the good old days

Since Donald Pleasance came up in last week’s review, I thought I would devote this week to evaluating another role by the same actor.  Of course, Pleasance is best know for his portrayal of Ernst Blofeld in the James Bond stinker You Only Live Twice, which I will not be ever be reviewing.  Instead, I’d like to talk about a Twilight Zone episode that Pleasance starred in:  “The Changing of the Guard.”

Some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone are actually extremely sentimental; in less skilled hands, they would have undoubtedly seemed mawkish, but Serling and his team manage to pull them off.  Art Carney’s famous performance as an alcoholic department store Santa who gets to experience the true spirit of Christmas is the most famous example of this.  “The Changing of the Guard” falls into the same category.  The story is rather predictable, and the moral is obvious from the beginning, but still it works.

Pleasance plays Ellis Fowler, an English teacher at the prestigious Rock Spring School for Boys.  The episode opens with him in class; after affectionately ribbing his bored students for their lack of preparedness, he reads from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, including the famous lines:  “But I was one-and-twenty,/ No use to talk to me,” which, we will shortly learn, is emblematic of Fowler’s own thinking about his youthful students.

The fall semester is at an end.  Fowler has been teaching for fifty-one years.  He is a small fellow and, as Rod Serling puts it, “bookish.”  He is in a hurry to get home to listen to Handel’s Messiah on the radio, but the headmaster calls him into his office for a chat, in the course of which Fowler learns that the school wants him to retire.  Yet retirement is something Fowler had never considered; he has nowhere to go, nothing to do without his job.  So he returns home in dejection and raises a gun to his head.

But he doesn’t kill himself immediately, and as the evening wears on, he bemoans his uselessness to his housekeeper.  Here Pleasance gives a really remarkable performance.  He begins reminiscing about his students, then grows disgusted when he remembers that one of his favorites had been killed at Iwo Jima.  What use was nineteenth-century poetry to a lad killed at Iwo Jima?  What use was it to any of them, even if they had been listening?

With the pistol in his pocket, he heads out into the snow, meaning to kill himself in front of a statue, engraved with a quotation that he once found meaningful, but which he now feels marks him as a failure.  Yet before he can fire, he has a vision.  He stumbles into his classroom, where the ghosts of seven dead pupils greet him.  They remind him that the poetry he taught them, and the noble sentiments behind it, had remained with them and had bouyed them in their own trials.  I find this scene extremely moving, in spite of its predictability.  The acting is quite effective all around–Pleasance as the confused, depressed, but well-meaning old man and his students, who are mature beyond the young years that Fowler’s memory accords them, earnest in their desires to remind him how he had taught them to be men.

As a final comment, it was interesting to see how large in the cultural consciousness the World Wars loomed.  Many of the young men had died in these wars, and it seemed that a large part of Fowler’s feeling that he hadn’t contributed anything to the world was based on the fact that he himself had not fought.  He stayed behind as a teacher, whereas these boys had risked and lost their lives fighting to preserve freedom.  For me, the first half of the twentieth century is a time to be remembered as the most evil era in all human history.  Yet for those who lived through the World Wars, it had been a time when millions of men had pledged their utmost for something that they knew really mattered.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is one of the most famous episodes of The Twilight Zone. A man, already teetering on the edge of insanity, spies a gremlin on the wing of an airplane.  No one believes him, so he has to take matters into his own hands.  Fear of flying is a major component of the plot.  In the roughly half century since The Twilight Zone was first broadcast, air travel has become ever more commonplace a phenomenon.  This storyline belongs to an era when flying was still considered an intrinsically risky way to travel.  The plot still works, but I suspect that it would have been even more effective when it originally aired.

The protagonist, Bob Wilson, is played by William Shatner.  He’s returning from a six-month stint in an insane asylum, after having had a breakdown on an airplane.  (Can anybody name the famous Wilson who later did have a breakdown on an airplane?)  As the plane sails into a thunderstorm, he peeks out the window, only to see a gremlin perched on the wing.  At first, he thinks he’s seeing things, but when he looks again, it’s still there, much closer.  Yet whenever anyone else looks out, the monster vanishes.  The gremlin begins to tamper with one of the engines, which terrifies Wilson.  Unable to convince the crew of the danger, he dives out the emergency exit and drives the gremlin away.  Wilson survives, but is sent back to confinement in a straight jacket.  After the action is over, Rod Serling’s closing narration is actually rather unusual.  Up to that point, the implication has generally been that Wilson was simply crazy.  Yet during the narration, Serling announces that the aircraft mechanics are soon to find evidence of the gremlin’s tampering, and the camera pans to reveal the damaged cowling the gremlin had pulled up.  Unlike many episodes, there is little ambiguity what happened; the magical explanation is the truth.

The episode is well written, a product of the strange mind of Richard Matheson.  In addition to his novels (including the remarkable I Am Legend, which has had three film adaptations, none of which conveyed the point of the original novel), Matheson penned a number of screenplays for Rod Serling.  Whoever the designer was for this episode, I’m not sure what he was thinking.  The gremlin doesn’t look like a traditional imp or monster, nor like the little devils that harassed the pilots of the RAF.  Instead, this gremlin resembles a miniature abominable snowman wearing a hannya mask, not the most affective antagonist.  Richard Donner directed, and he evidently paid special attention to the lighting. The setting is an overnight flight, and the cabin is dim, unevenly lit.  Flashes of lightning, rendered extremely well, add to the eeriness of the scene, as Shatner seems to descned further and further into madness.

And it’s Shatner’s acting that dominates the episode.  Most of the episode consists of him staring out the window, watching the malignant shape on the wing, or him remonstrating with his wife and the airplane’s crew.  It seems that before Star Trek, Shatner was practically typecast as a borderline nutcase, although how borderline was variable.  In this Twilight Zone, it’s established that he’s already been over the edge, even if the gremlin he now sees on the wing is real.  In his other memorable appearance on The Twilight Zone, in “Nick of Time,” he’s only just able to pull himself away from a penny fortuntetelling machine (on his honeymoon!).  Another probably less remembered role he had in the early 1960s was on The Fugitive, as a former cop.  By day, he runs the Boy’s Club; at night, his alternate personality takes over, and he guns down officers still on the force.  (By the way, I love The Fugitive.)  This typecasting is presumably related to Shatner’s well-known talent for overacting; his over-the-top technique works reasonably well for portraying a madman.

I understand why this episodes is so well thought of.  There are a lot of little things done quite well.  The rain outside looks realistic, as does the increasing sweat on William Shatner’s face, as his character grows more and more agitated.  It’s honestly not one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, but it’s definitely worth watching more than once.