Episode 303: Studio One – Wuthering Heights (October 30, 1950)

What I watched: An episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This week’s episode was an adaptation of Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights, starring Charlton Heston, Mary Sinclair, Richard Waring, June Dayton, Lloyd Bochner and Una O’Connor. The adaptation was written by Fletcher Markle and Lois Jacoby and directed by Paul Nickel. This episode first aired on CBS at 10:00 PM on October 30, 1950, and is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We open amidst a windy winter scene, with a man in a top hat knocking at the door. The stranger asks if he can stay over, but the two people within tell him to leave, saying that the house is worse than the blizzard and that “the master” won’t be happy to find another person here. The friendly maid Nelly (O’Connor) takes the man to a guest bedroom, where he finds an inscription on the windowsill. When he tries to close the window, he’s interrupted by Charlton Heston, who keeps the window open for “Cathy.”

We then flash back to many years ago, where Catherine and Master Hindley are young siblings fighting with each other and appealing to their jovial father. Their father brings in a dirty young boy, who was apparently starving on the streets of Liverpool. Hindley is a real asshole to the new kid, while Cathy settles on teaching him how to speak proper English. Without a real name for himself, the family dubs him Heathcliff. He does look a little bit like a young Charlton Heston.

Three months later, Cathy and Heathcliff are fast friends, frequently spending time on the moors, thus thoroughly pissing off Hindley. We cut to this romantic scene, with young Heathcliff wearing what looks a lot like a leather jacket, and quickly segue into a later scene, with the grown-up actors (Heston and Sinclair) brooding on the same moor. Heston chomps down on the line “It’s getting darker Cathy. Not with the sun going down, but… in our hearts.” Hindley (Waring) has become the master of the house, and is further tormenting them. He shows up to personally banish Heathcliff to the stables.

Who wouldn’t throw their life away for this man?

Cathy falls and hurts her leg, and Heathcliff brings her to their neighbours, Edgar (Bochner) and his sister Isabella (Dayton). Heathcliff and Edgar are both very dramatic about a sprained ankle, but Edgar takes the opportunity to put the rizz on. Back at the Heights, Hindley complains about Heathcliff to their maid Nelly. He discusses a potential match between Cathy and Edgar, which makes an eavesdropping Heathcliff angry.

Hindley plays on Heathcliff’s poor status to tell him he has no choice. Cathy returns, and is evidently smitten with Edgar, but refuses to give up the moors. Heathcliff smashes his hands through the glass after overhearing this. She confesses to Nelly that she belongs to Heathcliff. After overhearing part of the conversation, Hindley comes in, shouting that Heathcliff has stolen his horse and fled.

After a Westinghouse spot advertising the ability to watch big college football games (like Harvard vs. Yale!), we return to find that Wuthering Heights has fallen upon poverty, with a drunken Hindley taking out his rage on his servants. Hey, at least you still have servants, bro. He is visited by Heathcliff, wearing a cool cloak, who now apparently has some money to support the house. Meanwhile, Cathy is living in luxury, creating art alongside Isabella.

Heathcliff visits Catherine, and says he should have married her. He doesn’t seem like he’s going to take “no” for an answer this time, but does eventually leave. Heathcliff plays dice with Hindley, who has wagered away all his money and lesser property. He finally puts Wuthering Heights on the table, and loses it. He then tries to strangle Heathcliff, but gets punched out. This guy is really kind of a jobber.

I love anime food.

Catherine and Heathcliff get back to their old habit of fooling around on the moors. Things turn less playful when Catherine mentions that she is, you know, married. Heathcliff tries to get her to do a “blood brothers” thing. He heads to a dinner party at the Grange, but not before we see Hindley has a gun and is trying to work up the nerve to shoot him.

At the dance, Heathcliff puts the rizz on Isabella. Cathy takes her aside and tries to warn her that Heathcliff is only interested in her fortune, but she thinks Cathy is insulting her. Heathcliff tells Isabella that Cathy repels him, but that “I’d only destroy you.” I have to use that line some time. Scandalized by Heathcliff’s behaviour, Edgar says he should never visit again, but Cathy objects. They receive a letter from Isabella, saying she’s eloped with Heathcliff. Catherine freaks out.

The second ad break pitches us on a new Westinghouse refrigerator with a special defrosting system. We return to a sick Cathy seeing Heathcliff in the mirror. She begs Nelly to take her to the Heights again. Nelly tells a drunk and depressed Hindley that Cathy is dying, and he threatens to kill Heathcliff again, but shrinks when the man actually appears with Isabella in toe. He’s constantly berating her, saying that he’s trying to get her to hate him, and it seems to be working. Nice fellow.

Cathy is still dying of sadness, confessing to Nelly that there’s evil in her heart. She hears Heathcliff shouting for her outside the window, and obsessively lurches towards it. She runs into him and begs for them to be together, and he pleads for her to haunt him. Well, I have some good news about what genre of story you’re in. This takes us back to the “present”, with Hindley and Isabella as two of the wretched figures drinking together. Heathcliff is found on the moor, digging up Cathy’s grave amidst howling winds, and this is our (somewhat abbreviated) conclusion.

What I thought: I only recently read Wuthering Heights for the first time. As I’ve mentioned previously, I loved Jane Eyre, but I’ve had difficulty with the Brontës’ other works. Maybe it’s just my diminished attention span since my grad school days, but I found Wuthering Heights to be something of a slog, hundreds of pages of brooding without a really strong propulsive plot. Obviously it was a hugely influential book in the history of gothic literature, but as I get older I’ve become more willing to just admit it when I don’t enjoy reading a Great Book.

The Studio One version of Wuthering Heights was a bit more my speed. The novel is a difficult one to adapt due in large park to its baroque plot structure, which involves multiple time frames, a story-within-the-story frame narrative, and two different characters called Cathy. Studio One trims away the next-generation storyline which takes up much of the book’s last portion, and creates a more focused narrative based on the Catherine and Heathcliff relationship that everyone remembers.

One of the Westinghouse ads this week features a housewife proclaiming “Finally, I’m free!” about a new refrigerator, showing how modern appliances were pitched as liberatory for women.

