TZ-FAQ_ebook04

Or, Do Robo-Cows Dream of Electric Rustlers?

The western has been a staple of American television almost since Americans were sold their first receivers. Before that, radio told the tales, and for more than a century now, the movies have, too. Indeed, the era of the real-life classic western was still alive and well when the first actors and actresses (and horses, of course) were gathered to retell their tales on stage, with many vaudeville stars of the late nineteenth century themselves stepping straight out of that age of derring-do.

Since that time, the popularity of the western has risen and fallen; early in the twenty-first century, only the cable hit Deadwood has truly captured the public imagination. Fifty-plus years ago, however, as The Twilight Zone took its first steps into the limelight, westerns not only proliferated, they dominated the television schedules.

A mere decade had elapsed since 1949 brought the first-ever western TV series, The Hopalong Cassidy Show, but in 1959, no less than twenty-six prime-time network shows were westerns, with many of them not only ranked among the most popular shows in the nation, but also the longest running in network history.

Gunsmoke (aired from 1955 to 1975), The Rifleman (1958–1963), Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958–1961), Laramie (1959–1963), Have Gun—Will Travel (1957–1963), Bonanza (1959–1973), The Virginian (1962–1971) and Wagon Train (1957–1965) remain some of the best-loved shows in televisual memory, and while many critics (Rod Serling among them) would complain at the apparent paucity of ideas that were thrown into the average western potboiler, the public didn’t care.

Even today, forty years after its final episode, Gunsmoke remains the longest-running series in U.S. television history, its twenty-season, 635-pisode run probably destined never to be eclipsed.

Of course, The Twilight Zone had to saddle up the palomino and head out to ride the range. It just chose a somewhat less conventional range than Marshall Matt Dillon would ever have recognized.

“Mr. Denton on Doomsday” (First broadcast: October 16, 1959)

Serling described this episode as a twist on the classic “high noon” western spoof. However, it’s also a classic of the genre, the story of a once-feared marksman, Al Denton, who lost his taste for gunplay after he killed a sixteen-year-old boy. But he is nudged back into action by an itinerant peddler, the ominously named Henry J. Fate, a dealer in utensils, liniments, medicines and potions.

Together, we tumble down a figurative rabbit hole, to where a bottle awaits. “Drink me,” it says, “and become the fastest gun in the land.” For a few seconds anyway. Denton drinks, but then he is challenged by a boy who drank from the same bottle.

They face off, draw and fire. Both injure the other’s gun hand, and Denton announces that they are both “blessed,” for neither will be expected to indulge in gunplay again.

Mr. Fate smiles—Denton has redeemed himself.

“Dust” (First broadcast: January 6, 1961)

Loosely modeled on Serling’s 1958 story for Playhouse 90, the brutal attack on racism “A Town Has Turned to Dust”; based, too, on a story he submitted to Dr. Christian almost a decade before, “Dust” felt almost as though it were intended to compensate for the festive cheer of The Twilight Zone’s recent Christmas installment. Rod Serling’s first new script of the new year was also one of his darkest. At least until it was transformed into one of his weakest.

It is set deep in the southwest, in a village where a wagon operated by a drunken Luis Gallegos accidentally struck and killed a little girl. Gallegos is tried for her murder and found guilty.

He is sentenced to hang, from a rope that has been purchased from a mysterious traveling salesman named Sykes. It is a good strong rope, he insists; but Gallegos should not despair. For Sykes also has some magical dust that he’s willing to sell . . . for a price, of course. Throw it into the air, he swears, and the dust will transform hate into love.

Of course it won’t, it’s just a con trick, and to prove that Sykes cannot be trusted, his rope is scarcely fit for its purpose either. No sooner has Gallegos been strung up than the rope snaps and he falls to the ground, while a crowd of onlookers, far from feeling loving, howl for a fresh rope to hang him anew.

His life is saved only by the parents of the dead girl, as they look upon the anguish of Gallegos’s father. Enough that one family has lost a child; they cannot bear for there to be a second.

“A Hundred Yards over the Rim” (First broadcast: April 7, 1961)

This uncharacteristically drab Serling time traveler transports us back to the year 1847, to the territory of New Mexico. There, a handful of settlers, bound for California, are fast beginning to regret that they ever left Ohio. For all they have found has been deprivation, starvation, sickness and death.

Even as we join them, Christian Horn is nursing a dying eight-year-old son and a heartsick wife. And, according to Serling’s opening narration, “he’s the only one remaining who has even a fragment of the dream left. Mr. Chris Horn . . . who’s going over the top of a rim to look for water and sustenance . . . and in a moment will move into . . . the Twilight Zone.”

Or, at least, into 1961, for that is where he finds himself as he crests the hill, walking down to the Airflite Café and Gas Station.

There, he is introduced to a doctor who introduces him in turn to penicillin—sufficient to save the boy’s life and allow him to grow, as the modern doc has realized, into one of the most legendary physicians of his age.

