ship is running late, and the natives are getting restless. One of the crew members, Mr. Wrangle (Macollum), thinks that something spooky is going on, but his fellow sailor Mr. Slaughter (Cooke) make fun of him for being superstitious. A smooth-talking man, Mr. Walkes (Kroeger) offers money for passage to the Indonesian port. He says that he’s a Dutch missionary. The beautifully-named Captain English (Keith-Johnson) is suspicious, but agrees to the idea.
After two weeks of travel, Wrangle is thoroughly creeped out by Walkes, particularly his habits of standing on the brow all day and talking to the Asian crew in their native languages. We see Walkes having one of these conversations, albeit in English, where he says he doesn’t want to leave.He also says that he speaks to God, which seems normal.
He says that he’s foreseen the ship crashing on the rocks if they arrive by night. To prevent this, he wants the Chinese cook Chu to make sure all the officers eat at the same time. He talks to Mr. Wrangle, pretty nakedly trying to make him resent his senior officers. The other two officers enter, and apparently lunch being five minutes late has thrown off their schedule. They all agree to eat together, as Walkes looks ominously into the distance.
Walkes brings the officers gin, but they all refuse to drink. They notice that the engine’s stopped, and go to check it out. SUSPE — what, wrong show. Ten hours later, they’ve found the problem — sand in the engine. Walkes wants a lifeboat to shore, as his papers won’t stand up to examination. Being an upright man, Captain English refuses. A local bureaucrat comes on board, and says that Bali isn’t taking in any missionaries. When he sees Walkes, he instantly recognizes him as a “dangerous revolutionary” who “wants power at any price.” They refuse to take him in, leaving the crew with the question of what to do with a country-less man.
After the break, we find the ship in Saigon, unloading Walkes’ case. Wrangle says that he distrusts Walkes, but is entertained by watching him work. The French customs officer says his papers are fine but wants to check Walkes’ luggage. His cases contain revolutionary propaganda, which angers the officer so much he refuses to let the ship dock at all. Walkes responds by throwing the offending leaflets out into the crowd at the docks.
Unable to even take on coal at any port, the shift drifts aimlessly. They have just enough coal to head to one more port: the British colony of Hong Kong. Walkes provides us with some philosophizing, describing the world as one of chaotic slaughter. In the face of this, he advocates “indulgence”, particularly in the crate full of Dutch gin he brought along.
At Hong Kong, the local governor has changed his mind and refuses to take Walkes. He hints that English should just kill Walkes to get rid of the quandary. The revolutionary listens in on this slice of the conversation. He taunts English, saying that even if he dies he’ll haunt the ship. Now that’s some moxie.
A typhoon hits the port, and the two men continue having it out in the pouring rain. Walkes keeps coming back to English’s decision not to let him leave on a lifeboat at Bali, saying it’s a sign of the weak thinking that defines modern society. The ship’s rudder breaks in the storm, and it ends up sinking.
English finds a solution: everyone else will leave the boat, but Walkes will stay aboard the sinking ship as captain. I suppose that gives him plausible deniability for killing a guy. Walkes has gotten the Asian member of the crew to align with him, plotting a mutiny. But English draws a gun and they all get scared and abandon him. The seamen leave the insurgent on the sinking ship, screaming about how they’ll meet again.
What I thought: “A Passenger to Bali” begins with a dingy, chaotic port scene, full of mist, smoke and shouting. It’s honestly a little difficult to tell what’s going on. In part this is just the usual clumsiness with which TV dramas of this era handled their external film segments. But it also portends the themes of the coming narrative: an emerging vortex of chaos, one that even the episode itself ultimately doesn’t grasp.
This episode of Studio One is seemingly an original script, and not a period piece. Its British protagonists, in addition to once again giving the series an air of Anglophile prestige, are part of an Asia that was still very much colonial. Britain had allowed India its independence, albeit with the parting shot of partition, but in many ways the European colonial system was still formally in tact. The captain, heavy-handedly named English, stands in for this sense of order.
The episode’s villainous protagonist Walkes suggests the end of this system. Despite the trouble he brings our seamen, he also has a seductive quality to him — well-read, erudite and charismatic. At one point he tells English that “This is the end of your world and the beginning of mine.” It’s a great line, and we believe it.
Scriptwriter St. Joseph plays coy with Walkes’ ideology. The content of his pamphlets is never discussed, only the effect of “intoxicating the mind.” But one doesn’t have to read between the lines too much to see the fear of Communism, particularly in the colonial world. Capitalist nations feared that communism would sweep its way through the poor countries by offering them equality — the “domino theory” that was to cause so much intransigence later. China, the continent’s largest country, was already in the process of becoming Communist and it was feared the rest would follow.
Walkes’ megalomaniac monologues, set against the raging storm, associate him with a widening chaotic world. Of course, only to the colonizer is his conquest order and rebellion against it chaos. “A Passenger to Bali” suggests that what is most fearful about Walkes and his fellow travelers is that they suggest the white man’s hegemony over the world could be overthrown. In another on-the-nose moment, he is shown reading The Decline of the West, Otto Spengler’s tome that argued Western culture was weakening and would soon lose its dominance.
St. Peters is ultimately too afraid to admit the plausibility of the fear driving his script. We get to the logical ending of the narrative, Walkes turning the crew’s Asian servants against the captain and transforming it into a pirate frigate, but they are all dispersed by one man with a gun. Ultimately the script suggests that the West will win because the East is cowardly and superstitious. It can’t even imagine an Asian agitator, only a white man stirring up the throngs of simple natives we see whenever the ships dock.
The following decades would show the West just how wrong this racist perception was. Three months after this episode aired, the US would send troops to Korea to try to stop the spread of communism there. The Suez Crisis in a couple years’ time would show the European powers just how little power they had. The Dutch East Indies, depicted here as in charge of the port of Bali, had already given way to an independent Indonesian state — a country that would see decades of bloodshed motivated by the desire to suppress communism in East Asia. As for the French port of Saigon, depicted briefly here, for those few of us watching from the future it looms like an omen of just how impossible it would be for the West to maintain control in Walkes’ new world.
A Word from Our Sponsor: The first Westinghouse commercial in this episode is interesting, advertising its TV/radio console as a way to entertain the guests. The slogan, “All Dressed Up to Stay at Home”, posits this in opposition to a night out on the town. It suggests the extent to which television was creating a new domestic sphere, with people turning to it for entertainment instead of going out to the movies or a play. (After all, one could watch a movie or play at home on the set.) The entertainment world was always one of private companies, but it was increasingly becoming privatized in terms of the space it occupied.
The final ad segment, like others before it, seems designed not so much to sell a product to the consumer as to burnish Westinghouse’s image by describing it as at the forefront of wondrous technological innovation. Here, we get a pitch for the wonder of Micarta artificial plastic. You can’t go wrong with plastics.
Coming up next: At long fucking last, we have arrived at the end of Life of Riley.
The Eternal Couch Potato 