Weird & Free – Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

 

     I often find myself looking at my selections with a little regret at how often they're tied to subscription platforms, the regret being that not everyone has that fiscal freedom, and one of the last things anyone in a financial pinch needs is someone indirectly reminding them of it. I don't smoke, I don't frequently drink, and even in non-pandemic times I've never been one for bars, nightspots and clubs, nor do I often take traveling vacations (two in the 21st century, IIRC), or go to concerts. Most of my costly collectibles hobbies were set aside years ago, too. Video and digital media are nearly all of my entertainment budget, so that's where I indulge. Currently, aside from being enough of a dinosaur that I haven't cut the cable cord -- I like the spread of access and, especially, the DVR options -- I have subscriptions to Netflix (there I'm a plus one on a son's account), Amazon Prime, Disney+, Paramount+ (which was CBS All Access until a couple weeks ago), and Hulu.
  Still, I do try to note content I've found of interest that's essentially free media, at least once one's online. Items that, if you're reading this, you also reasonably have access to without spending any more money. That's the case this week.
     This week a nostalgia dive reminded me of a few episodes of a show where because it was an anthology program, drawing on a broad swath of authors, on some rare occasions it crossed into other genres for a story one otherwise wouldn't expect.

     On the Peacock streaming platform, where one can sign up for free and access the majority of their archive for no more inconvenience than a few ads, there’s a wealth of material. The come-on there is that they’re hoping to entice users into paying to be able to see some of the newer, original shows, or to otherwise pay a premium to watch without ads. There’s no special, free period access that can become a paying trap if you forget to opt out by a set time, so it’s a safe add and a site that works smoothly. (The latter in great contrast to the clunkiness of the NBC.com site, which is slow, difficult to navigate, and has an aggressive number of ads crammed in at strict time intervals rather than natural breaks in programs.)
     Among the offerings on Peacock are all the seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour - seven seasons of the former and three of the latter. (When I first sampled the platform shortly after their launch, they had some of these behind a pay wall, but they must have rethought the position.) The vast majority of the tales Hitch presided over were ones of crimes – often murder, many times revenge, swindlings and misadventures – but generally very down to earth, human, contemporary and explicable. A few times, though, the subject matter crossed over into the supernatural or science fiction, which made for an interesting twist, as that was far from the very human, grounded norm. I want to point out a few of the ones I’ve enjoyed, including during the recent revisits that prompted this week’s piece.
     Oh, and if any sharp-eyed aficionados notice any there that I've overlooked -- and I'm reasonably sure I have, especially in the cases of stories that were set in some retro-future, and at least one involving a psychic experience -- please point them out to me. For this piece I went for the ones I'd recalled from years back.

     A relatively mild case from the first season of the show is a tale that would have been more fitting for The Twilight Zone -- though that didn't exist back on December 4, 1955 when the episode aired.
     "The Case of Mr. Pelham" is an abbreviated, altered version of a 1940 short story that was later expanded to full book form in 1957, by Anthony Armstrong. The Hitchcock Presents version provides no unusual or extreme circumstances - whereas the original story centered on a man who'd survived a car wreck. As such, this version of the story doesn't suggest any triggering event for what is best described as a supernatural tale. We remain as much in the dark as the hapless Mr. Pelham. (A fuller adaptation of the original story is The Man Who Haunted Himself, a 1970 Roger Moore vehicle that Moore himself considers a favorite if for no other reason than that he got to act. The film has a tragic, behind the scenes twist to it, as writer/director Basil Dearden died in a car crash the following year, making this is final film. A quick check suggests that Apple+ has that film's rights tied up at the moment, btw.)

     Getting back to the Hitchcock version, we see a quiet, successful businessman (played by character actor Tom Ewell) who comes to realize that he has a doppelgänger weaving in and out of his daily life, and seeks professional advice from a doctor of his acquaintance (played by Raymond Bailey - almost universally remembered as bank president Milburn Drysdale from The Beverly Hillbillies.) Friends and acquaintances see him at his private club, or out on the streets, or in the office doing work,  or even at home at his apartment, all at times when Pelham is occupied elsewhere. At first he thinks it's a gag - some elaborate prank being run on him by friends - but that doesn't check out. It's all too detailed and comprehensive. It also doesn't seem to be a short-term con; not some criminal endeavor. No sudden swings from established behavior nor loss of cash, it's all the more unnerving because in many respects the impostor - who passes muster with people of long association - seems to be out-Pelham-ing him. He tries to trick the man he never seems to be able to catch up with by changing up some elements in his too staid and routine life, but this does nothing for him. Eventually there's a confrontation, but it doesn't go as he'd hoped. All very neatly, if still ultimately mysteriously, handled in twenty-odd minutes.
     The hour-long (minus commercials, of course) format the show took for its final three seasons seemed to find more incidences of these genre cross-overs. How much of this was a general nod to the market shows like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits more directly catered to isn't clear.