The visual format also helps to make this narrative more memorable to me. Even with the relatively cheap sets of 1950 television, the visual image of Cathy and Heathcliff on the moor helps to sell this as a romance the characters are desperate to return to much more than the abbreviated script would do on its own. The sets also do a good job contrasting the atmosphere of the two estates – the doomed Wuthering Heights and the proper and innocent Grange.

None of the characters have a great deal of psychological depth, especially villainous Hindley, but the talented cast do their best to make them memorable. Charlton Heston is not a great fit for a Byronic hero, as in Jane Eyre – he’s not a man you can imagine society looking down on. But his raw charisma and masculine presence make up for that, and if nothing else it makes it immediately clear why Catherine and Isabella can’t resist him despite all logic.

Whatever my gripes about Emily Brontë’s prose, Wuthering Heights is still a vital story, and one that set the template for many romance narratives today, pairing a noble woman with a primal, less civilized but undeniably magnetic men. The tropes introduced by Bronte are still present in contemporary shows like Outlander. Studio One leaves out a lot of the book’s wrinkles, but is effective at conveying its core appeal, which is all you can really ask a one-hour adaptation to do.

Coming up next: It’s finally time for Halloween on Kukla, Fran and Ollie.

Episode 272: Studio One – “The Spectre of Alexander Wolff” (October 9, 1950)

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.

Out of all the gin joints in Marseille, you had to walk into mine multiple times.

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.

There’s a lot of close-ups in this one.

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.

Episode 252: Studio One – “Away from it All” (September 25, 1950)

What I watched: A third-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Kevin McCarthy, Catherine McLeod, Haila Stoddard, Faith Brook, and Miner himself. It was directed by John Peyser and written by Miner based off a radio play by Val Gielgud. “Away from it All” aired on September 25, 1950 at 9 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We begin in the clouds, and a totally realistic-looking airplane cockpit. Aboard are Air Force man and woman John Quayle (McCarthy) and Shirley March (McLeod) The plane crashes, very gently, and the man and woman onboard crash onto a deserted island. After briefly moving through some palm fronds, they find a large mansion. The pilot finds a photo of a famous aviator who went missing over the Pacific ocean. There are also a bunch of magazines dating from 1939, when the accident happened. Is this product promotion for Newsweek?

The pilot himself, Hugo Basten (Miner), is here to greet them. They inform him that World War II is ended, but now there’s trouble in the Pacific. Hugo has been hiding out on his island of tranquility with eight other people, including his personal chef. Shirley immediately says she doesn’t like him. Hugo goes on to explain that he doesn’t care for the modern age, and wishes he was back in 1850, where everything was handmade. To follow his feelings, he and his companions plotted to fake their deaths in the plane crash. He welcomes John and Shirley as guests, but says that they can never leave.

The next morning, a group of European aristocratic people are dining, other residents of the island. A British woman, Edith (Brook), is one to deliver the news. Two more people enter, including Gloria (Stoddard), who is desperate for a new man. Edith mentions that three of the four men on the island have already been reserved exclusively for her. Things are getting kinky. Stepan, a heavily accented man with a goatee, worries that the Americans will reintroduce all the world’s conflicts to the island.

Shirley comes back down, and Edith gives her a fairly cheerful greeting. They talk about the possibility of her marrying John on the island. Heinrich, another eccentric European scientist, wants to test his cure for the common cold on Shirley. John comes down, having checked the plane and found that it is in fine condition but out of gas. Hugo also enters, introducing Edith as his wife. He’s very genial, but still says he will stop John from leaving the island. John castigates them for living it up when so many other were suffering, but Hugo no-sells it. Gloria seductively introduces herself as the act ends, and Betty Furness shows us how we can change the channel with just one hand on the new Westinghouse set, with a mammoth 17-inch screen.

Still looks better than Money Plane.

When we come back, we find Shirley trying to fix the radio to send out a message. Dan, another American man who used to work for Hugo, tells her to cut it out. He’s resigned to living out the rest of his life as a barfly on the island. Edith gives a similarly cordial warning to John. This doesn’t stop the newcomers from trying to figure out where they are, and speculating about who else on the island might want to leave

Gloria continues trying to seduce John, telling her about her relationships with the other men on the island, including Hugo, who she once had a one-sided affection for. Stepan plays some music on the piano and talks about how sad it is. John tries to get them on his side by talking about how much they’ve missed in the outside world, including playing “Oklahoma” on the piano. Yeah, that might make me want to stay on the island instead. Hugo interrupts in the name of politeness.

Later that night, Gloria meets up with John in the cockpit of his old plane. (This is not a euphemism.) She suggests that she wants to get away, but it might just be more flirtation. She lays one on his lips. Meanwhile, Edith is chatting with Shirley. John comes in and tells Shirley that they’ll be escaping tomorrow, as he’s discovered a source of gasoline on the island. But Hugo is just listening in. We take another break so Betty can clear us up on self-defrosting refrigerators.

The whole group gathers for breakfast the next morning, even the Asian servant. (How much does that guy’s life have to suck?) Hugo makes an announcement that he knows John plans to leave, and that other residents of the island are aware of it. Dan admits to it, and interrogates Hugo about why he wants to keep them there. Hugo says he came here not so much to avoid war but as to avoid the ugly negotiations and deprivations of peace, and that he cannot risk word of the island reaching the public. Dan says that Hugo’s real motivation was psychological sadism, of watching the people he surrounded himself with become more dependent and more pathetic.

Was this Time/Life product placement?

As Hugo finishes his speechifying, there’s a huge explosion, or at least some flashing lights. He says that he planted explosives in the gas supply for just this eventuality. Later, Hugo meets with the unhappy Edith, who tells him that she also longs for civilization. John and Shirley meet and again discuss marriage. But Gloria shows up and says that the Marines have landed, although she’s very giggly about it. Hugo assumes that John somehow got a message out, but he denies it. An officer shows up and says that they came to investigate the large column of smoke from the explosion. Hugo refuses to leave, but the officer says that the island is the target for missile tests. He finally admits that “there’s not any room anymore for the 18th-century.”

