What I watched: A third-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Joan Chandler, Murvyn Vye, Leslie Nielsen, and Rock Rogers. It was directed by Carl Frank and written by Miner based off the novel by Gaito Gazdanov. “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff” aired on October 9, 1950 at 9 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.
What happened: We open in Marseille in 1944. Lovely city, not a great year to visit. A man is sneaking through an alleyway with a gun in his hand, and surreptitiously knocks on a woman’s door. She lets him into her apartment, which is pretty nice, all things considered. The man introduces himself as Paul (Nielson), and he’s here to visit a balding Frenchman, who we will eventually learn is the titular Alexander Wolff (Vye). Paul has a wound on his shoulder, which Wolff patches up, seeming much more relaxed. Paul is upset when the woman, Helene (Chandler), shows up again, shoots the man, and runs.
In 1950, Paul is working at a magazine. His editor wants him to do a piece on the French resistance, but fashion reporter Joan says he won’t do it. Paul comes in and wants to take everyone out for dinner, kissing Joan on the forehead. He knocks over the files as a dramatic gesture, but then notices that one is related to Alexander Wolff. The manuscript is apparently written by Wolff, describing a dramatic night during the War. Paul assumes that this was a sign his editor knows his true identity, and interrogates him. Paul confesses that he’s the man who shot Wolff, and assumed he killed him. Paul swears to meet him.
Paul returns to Marseille to track down the man who sent the manuscript, Marcel Verignac (Rogers). He claims to work with the police, saying he’s investigating Wolff’s ties to the Gestapo. This leads him to the familiar-looking apartment of Helene in her dressing gown. He greets her in French and then they talk in a weirdly accented English for the rest of the conversation. She says that she though Wolff was dead too, and asks Paul why he missed.
Marcel harasses Helene in a cafe, saying that Wolff is on the move, and doesn’t like to travel alone. Paul arrives, and says he cabled home to quit his job. He’s conflicted about his romantic feelings for the woman, saying that it feels as though he’s betraying Wolff. She says that she loved him, but that he was a “twisted person” who manipulated her. She refuses to answer Paul’s questions about whether Wolff had called the Gestapo about him. Paul stuns her by saying that Wolff is still in Marseille. Helene calls up Alex and asks them to meet. Wait, could she have done that the whole time?
Marcel evicts a happy couple from the one table that’s in the middle of the set. He tells Paul to wait outside. Paul, saying that he’s also waiting for Wolff. The two men recall their days in the Resistance. Marcel says that Wolff has been involved in criminal business from Algiers to la Rochelle. Just as his tongue starts wagging, Wolff shows up to yank him away, saying he’s heading to Algiers in the morning. He seems in good spirits about the whole shooting thing, pouring Paul a glass of wine and explaining that the incident took away his idealism. Paul still isn’t able to get a clear answer, and takes off.
Wolff goes to Helene’s apartment, and references their past while lightly mocking her musical ability. He offers her a trip to Algiers with him, but she refuses. Wolff tells her to break it off with Paul, and refers to Raul, an old friend of Paul who he accuses Helene of betraying to the Gestapo. Helene says that she thought Raoul was a traitor. Paul starts knocking at the door, and Wolff beats a sarcastic retreat. Paul begs with Helene to come to Paris with him, but she refuses, saying that their romantic moment was “just an incident.” After he storms off, Wolff returns for a cup of coffee.
The Westinghouse commercial shows us a new model of washer, which uses its door as a scale to tell how much soap you need. That one never caught on, I guess. Marcel hassles a dispirited Paul back at the only bar in Marseille, until the cops show up. Marcel tells him that Wolff and Helene used to be an item, and Paul gets mad, He storms back to the apartment, to find Helene packing her suitcases to go with Wolff. Paul thinks he’s “holding something over her head”, and Wolff is all too happy to volunteer the story about Raoul.
But Wolff lets slip one detail too many, and Paul realizes that it was actually him who killed Raoul, and that he was working for the Gestapo after all. Wolff holds them both at gunpoint, but Paul is able to shoot him first by gently walking around a pillar. Elaine comforts Paul by saying that Wolff had “been dead since the beginning of the war.” Wow, a zombie story! And that’s the end of our program, except for a weird Westinghouse ad about the value of the electric motor.
What I thought: “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff” is another Studio One episode strongly influenced by the experience of America in World War II, and the ambiguity of the postwar world, like “Away from It All” and “Passenger to Bali.” The war was not a conflict in which one could easily claim that it was unclear who was in the wrong, but nonetheless a lot of Americans probably felt some degree of ambivalence over their participation in the war, which was often a lot uglier than the idealized and patriotic narrative. So we end up with plots like this, where there’s a little corner of ambiguity as to who was good or evil within the larger war.
The resulting episode isn’t quite as good as “Away from It All” but is nevertheless a fairly enjoyable episode of noir-ish international intrigue. Think of it as a shrunken Casablanca. _’s performance as the central figure of Alexander Wolff isn’t quite magnetic enough to justify the intrigue that the script builds up around the character. Not everyone can be Harry Lime, I guess.
The stakes of the story, more so than most TV dramas of this era, are essentially emotional. Paul already made the decision to shoot Wolff years ago. What he tries to work out over the course of the hour is how he should feel about it. He has to determine whether or not Wolff is bad not in order to stop his future crimes so much as to resolve the trauma he still feels over his experiences in the war.
There’s also a sub-drama here related to Helene, who is at least nominally the femme fatale of this story. She is continually pulled between Paul and his Americanized virtue and the continental sleazebaggery of Wolff. This is rendered in a very literal geographic (and colonialist) morality: north to Paris and salvation, or south to Algiers and sin. Unfortunately, this part of the episode isn’t as successful, with Helene never really seeming like a character as much as a plot device.
The episode is a loose adaptation of Gaito Gazdanov’s novel of the same name. Gazdanov,a Russian crime author, uses the Russian Civil War in his protagonist’s backstory instead of World War II, and has the narrator discover that Wolff is alive by reading a book of short stories that he wrote (a rather more elegant device than the TV version.) I haven’t read the original book, but it’s interesting to see how what seems to be a novel at least partly in the tradition of nihilist Russian fiction is translated into the Hollywood argot.
And hey, it’s Leslie Nielsen! Like most people, I know Nielsen basically entirely as an older guy who was in 1980s comedies, but he was an actor for decades before that. 1950 was actually his first year on-screen, in which he appeared in 46 different TV productions. The 25-year-old Nielsen doesn’t really stand out here, but does a capable job as a leading man. Most of the cheaply-made TV dramas from this era aren’t preserved, but hopefully we will be able to see some more of his work before he heads to Hollywood.
Coming up next: Ollie blows something up.
The Eternal Couch Potato 