“The Passersby” (First broadcast: October 6, 1961)

Serling’s teleplay this week was based on a script he contributed to the anthology series The Matinee, back in 1958. “The Cause” was seriously revised (and, of course, pruned) in order to fit The Twilight Zone’s parameters, but still it traveled back to April 1865, to the very last days of the American Civil War; perhaps, to the first days of Reconstruction; or even, as Serling would have it, to that “strange province that knows neither North nor South, a place we call . . . the Twilight Zone.”

Timed (as were other, similarly themed, episodes) to coincide with the ongoing centennial of the American Civil War, “The Passersby” is a very straightforward ghost story—a woman sitting on the front porch of her home, watching as a seemingly endless parade of the war’s walking wounded pass by.

Among them, she comes to realize, are several whom she believed to be dead, her own husband among them. And slowly the understanding dawns on her; that she too is dead, felled by fever a few weeks before . . . an understanding voiced by the so-recently assassinated Abraham Lincoln as he too passed by.

“The Grave” (First broadcast: October 27, 1961)

Writer Montgomery Pittman stepped into the world of the great American western for this episode, although naturally he twisted the trope before delivering it. According to the CBS press release that preceded the episode’s broadcast, it was based on a legend he heard while growing up on a ranch in Oklahoma.

“I was just a lad . . . when I first heard the story of a desperado who swore he would reach out from the grave and get the man who had been tracking him down. It seemed that whenever the wind began to howl, my pappy and his friends would sit around the pot-bellied stove and he would tell the tale. This didn’t happen just once, but about anytime the wind was blowing up a storm.”

It’s a story of honor, played out by some of the finest actors the western has ever seen—Lee Van Cleef, Strother Martin and Lee Marvin—and soundtracked by themes familiar from past episodes of Gunsmoke.

Sykes is dead, shot down by lawmen just a couple of days before the bounty hunter Conny Miller hits town, himself hot in pursuit of the outlaw. Of course he’s too late, but that’s not the worst news that awaits him. On his deathbed, Sykes had cursed out Miller, insisting that the thief catcher was a craven coward; that Sykes had once challenged Miller to a gunfight and the hired gun failed to turn up.

Dying but still defiant, Sykes still wants to take his hunter down. Should Miller ever dare to step close to Sykes’s grave, the fading man swears, he will reach out of the ground and drag his adversary back to hell with him.

It’s an empty threat, of course—how can it be anything else? So, when the townsmen bet Miller that he wouldn’t dare put Sykes’s pledge to the test, of course the bounty hunter accepts the challenge. Alone at midnight, he will go to the cemetery and plant his bowie knife into the soil of the grave.

He does so, too. But the following morning, when the other men visit the site, Miller lies cold and dead alongside it, with his own knife through the fabric of his overcoat. Almost as if someone had reached out and grabbed it. . . .

“Still Valley” (First broadcast: November 24, 1961)

Rod Serling based his teleplay on the short story “The Valley Was Still” by Manly Wade Wellman, a piece first published in the August 1939 issue of Weird Tales. It is another Civil War epic, set in Virginia in 1863.

Scouting ahead of the main force, the Confederate soldier Joseph Paradine finds himself in a small town at the bottom of Channow Valley, there to discover it has been overrun by Union soldiers—every one of whom is frozen, statue-like, in the street.

Quickly, Paradine eliminates the possibilities—a plague, a disease, even the possibility that time, too, has become frozen. There is just one plausible explanation—the old man whom he meets, and who claims that the soldiers are the victims of witchcraft. A witchcraft that he, the seventh son of a seventh son, enacted in a bid to end the war altogether.

But he knows that his own death is imminent, and his plan still has a long way to go.

He offers Paradine the book containing the necessary incantations, but he has chosen the wrong man. A godfearing Christian, Paradine returns to camp with the book and explains what he has learned to his commanding officer. But he cannot and will not side with the Devil in the casting of spells.

The book is flung into the fire, and, the next day, the troops move out, heading north, toward a small town in Pennsylvania, a place called Gettysburg. The bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil will go ahead as scheduled.

“Showdown with Rance McGrew” (First broadcast: February 2, 1962)

Another classic western, twisting what the rest of the television universe regarded as a classic western, and scripted by Rod Serling from an original story idea by Frederic Louis Fox—well known as a writer for such shows as The Rebel, Johnny Ringo, Lawman, Zane Grey Theater and Black Saddle.

Like every other entry in a small TV Guide full of cowboy knockoffs, the western in question was based on that romance-strewn era, “some one hundred odd years ago, [when] a motley collection of tough mustaches galloped across the West, and left behind a raft of legends and legerdemains.”

But there is a catch. Serling does not attempt to portray the lives and loves of the men and women who lived and died back then. He attempts to encapsulate what they must be feeling today, as they see those lives so horribly romanticized on the television every night.