What I watched: Whenever I go to the New York Times archive to find the TV schedules for one of these days in fall 1950, I’m confronted with a front-page story about the Korean War: territory won, territory lost, people dying in great number. The conflict had begun the past June, with North Korean forces taking over almost the entire peninsula, before a UN counteroffensive in this very month began turning the tide towards a bloody stalemate. The war was one of the most brutal in modern history, with roughly 3 million fatalities, but it’s been just about invisible in the television we’ve looked at. In part this is because most of what’s available from this era is children’s programs, but it also seems like this conflict, in stark contrast to World War II before and the Vietnam War to come, left little impression on popular culture. In contrast with today’s relevance-chasing productions, 1950s TV as a whole offered an escape from news of war and struggle, and island where the bloodshed and tragedy of the escalating Cold War might as well have not existed.

“Away from It All” is an episode about that kind of separation. It’s the first episode in our series to touch on Korea, and even then it does so obliquely, mentioning a “new war” that is “complicated and ugly.” Hugo wants to remove himself from the endless, grueling march of history, and goes to great extents to do so. He creates a world that is an endless dinner party, a simulation of pleasure without any pain to contrast it with. It’s an alluring choice, if one doesn’t look too deeply at it.

The strength of “Away from It All” is how it conjures a complex social ecosystem within a short amount of time. We get at least a decent sense of who all of Hugo’s guests are, and how they relate to each other. It becomes clear that all of these people are sick of each other, their worlds having been intertwined for so long that every relationship has become overburdened. If anything, I would have liked to see this story expanded a bit, just because there are so many moving parts that could use further development. This was obviously a story that was important to Studio One showrunner Worthington Miner, as he not only adapted it but starred as Hugo, and probably gave the most interesting performance.

11 years with only piano playing for entertainment would drive me nuts.

This is not to say that the episode is perfect. The plot raises a lot of logistical questions that are hard to answer — How have they not run out of sherry? Why does the servant keep working? John and Shirley are also fairly dull, square-jawed protagonists, and it could have helped to have them be a little bit tempted by what the island has to offer. But I found it very refreshing to watch a complex, big-idea adult drama, and ended up enjoying this hour quite a bit.

As I write this, we are in the early stages of another war, with Russia invading the Ukraine, and it’s complicated and ugly. In comparison to the 1950s, this war seems to be hypermediated, with every brand and sphere of society feeling the need to weigh in. But we still live on our little islands. On the day of the invasion, I was writing an article about Pam & Tommy, a series about a celebrity sex tape that felt impossibly trivial compared to the news. We compartmentalize, build our own little endless dinner parties, where the darkness of the world can’t intrude.

But such isolation can never last forever. Hugo finds that out in “Away from it All.” The ending strongly implies that, had the military not been alerted to human presence on the island, they would have used it for nuclear testing. No matter how much we isolate ourselves, the world intrudes.

What else is on?: Unusually, NBC started the hour-long Robert Montgomery Presents at 9:30, with the second half-hour running up against Studio One. This week’s episode was an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled classic The Big Sleep starring Zachary Scott and Patricia Gaye. I’m not a big film noir buff, but I would probably go with the Bogie and Bacall version instead. In the remaining half-hour, NBC aired Talent Search with Skitch Henderson.

Elsewhere on the one-handed dial, DuMont had a second hour of Wrestling from Columbia Park. In the New York area, the ABC affiliate aired the 1942 film The Adventures of Martin Eden, rounding it out with some short films, while WPIX aired The Art Ford Show and WATV aired stock car racing from New Jersey. The Montgomery show ended up being the highest-rated program in this time slot, although Studio One also finished in the top 25 of the season.

Coming up next: We return to somewhat cheerier matter, as Kukla, Fran, and Ollie get around to fixing those floorboards.

Episode 211: Studio One – “There Was A Crooked Man” (June 19, 1950)

What I watched: A second-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Robert Sterling, Charles Korvin, Virginia Gilmore, Richard Purdy and Marion Scanlon. It was directed by Paul Nickell and written by Charles Monroe based off a story by Kelly Roos. “There Was A Crooked Man” aired on June 19, 1950 at 9 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on the Internet Archive.

What happened: The episode opens with a kid playing, wearing a stupid hat, and generally being annoying. He tells a nearby woman, who will turn out to be our heroine Haila (Gilmore) that his long-gone father has returned. His mother Lucia runs a boarding house, and is renting to Mr. Collins (Korvin), who kicks a cat on the way in, so you know he’s a nice guy. It turns out that all the women in the neighbourhood are seemingly waiting for their husband to come home, including the two women also rooming in the house, Haila and her friend Kay (Scanlon).

Otis is introduced with a loving close-up of him eating cheese.

We meet yet another lodger, a cheery bedridden crackpot eating cheese. His name is Otis, of course. Haila asks him about Collins, who he’s friends of sorts with. Her friend Kay is afraid of Collins. There’s also another daffy professor named Simons (Purdy), who’s working on a twelve-volume complete history of education. These guys are my goals. Later on, Collins catches Haila in a state of undress, by which I mean she’s basically wearing a vest. The landlord, of course, blames her for entertaining men in her room. She goes to check on Otis, but finds him dead, with a knife in his heart. Kay is hiding behind the mirror, but protests her innocence. She tells Haila to hold off on calling the police, which is definitely non-suspicious behaviour.

Lucia’s husband Gerard finally comes home, and in turns out that he’s the one who’s stolen everyone’s clothes. Kayla’s husband Jeff (Sterling) returns, just as the body is discovered. When we get back from the break, they’re making out, so I guess it was a big turn-on. A gravelly-voiced detective, Captain Henry, has arrived, and points out that no one has a witness as to where they were.

Suspicions start flying, and settle on the new arrival, then Professor Simons. Academics are known to kill their own. There’s a long sequence where everyone stares at each other, with the cameras moving around following everyone’s gaze. The detective holds everyone as “material witnesses”, forbidding them from leaving the house, which totally sounds legal.

In the privacy of her room, Haila tells her husband that she’s sure it’s Collins. Kay says that she was in Otis’s room looking for a rare letter she gave him. She says that Otis was blackmailing her over it. Simons fears that the killer is trying to frame him. Kayla and her husband interrogate him. They leave, but then he gets a VOICE-OVER saying “Now then Mr. Collins, what’s your next move.” Wild stuff.