     Season two, episode 13 of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, was "The Magic Shop" - from January 10, 1964 - marks another unusual turn for the series, again into the supernatural.
     Starring Leslie Nielson and Peggy McCay as the Graingers, parents of Anthony, played by John Megna, a familiar, mildly unsettling, child actor in the '60s.
     Having been given money for his birthday, Tony is taken out by his father to decide on how he wants to spend it. An unfamiliar storefront, a magic shop, catches young Tony's attention. The odd proprietor, Mr. Dulong, seems impressed with something in the young man, and offers to teach him all about "real" magic, all to the growing chagrin of his father. The visit gradually unnerves Mr. Grainger, only to have matters change for the worse as one of a parent's greatest fears is realized. To say more would be to give too much away, but the story has two, broad sweeps of arc as one, primal, fear seems relieved only to become another.
     Among other things, it's always interesting to watch Nielsen in productions from his first few decades, as it wasn't until the '80s that he was suddenly set free as a comedic actor. Prior to that he tended to play either leading men or heavies in dramas.
     Episode 27 of that same season brought another tale with a supernatural twist, "The Sign of Satan" - first aired May 8, 1964.  

  Hollywood looks to make a new horror film, and finds a likely star in a bit of film that finds its way into their hands. It's a film of a black mass, and they're particularly impressed with the tall, brooding lead - Karl Jorla - played by Christopher Lee.
     Tracking him down in France, they fly Jorla to Hollywood. Once there, they find that Jorla was anxious to flee Europe because the film they saw was of a real black mass, filmed at the request of the coven and intended for their eyes only. Knowing he has been marked for death, Jorla trusts no one. When he is not at the studio for filming he disappears to arrangements of his own. He refuses to participate in any of the publicity, insisting that the cult is searching for him with the intent to kill him for his seeming betrayal. Jorla disappears for a few days, but shows up just in time to film a key scene with the leading lady, before disappearing again, leaving a clue as to his location. 

    The third season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour included the 11^th episode, “Consider Her Ways” (December 28, 1964) an adaptation of John Wyndham’s 1956 science fiction novella of the same name.
     In it, an experimental, psychoactive drug has sent the mind of despondent Dr. Jane Waterleigh (Barbara Barrie) into the bloated body of a woman just over a century in the future. She ultimately learns that an experiment gone awry back in her own era quickly killed off all human males, forcing an alternative means of fertilizing ova and continuing an all-female race. A society with a strict caste system evolved. The body she found herself in was one of the Mothers – women whose sole purpose is to produce babies. Most of the people in that future are unaware of the history of a century or more earlier, and even the educated class has been indoctrinated with a hyper-feminist, revisionist stance that women were strictly chattel until the plague rid them of the oppressive males. When the drug’s effects are negated, she finds her mind back in her 20^th century body. Checking the knowledge gained from her trip (which the supervising doctor regards as simply a vivid hallucination) she comes to believe that what she experienced was reality, so she seeks out the scientist whose work was the cause of the vast catastrophe, seeking to prevent that terrible future through any means necessary. Throughout, the audience tries to decide both if what she experienced was real, and, if so, is that future open to change?
     The show is best taken in by keeping in mind that the main character is not operating at her best, and that her time under the influence of the drug is to be experienced as a nightmare. Who among us hasn't second-guessed our dream selves' sometimes less than logical and perspicacious actions?

     Finally, just two weeks later, the show took another, final, supernatural turn in “Where the Woodbine Twineth.” (January 11, 1965.) An adaptation of Davis Grubb’s short story.
     Here a newly-orphaned little girl, Eva, is taken to her paternal family’s Mississippi home, primarily by her maiden aunt, Nell. That Nell is doing so more out of a sense of familial duty than anything else is much of the problem, but that's been her preferred role. She’d allowed daughterly devotion to her ailing mother, and deference to her brother, to close off all other prospects of relationships and building a life for herself, and there is evidence of a resulting vein of bitterness. Nell lacks the patience and full maternal instincts for an imaginative little girl, in part resenting any notion that the girl have a freer childhood. This includes a resistance to Eva’s insistence on the reality of her unseen friends – little people, Mingo and her father Mr. Peppercorn – which soon begins to wear on Nell, leading to an unfortunate contest of wills. The contest is pressed to tragic ends.
     I'm not going to pretend that key elements of each of these are going to be telegraphed for many in the audience, and I've little doubt that the supernatural or otherwise unnatural aspects of these episodes bothered at least a subset of the Hitchcock audience who saw such elements as cheats, preferring tales where in the end all things weird were revealed to be clever illusions. I can understand the perspective, but I do enjoy these elements of the beyond, too.

     Another at least momentarily free (if you can excuse the quality of the video) story of the weird, one that I couldn't help but think of while revisiting The Case of Mr. Pelham, was the adaptation of a Harlan Ellison story, "Shatterday", that was on the very first episode of the revived Twilight Zone in 1985. It starred a then not-yet-famous Bruce Willis, and was directed by Wes Craven.

     Here we have someone facing a similar set of moves to take over his life, but in this case it's all ultimately more clear cut. If we retroactively apply the same reasoning to Pelham's case then we're presented with ideas of a meritocracy for ownership of an identity. Did Pelham lose the right to his identity due to a lack of ambition or action?

    Oh, and tying both Peacock and things Weird back in to the present, one other thing you can do there is catch up on a current, new series I mentioned again just last week: Debris. As noted last week (at the very end of the piece) it's still too early to tell how well it'll hold together, as we've only the first two episodes so far, but based on what I've seen and the show's creator, it has the conceptual appeal of Fringe (2008-2013). What I'm waiting to see is if the show will manage to bring us any character to rival that of the endearingly quirky Walter Bishop, played with curious intensity by John Noble; Walter was the most reliable hook in that Fox series. (To clarify, John Noble has nothing to do with Debris.)
     Another wearing week for me, personally, I'm (as ever) hoping to make it to the weekend without being a target. Wishing the same for you, and a peaceful weekend to follow. -- Mike