In a televisual world where the lives of even the most infamous western antihero has somehow been warped into a weekly succession of “ah’ve come for mah boy”s and “Yup, that’s mah steed, alraht”s; where the good guys wear white hats, and the bad guys never shave; and where even the lousiest, lowdown son-of-a-gun cattle thief is also a champion yodeler, actor Rance McGrew is the most clichéd of them all.

Worse than that, he’s not even a decent actor. He can glower all right, and say “pardner” with the best of them. But he forgets his lines, he fumbles his guns and he can barely walk down the street without calling for a stunt double.

So, when another of those pesky Rod Serling–schemed time slips transports him back to the real Wild West, he’s already out of his depth—and that’s before the ghost of Jesse James marches up to him and explains that there’s an afterlife full of cowboys who are sick to death of his weedy, weak portrayal of them.

So here’s what they’re going to do. Either McGrew makes certain that his show becomes more realistic or there will be a whole heap of trouble piling up around him. And just to make certain that McGrew takes things seriously, Jesse is going to join him back in 1962, to work as his agent.

Serling’s monologue completes the story. “The evolution of the so-called ‘adult western,’ and the metamorphosis of one Rance McGrew, formerly phony-baloney . . . now upright citizen with a preoccupation with all things involving tradition, truth and cowpoke predecessors. It’s the way the cookie crumbles and the six-gun shoots . . . in the Twilight Zone.”

This episode was something of a late arrival in the running order, replacing what was originally scheduled to be author Ray Bradbury’s debut as a contributor to The Twilight Zone. A Bradbury script titled “A Miracle of Rare Device” had already been assigned a production number (4812) before it was decided that it simply wasn’t going to work, and this tale was shoehorned in instead.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (First broadcast: February 28, 1964)

The Civil War again raises its head in what was (and would remain) the oldest story ever retold by The Twilight Zone, as Robert Enrico adapted an Ambrose Bierce shocker first published in the July 13, 1890, issue of The San Francisco Examiner.

It was not, however, a Twilight Zone creation—rather, it was an independent French production, much acclaimed in Europe and winner of the short subjects category at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. (An Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film followed in 1963.)

Produced by Marcel Ichal and Paul de Robaix, and directed by Jean Bofferty, La Rivière du Hibou was both haunted and haunting. Films and Filming magazine described it as “another fragment of time out of war,” and delivered some sense of the mood as well.

In the grey light before sunrise, in a woody Alabama gorge, they are hanging a man. We watch him escape and run for home and wife. There is little dialogue and no character-drawing to divert us from the action which, gripping the imagination throughout, is told principally by camera and soundtrack. . . .

The photography is breathtaking, conveying marvelously the right sense of things seen for the very first time. The climax is short, sharp and a bit flash, strictly irrelevant to the coolly observed poetics of the rest, and the film neither seeks nor achieves any real humanity; but within its imposed limits it is a complete success.

CBS authorized a payment of $20,000 for a single broadcast of the film as a part of The Twilight Zone, and while some consideration was given to simply reshooting it as an original presentation, few people took that notion seriously. The French film was simply too beautiful; so much so that even fears that it might be too arty for the average American viewer were shrugged off.

The result was one of the most remarkable pieces of television screened that season, and certainly one of the most glorious of all episodes of The Twilight Zone—a happenstance that even encouraged Serling to request viewing copies of two more Robert Enrico efforts for possible inclusion in the then still plausible sixth season: The Mocking Bird and Chickamauga.

The oldest author ever to be credited with a Twilight Zone episode, Ambrose Bierce would have been 122 when his “Occurrence at Owl Bridge” entered The Twilight Zone.

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“Mr. Garrity and the Graves” (First broadcast: May 8, 1964)

Rod Serling based this tale on “Alta—Boomtown to Boomtown,” an article by Salt Lake Tribune sports writer Mike Korologos that traced the tale of one of Utah’s leading ski resorts from its beginnings as a nineteenth-century silver mining town. Included in the story was the peculiar local legend of a stranger who came to town one day and, on learning that Alta possessed one of the most brutal murder and accident rates in the land, declared himself to be a Christlike figure, blessed with the power to bring back the dead.

Of course, he was a con man, his scheme relying on the fact that a lot of people in town would be heartily indisposed were their dead to return from the grave and begin demanding that their survivors hand back all the lost fortunes and inheritances that death had passed on.

And so it turned out. A collection among the townspeople (the living ones, at any rate) raised the princely sum of $2,500, offered to the stranger if only he and his unearthly powers would leave town, and so he did. Alta never heard of him again, and Alta’s dead slept on.

Serling’s story gave the stranger a name, Jared Garrity, and replaced Alta with the fictional town of Happiness, Arizona, deep within “the wild and wooly hinterlands of the American West.”

But there, too, the murder rate is in triple figures, and although Garrity is originally regarded as a crank, he becomes more believable once he has resurrected a dog that died beneath the wheels of a passing wagon train.

Other miracles follow, the recent dead rising from their tombs, and only once he has extracted his payment from a terrified community does Garrity depart, in the company of a group of friends who are still brushing grave dirt from their clothes and a dog that was long ago trained to play dead.