They move on to Gerard, who swears he was at his “club” at the time of the murder. The couple still seems to find this all very sexy, kissing on Gerard’s bed. Haila then finds a business card for Samuel Dunbar on the floor, the same thing she found next to Block’s body. The husband leaves to see Dunbar, and tells his wife that she doesn’t have to worry about being murdered. Well, that’s nice.

Haila then overhears Collins talking to Kay, and wanders out onto the fire escape to listen to them. She’s quickly discovered. It turns out that the two of them are married, which explains why Kay was so afraid of him. Cat-kicking really turns her on. Later, we see Simons putting on a hat as ominous music plays. He unscrews a light bulb and slips out. Things are getting WILD. Kayla hears someone coming into her room, and thinks it’s her husband, but it’s actually a guy who looks like Simons. She screams and says that the murderer came back. There’s something spooky on the stairs, but it’s just the kid in a mask, and things have suddenly gotten very Goosebumps.

After another ad break, dawn of the next day has arrived, and Jeff has finally gotten back from what is presumably an all-night bender. He tells Kayla what he’s learned from Dunbar: that Block had a racket hitting up Ivy League alumni for phony donations. Tom also encourages the Professor of being in on the racket, and he reluctantly admits to it — but not to the murder. When he hears about the letter, the Prof thinks that it was actually Kay and Collins who killed Block over the letter.

The cops are still interrogating Gerard, revealing that he hasn’t actually been away for the past six years — he’s just been at another apartment in Manhattan. The key turns out to be the chalk drawing that young Walter made on the Prof’s jacket. It turns out that he’s been replaced by a clean-jacketed impostor.

It’s nice that she doesn’t have to be rescued, I guess.

Of course, our heroine is in immediate danger, having gone down to the library and gotten into an elevator with the murderer. She jars some kind of tape recorder while she’s in there, revealing his identity. He briefly tries strangling her, but in the end he’s just an old man and she overpowers him. She reunites with her husband, and the cop goes to arrest the fake Simons. And with that, it’s more cheery couplehood. The ad for next week promises something called “My Granny Van”, which sounds grody.

What I thought: “There Was A Crooked Man”, apparently named after a now-out-of-favour nursery rhyme, is a relatively routine murder mystery in a mildly interesting setting. The story swaps the upper-class manors of much mystery fiction for a boarding house full of young women and local eccentrics. It seems more like an hour-long episode of Suspense than what Studio One had been up to, but hey, it’s June and they have to fill the schedule any way they can.

The characters are well-drawn, but the script is a little too over-encumbered for a one-hour drama, packed with too many twists and red herrings. (I probably screwed up the plot description somewhere along the way, although that could be because I was watching on headphones in a Starbucks.) Some aspects of the plot, like the two amateur academics’ not-particularly-nefarious shakedown, could definitely be better developed.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the story is its heroes, the couple of Jeff and Haila. At the beginning of the story, all of the women are waiting for their husbands to return — from the war, presumably, although this is never stated. They are independent and even industrious on their own, but their lives are in a kind of stasis, stuck in a waiting period before the next phase (marriage, children, a home in the suburbs) can begin.

There’s a long history of married couples as sleuths, with the most famous and influential being Dashiell Hammett’s Nick & Nora. “Crooked Man” goes further than most in linking the grisly violence of the murder with the erotics of the couple: the two are constantly making out, even as death and danger surround them. Freud’s two drives, eros and thanatos, are often linked in the crime genre. Here, as there’s nothing very erotic about the crimes, it’s the protagonists — particularly the occasionally-unclothed Kayla — who have to bear the burden of seducing the audience.

Nickell uses extreme close-up to build the viewer’s suspicion.

If the couple form is sanctified, then the alternative has to be vilified, and it is. Unmarried, introverted men — social outsiders — are under suspicion in this story, and for the most part this suspicion turns out to be justified. Otis and the Professor are undesirable men who have chosen to place their meaning in learning instead of romance, and they are ultimately revealed to be frauds and criminals. Collins, who initially appears cruel and violent, has his innocence confirmed at about the same time the audience learns he is actually married. Those who remain permanently outside heteronormative bonds are a threat to them.

The crime genre is often read as merely reactionary, restoring social norms at the conclusion of every case. At the same time, these stories are often able to represent the socially abject in a way that other genres aren’t. So, as an intellectually pretentious man who lives in a cheap apartment and has little hopes of attaining heteronormative success, I felt a kind of connection with Otis and the Professor. When they were ultimately shown to be villains, that pang of connection became a little more painful, but didn’t go away.

Coming up next: Suspense protests that it’s no hero, but meets the challenge of Studio One head on.

Episode 206: Studio One – “The Man Who Had Influence” (May 29, 1950)

What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based on a novel by Don Mankiewicz which was adapted by Worthington Miner and directed by Franklin Schaffner.. “The Man Who Had Influence” stars Stanley Ridges, Robert Sterling, King Calder, Anne Bancroft and Sally Hester. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, May 29, 1950 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.

What happened: An old backroom politician, R. C. Grant (Ridges), advises his aide Harry to stay anonymous if he wants to really have influence — just like he has. They meet with a man who hasn’t heard his advice, Senator Scott, and Scott’s bright young daughter Sally (Hester). Grant’s problem is his son David (Sterling), a young troublemaker who relies on his dad’s money to get through college and stay out of trouble. Anyway, the shitty son is taking Sally out on a date. Some guys have all the luck.

The fatal ristorante.

At a corny-looking Italian restaurant, David is at it again, trying to blackmail an underage waitress into going out on a date with him. Sally ends up dancing with Harry instead., while a drunken but still charming David takes the young girl Maria (Bancroft) home. The next morning, David can’t find his car or remember anything about the previous night. Sally decides to break off the engagement, saying that he isn’t a man.

An old Italian woman, Ms. Cassini, comes around looking for her daughter Maria. The Chief of Police also arrives, saying they found the car in a lake with a dead Maria in it. He takes David off to jail, and Grant tells Harry he’s about to see something really dirty. Presumably he took out his collection of stag films during the act break.

David spends a fitful night in a jail cell. The card-playing jail guard (Calder) has no sympathy, but is still sure that he’ll get off. Grant is already working on things with his lawyers. He wants Sally to pretend that she and David are still engaged, but she objects, denouncing the corrupt old man. After she leaves, Grant swears to destroy her in melodramatic fashion.

One of his father’s doctors attributes David’s memory loss to a concussion, but he doesn’t believe it — he thinks that it was psychological. Scott starts giving Grant a moral lecture, and immediately gets kicked out. Grant talks to Harry about David’s mother, who died before she was thirty, and who’s still an emotional sore spot.

His normal tricks aren’t working, however. Sally has apparently testified against David, and severely damaged his case. She comes by to embrace him, and explain that she thought he needed the punishment to make him a man. He agrees.

The verdict occurs during the commercial break, and it’s “guilty.” Grant is still trying to lean on the judge to go lenient on him. He offers the judge money to take care of his wife’s illness, and is eventually able to break through his professions of integrity. The prison guard says that he’d be chief of police if he hadn’t crossed Grant, thus explaining why he’s given so many bitter

We finally get to the actual courtroom. David gives a speech to the audience saying that he wants the full sentence. (A whole ten years!) He exposes the whole plot to buy off the judge. The judge says he has to be fair, and sentences him to two years, which all of the good guys seem happy about for some reason.

What I thought: This episode deals with a subject near and dear to my heart — the evil and corrupt nature of the rich and powerful. Dramas of this era are often about the disruption of an idyllic Western way of life, with the status quo restored at the end — think, for instance, of “A Passenger to Bali.” However, in the world of “The Man Who Had Influence”, corruption is taken as an ongoing state of affairs, one that is challenged but by no means resolved by the ending.

Perhaps because of this, the episode feels the need to bludgeon the viewer with the moral of the story. Every character, from the corrupt politician himself to the innocent daughter, has a monologue about how evil the central character is. It’s supposed to be a legal drama, but we don’t spend much time in the actual courtroom, with crucial moment like Sally’s testimony and the conviction going undramatized in favour of long jailhouse ruminations. It’s a character piece, but the characters seem two-dimensional and phony.

Perhaps the most unconvincing part of this all is that everyone treats the scandal — a pretty routine case of taking care of a rowdy son — as the most evil, dirtiest thing ever. Even if the plot suggests such corruption is routine, the dialogue tells us that everyone is shocked. In this way, as cynical as the story thinks it is, it’s actually a bit in denial.

In reality, both Grant and his son would likely find a way to believe that they were doing the right thing. They would become more interested in saving the young, privileged man from his destructive actions than the working-class girl he killed — as, indeed, the script is more interested in David’s redemption than the dead body which is largely forgotten after the first act.

We again have a young Eva Marie Saint here, but she’s in a background role. Miner doesn’t seem to have grasped her star potential like he grasped Charlton Heston’s. Also of note is Anne Bancroft, who expresses a lot of charisma in her brief appearance as doomed Maria, but would have to wait a couple of decades for her star turn. The main cast’s performances are mostly workmanlike, with Ridges trying and failing to make the juicy part of Grant memorable.

This is actually a visual effect, not just bad film.

Perhaps the most talent was behind the camera, as Franklin Schaeffner once again took the role of director. The set-up was still basically a filmed play, but Schaeffner does his best to liven it up. His camera is always moving, taking in different aspects of the set. At one point David and his guard are filmed through the bars of his cell, isolating the prisoner in the middle third of the screen, while another shot sees Grant distorted through the lens of an eyeglass. It’s nothing revolutionary, but it’s nice to have something interesting to look at with a script this tedious.

Coming up next: It’s back to the variety show trenches as I face a Cavalcade of Stars.

Episode 192.5: Studio One – “The Scarlet Letter” (April 3, 1950)

What I watched: A second-season episode of the anthology series Studio One, created by Worthington Miner. This episode stars Mary Sinclair, John Baragrey and Richard Purdy. It was directed by Franlkin J. Schaeffner and written by Joseph Liss based off the novel by Nathaniel Hawhtorne. “The Scarlet Letter” aired on April 3, 1950 at 10 PM on CBS. It is available to watch on YouTube.

What happened: We open with a visit from Worthington Miner himself, who is here to mark the special occasion. This episode is part of the Hawthorne Centennial celebrations marking 100 years since the publication of The Scarlet Letter. The scholar presents a plaque to Hawhtorne’s elderly granddaughter Hildegaard Hawthorne, who wonders what her famous ancestor would have made of “this barbarous thing” Miner is doing with his most famous work. It doesn’t really seem like a gag.

We open in Boston 300 years ago, with Hester Prynne (Sinclair) making her way through a crowd carrying a baby. They’re not very fond of her. She’s already wearing the eponymous letter A, which people think she made too fancy. Hester is placed in the stocks. The Minister and Governor come through as an old hag demands that Hester and the man she had a baby with be hanged. She’d probably be a Trump voter today. Minister Arthur Dimmesdale (Baragrey) is asked to make her repent, and seems pretty reluctant about it. Hmm. He asks Hester to reveal her lover, but she stays mum.

It tastes awful, but it works.

Two men are discussing the case, talking about how good it is that iniquity is punished in New England. Well, not on the football field. One man, a foreigner, wants to talk to her directly. Hester was married to a doctor from Amsterdam who has been two years lost at sea, hence the sin of bearing a baby. But whoops, the foreigner is actually said Dutch doctor. He gives the baby some medicine, which Hester is suspicious of. They have a big blow-out argument about how she never loved him. He tells her to promise not to tell anyone they were married, to avoid him looking like a cuck, and infiltrates the colony as Roger Chillingworth (Purdy).

Time passes, and the child is now a precocious young girl named Pearl, who is being interrogated by a town elder. He is aghast to discover that Hester has been embroidering clothes for the Governor, and that the daughter doesn’t go to school and doesn’t know of her mother’s shame. In the town square, one woman is willing to forgive Hester, but the rest shout her down. The Governor thinks Pearl is beautiful, which is just a bit creepy. He calls Hester and Pearl in and not-so-subtly suggests that she give up her child to the town to raise. The elder quizzes Pearl to see if she has appropriate teaching. Things go badly when Pearl says that she was not born but plucked from a bush of roses. Well, that’s true with sufficient euphemisms. Arthur interferes, agreeing that “God gave her the child.” Roger again swears to figure out who the real father is.

Things take an abrupt turn into an internal monologue, as Arthur reflects on the guilt and torment he feels, although he’s still vague about it. Come on Worthington, you’re not going to pull a plot twist. Roger is doing some alchemy stuff with beakers and chemicals. He discusses the nature of confession and guilt with Dimmesdale. Chillingworth gives him a draught of “medicine” to drink, and he promptly passes out, allowing Roger to search his person. When he wakes up, Arthur is struck by the nearness of death and the hypocrisy of his sermon, and begs for forgiveness at the stocks. Fortunately, it’s a rainy night, so nobody hears him.

When he gets done writhing in guilt, Arthur learns that the Governor has died, with Roger at his side. Hester and Pearl come across him, and he acts super-weird, holding their hands to their chest. Chillingworth looks on, which really freaks Dimmesdale out. Roger visits Hester, telling her that he’s received the magistrate’s permission for her to remove the letter. She’s not interested, instead castigating him for hounding Arthur and becoming a “fiend”, and promising to tell Arthur that Roger is her husband.

After the break, Arthur receives a letter from Hester. (Ah, that must be the letter in the title.) He reads it and promptly burns it. Later, Hester meets Arthur in the woods, and he once again collapses from guilt. She tells him Roger is her husband, and Arthur pleads for God to forgive them, but says that Roger is a worse sinner than him for violating the human heart. Sorry, that’s not how Puritanism goes. Hester pleads for him to leave town, but Arthur says that he is dying. Hester hugs him but calls him “Roger”, which I’m pretty sure is one of those live-TV flubs.

Later, Hester takes Pearl to a holiday, where everyone is waiting for a procession to board. Hester has booked passage for Arthur on a ship, but Roger has volunteered to come with him. Arthur gets up in front of the town and admits that he is Pearl’s father. He pulls open his shirt to reveal the letter “A” carved out in wounds on his chest, and collapses. And that’s the plot of The Scarlet Letter, all right.

What I thought: The Scarlet Letter was one of the first significant American novels, and has had pride of place in the American literary canon and high-school reading lists for at least a century. Despite this, it feels as though there’s no definitive on-screen version of the story. Wikipedia lists a dozen film versions, including one adapted by Wim Wenders and another starring Demi Moore, but all seem to have instantly faded into obscurity. Probably the best-remembered is the 2010 teen comedy Easy A, a loose adaptation at best. The Studio One rendition of the story is not that definitive version, although it is an interesting curiosity.

Unlike many other of the novel adaptations on Studio One, “The Scarlet Letter” gets almost all of the novel’s story in without seeming crammed or confusing. Outside of some clumsy exposition in the early scenes, the story more or less works as a one-hour teleplay. It was always a slim novel, and one more focused on introspection than plot. It does leave out the very end of the novel, where Hester dies in the wilderness and is buried in a pauper’s grave, but perhaps that was too depressing even for Worthington Miner.

One issue is the big letter A itself, which makes Hester look like an off-brand superhero and the blocking seems to be hiding as much as possible.

Mary Sinclair is first-billed for playing Hester Prynne, but she sometimes feels like a secondary character in Liss’s adaptation, which foregrounds Dimmesdale as a kind of tortured, Byronic hero. John Baragrey definitely has a kind of steely charisma which makes this interpretation work, but he seems altogether too masculine and fit to play Arthur, who comes across as fairly pathetic in Hawthorne’s original text. Richard Purdy as Chillworth and the uncredited young actress playing Pearl are easily the stand-outs of the cast.

Today, The Scarlet Letter is taught in large part as an account of just how oppressive and brutal Puritan society can be. Certainly American society in 1950 was far from the Puritans, and often more rough around the edges than the media would suggest. But there were probably still plenty of people in that time who would shun a woman who had a child as a result of adultery, as there are today. The Studio One version avoids the still-existent strains of moralism by making the story primarily about Arthur’s guilt, and how it destroys him.

“The Scarlet Letter” was clearly a prestige project for Studio One, with Miner himself making an appearance and connecting the story to the novel’s centenary celebrations. Schaffner does his best to add a sense of drama to the small set. But I’m not sure anyone who was skeptical of television’s ability to create great art would be persuaded by this competent but somewhat dry run-through of a century-old classic. Ultimately, The Scarlet Letter may just be too introspective a novel to make a great film or television program. But I have a feeling that people are going to keep trying anyway.

Coming up next: Suspense offers us 1000-to-1 odds. Never tell me the odds!

Episode 189: Studio One – “A Passenger to Bali” (March 27, 1950)

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.

Nickell lets us know Walkes is a bad guy by shooting him in extreme close-up.

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 unwashed masses.

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.

I can’t work out the weird book format that Westinghouse uses to introduce these ads.

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.

Episode 173: Studio One – “The Willow Cabin” (February 27, 1950)

What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based off the novel by Pamela Frankau and adapted by Sumner Locke Elliot. The Studio One adaptation stars Priscilla Gillette, Charlton Heston, Joan Wetmore, Joan Seymour and Francis Bethencourt. It was directed by Franklin Schaffner. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, February 27, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.

What happened: After performing on stage, Carol (Gillette) is congratulated for a great performance by just about everyone. Her friend introduces her to the famous surgeon Dr. Michael Knowle (Heston), and the two go to a party later. They come back to her house later, chatting about how terrible the party is, until Michael cock-blocks himself by bringing up that he’s still married to a woman named Mercedes who he now hates. (What is it with this guy?) He makes a hasty exit, but Carol nevertheless tells him that she’s in love with him.

The opening shot features Gillette in the centre of the frame as everything backstage moves around her. It’s striking, and it goes on for quite a while.

Carol ‘s agent Jay Brookfield (Bethencourt) has gotten her offered a role in a new play by the acclaimed director Rokov. She’s cool to the prospect saying that she isn’t sure she wants such a big career, which makes her agent furious. She also learns that the set designer of the play is Mercedes. Well, they say theatre is a small world. Nothing really comes of this.

Michael takes Carol into Cold Ash, a country town, to meet with his sister Dorothy (Seymour). They start making out (the first two, not the sister) until Carol notices that Michael has etched he and Mercedes’s initials into the window, I assume when they were twelve. He’s heading off to America to work on a famous client, and Carol decides to go with him.

On the boat Carol surprises Michael with her presence. He’s upset because she blew off Rokov, then makes up his mind to ask for a divorce from Mercedes. Michael wants her to swear that she’s sure she loves him, which seems reasonable. Just then, World War II starts. No, really.

After the act break, the war is well underway. Carol is in the lady army and her unit is being moved to Cold Ash. Michael is working in an army hospital and Carol thinks he’s overworked. They can’t find Mercedes to get divorced, which Carol describes as a struggle on par with WW2. Then Michael shows up drunk. He’s learned that Mercedes has been captured by the Germans.

Michael is assigned to go to the front line, which makes Carol sad. She breaks the engraved window pane, just to do something symbolic. Later, she receives a newspaper saying that Michael has been found mysteriously dead in a hotel room. I hear that, I think auto-erotic asphyxiation, but that’s probably not where they’re going. Dorothy reads the paper to her, which notes that a bottle of sleeping pills was found by his bed. Carol faints.

The finding of the inquest is “death by misadventure”, a euphemism that frustrates Carol, as she thinks it was a suicide. She blames it on Mercedes, not the whole war thing. She vows to track down the evil wife after the war. Fortunately, it only takes one Westinghouse ad to end the war. Carol goes back to acting, albeit reluctantly.

Mercedes (Wetmore) comes to Cold Ash, and Carol is finally able to meet her. Things are a little frosty, to say the least. But Mercedes says that, despite what Michael said, he never asked to divorce. She also claims that she was the one who initiated the separation, despite his obsession with her. The two women also disagree on whether or not Michael committed suicide. Michael wrote Carol a letter on the night that he died, finally asking for the divorce. The two women decide to stay and have a drink.

What I thought: This is another literary adaptation from Studio One, and another use of its emerging star Charlton Heston. In this, it probably most resembles the series’s Jane Eyre adaptation, also a romantic drama starring a married man. That episode also featured Heston and Wetmore, with Locke Elliot producing the adapted script — indeed, at times this almost seems like a modern-dress revival of Jane Eyre. Perhaps it was just the novelty of the material, but I actually liked this a good deal more than that episode. It seems less like a bid for prestige and more like a genuine attempt at adult drama.

The Willow Cabin was a largely-autobiographical novel by Pamela Frankau based on her relationship with a poet. Frankau didn’t write for almost a decade after his death, which finds a parallel in the novel with Carol’s indifference towards acting. (Frankau was bisexual and spent most of the rest of her life in a relationship with a woman, which isn’t in the TV show for obvious reason, although the last scene does have a bit of a vibe to it.)

Charlton Heston is SAD.

Heston is in more of a supporting role here, and the role of an agonized, self-loathing poet doesn’t really suit him. Nevertheless, his charm immediately draws attention (as does that of the less-famous Gillette), and it’s fairly obvious why our protagonist would quickly fall in love with him. Also of future-fame note is director Franklin Schaffner, who would direct Heston eighteen years later in Planet of the Apes.

This was one of the services provided by the anthology drama which doesn’t really have a parallel in contemporary TV: a young talent, once discovered, could develop their craft by appearing in a variety of roles. They could then transition to bigger things, as Heston did, without needing to be written out or replaced. I’m not sure if there was enough of fandom or a critical body for viewers to anticipate the episodes where Heston appeared, but it’s clear that Miner and the other staff of Studio One knew what they had and wanted to make the most of it while they had the chance.

As for the actual story, I’m still sort of digesting it. Perhaps the most striking element of the story is its portrayal of World War II as almost a background element of the plot. The war is only notable for the additional strain it adds to the central romance. At one point,Michael’s quest for a divorce is directly compared to the conflict which killed tens of millions of people, which seems a little risible to me.

I did, however, love the final scene. The episode withholds Wetmore’s Mercedes for forty minutes, keeping her an off-screen menace, until finally revealing that she wasn’t a menace at all. Gillette again does well portraying Carol’s stubborn refusal to let go of the narrative she’d built up in her mind. So many of these anthology dramas portray one-dimensional villains that it’s refreshing to see a story where everyone is just, well, human.

A word from our sponsors: I had to comment on the last Westinghouse ad, which promises a utopia built on “atomic energy” (by which I assume they mean nuclear.) Incredibly, they show a mushroom cloud, directly linking the new technology to the bombings which killed tens of thousands of people. I guess trivializing WW2 is the theme of the night. In any case, it’s extremely 1950s.

Coming up next: A presumably cheerier episode of television on Texaco Star Theatre.

Episode 129: Studio One – “Jane Eyre” (December 12, 1949)

What I watched: A second-season episode of Studio One, an anthology drama series created by Worthington Miner. This episode was based off the novel by Charlotte Bronte and adapted by Sumner Locke Elliot. The Studio One adaptation stars Mary Sinclair, Charlton Heston and Viola Roche, Ethel Remey and JoanWetmore. It was directed by Franklin Schaeffner. This episode aired at 9:00 PM on Monday, December 12, 1949 on CBS, and is available to view at the Internet Archive.

What happened: We open with the titular Jane Eyre (Sinclair) leaving the Lowood School for Girls, now a full-grown woman. The old woman at the gate seems pretty angry with her, calling her wicked and willfull. Jane ends up at a big drafty house, where she is to serve as governess for a young French girl named Adele. Overseeing this are the housemaids, the kindly Mrs. Fairfax (Remey) and the cautious Grace Poole (Wetmore.) They seem to get along, but spooky things are afoot.

A few minutes later, Jane is spontaneously monologuing at night about how much she loves the house when she hears some creepy laughter. She opens the door, and is yelled at by the Grace. She is told to never enter that part of the house. The next day, the master of the house has unpredictably arrived. This is, of course, the surly Mr. Rochester (played by a Grinch-like Charlton Heston), who mostly seems interested in whether or not Jane can play the spinet. He asks Jane to eat with him, much to the displeasure of the crazy women looking down from above. He tells her that the daughter is not his own, but rather one he adopted after her frivolous mother ran off to Italy. He then begins to get all angry and angsty, and Jane quietly leaves.

The camera stops us from seeing Rochester’s face for a while, creating suspense and emphasizing that Jane is continually subject to others’ glare

When he’s passed out from drink, we see the older woman we’ve seen previously holding a candle and creeping downstairs. She lights the carpet on fire, and smoke starts to go up. Jane wakes in the middle of the night, and finds said candle on her doorstep. She goes down to the smoky parlour and wakes up Rochester, then helps him put out the fire. He tells her not to tell anyone about the incident, despite her freaking out and him nearly dying.

After the act break, Rochester is entertaining two saucy tarts (one of them Roche in the shrunk-down role of Blanche Ingram) when Jane and Adele appear at the door, the picture of domesticity. She heads inside, but doesn’t fit in. She then tells Mrs. Fairfax that she must leave, because she loves Rochester. He comes out to apologize for his rude guests. He tells the girls that he’s lost most of his fortune earlier this year, and they immediately lose interest.

Adele is distraught at the news that her nanny is leaving. Rochester, meanwhile, just wants to know what he’s done to alienate her. He tells her that he’s very attached to her, in grisly language. Finally, Rochester confesses his love for plain Jane, and asks her to marry him, and she says yes.

Four weeks later, they hold the wedding. A Mr. Mason arrives from the West Indies, wanting to see Rochester. Jane comes down the aisle (okay, it’s just out into their backyard) in her wedding dress, but all is not well. Crazy Bertha is watching on from the window. Mason interrupts at the appropriate time, proclaiming that Rochester was already married to Bertha Mason in Jamaica. Bertha, it turns out, is the crazy woman in the attic, and Heston intones that God is punishing him. (This would be a go-to throughout his career.)

The direction also continually emphasizes Rochester’s size in comparison to Jane.

After a pitch for a Westinghouse electric blanket, Rochester summons Bertha down from her attic. She shrieks and lunges for Rochester’s throat — an understandable reaction for someone who’s been stuck in an attic for fifteen years. He does his poor-me routine again, and Mason takes off. This leads Jane to stand by a tree moodily, doing a voice-over about how she is like the wind. She hears Rochester’s voice, and decides to come back to him.

During her not-clearly-explained absence, the west wing of the house has burned down. As a result, Bertha is dead, and Rochester is hobbled and blinded. Despite this, she is still in love with him, and promises never to leave again. I swear, this felt like slightly less of a deus ex machina in the book. The closing credits advertise an adaptation of Mary Poppins which is sadly unavailable.

What I thought: Jane Eyre is probably my favourite Victorian novel, although that’s not such a difficult accomplishment. (In general, I find English fiction from this period kind of trite and parochial compared to what was happening in countries like France and Russia — but that’s neither here nor there.) So I was looking forward to this episode of Studio One. This episode is fairly accomplished, and certainly not a bad attempt at the material given the limitations of the format, but it left me feeling a little indifferent.

In order to fit a one-hour running time, Studio One had to cut many of my favourite parts from the novel, like Jane’s childhood as a rebellious and inquisitive girl or the strange interlude at a house with strangers who turn out to be her cousins. Elliot’s script instead narrows the focus to the novel’s most famous aspect, the romance between Jane and Rochester. This has the effect of making Jane’s character rather flat — she’s mostly a passive participant in this version of the story, not the strong-willed woman we hear about in the first few minutes.

Nevertheless, there’s clearly a reason why this romance has been so successful and fascinating for so many generations. For a male audience, the story provides a moral patina on ditching your old wife with problems for a hot young one. (And indeed, with Charlton Heston in the role of Rochester, the TV version at time risks becoming his story.) And from feminine perspective, Jane Eyre provides a Pamela-esque fantasy of class transformation, with the “plain Jane” bagging a handsome nobleman. Such fantasies still remain popular in the British imagination — just ask Harry Potter.

In addition to the romantic appeal, this was a story that much of the viewing audience would have already been familiar with, either from their English classes or from the film version released earlier in the decade (starring a reluctant Orson Welles as Rochester.) From this perspective, it’s okay that the script doesn’t quite hang together in isolation: the viewers would be able to fill in the blanks, and just enjoy seeing their favourite scenes re-enacted in the comfort of their own home. For Studio One, it was also another canonical text to add to their prestige and prove the viability of television as a means of presenting fine art and literature.

Jane Eyre is also a text that has been subject to frequent interpretation and reinterpretation within English literary studies. One of the most famous works of feminist criticism is Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, which focuses on the really abominable way the text treats Rochester’s first wife Bertha. Jane’s impiety is fine for a young woman, but Bertha’s fate — trapped in an attic, loathed and disregarded by her husband, and ultimately consigned to a grizzly off-screen death — is what becomes of women who go too far in their transgressions against patriarchal society.

The madwoman in the attic.

In most readings of the novel, there is also a colonial aspect to the villification of Grace, whose origins in Jamaica are textually linked to her madness. In the Studio One version Grace is imagined as a white woman, so this aspect of the source material has been de-emphasized. Nevertheless, Grace remains profoundly Other, a monstrous face in the window overlooking the happy domestic scenes of Jane, Rochester, and their surrogate child Adele. She’s barely even a character, just an obstacle the more neurotypical characters have to overcome. So yeah, it’s not the most sensitive portrayal of mental illness, and the Studio One adaptation does nothing to make things any better.

This would be Charlton Heston’s second appearance on Studio One, after “Of Human Bondage”, another literary adaptation in which he played a Byronic antihero. (We’ve also previously seen Viola Roche in Suspense.) For the role of Rochester, in which he needs to project more masculine confidence than sympathetic frailty, he’s perfect. I would imagine that Worthington Miner was hoping that he could make Heston a regular feature of the program, maybe even making him the kind of dramatic star that TV didn’t really have in this period.

For all the competence of this adaptation, and Heston’s charisma, it still feels a little hollow. So much of what I liked about Bronte’s novel was Jane’s strong, feisty narrative voice, and that’s almost completely absent here. As a result, this seems like less of a story and more of a sequence of events without much of a perspective.

Coming up next: We return to less highbrow fare with yet another episode in The Life of Riley.

Episode 125: Studio One – Henry IV (December 5, 1949)

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 shakily-shot castle, according to an Internet Archive commenter, is
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 calling card of live TV drama: a boom mic dropping down into the frame.

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.