It's March once again, time to do some Spring cleaning on the cobwebs of your mind and celebrate, along with blogathon host Terence Towles Canote at A Shroud of Thoughts, all those classic TV episodes that entranced us, entertained us, and even inspired us.
"Inspiring" isn't too strong a word in describing Rod Sterling's The Twilight Zone, as it came along at just the right time for Boomer Monster Kids like myself, stimulating their sense of wonder, giving a slew of future star actors some unique, meaty roles, and showing the way for a new generation of fantasy authors and filmmakers.
Also inspiring was the way in which Sterling and his stable of writers could take elements and objects of ordinary middle class life, add a twist or two, and come up with intelligent, albeit sobering and often macabre, commentaries on the human condition.
The beauty of the series was that the lessons were often seamlessly woven into a dark tapestry of imagination that seemed far removed from any kind of forced social messaging. It's the kind of schooling through entertainment we could use more of today.
The Twilight Zone did its thing so well that it still.has a hold on the popular imagination over six decades later. Indicative of its stature is the series' continued use for New Year's Day broadcast marathons, such as the the recent fest on the Heroes and Icons (H&I) channel. Even though episodes are available on demand at other locations, I went old school, pretending it was still the VCR era, and recorded a bunch of them for bingeing. Somehow, just setting up the recordings gave me a warm, nostalgic feeling.
I've written before on this blog about "lost" Twilight Zone episodes -- lost in the sense that I don't remember seeing them as a kid, and only (re)discovered them in the streaming era (see my posts here and here). Now that the New Year's recordings have run out, I've been sampling episodes from TUBI's on demand stash.
Now Playing: "The After Hours," season 1, episode 34 of The Twilight Zone, first aired June 10, 1960. Written by Rod Serling, directed by Douglas Heyes, and starring Anne Francis, Elizabeth Allen and James Millhollin.
One of the episodes that I binged recently, "The After Hours," is something I definitely remember from those halcyon days sitting in front of the black and white console TV. While it doesn't have the surprise gut punch of more celebrated TZ episodes, "After Hours" effectively establishes a dark and creepy atmosphere, only to end on an unexpectedly upbeat note (in a twisted fairy tale sort of way).
Anne Francis plays Marsha White, an attractive but nervous young woman who is hoping to get a gift for her mother at a busy downtown department store. After distractedly perusing items in various display cases, she heads for the elevator, which seems to be running slow, as there is a crowd of shoppers huddling in front of it.
Fortuitously, an adjacent elevator door opens, and an operator in a dapper uniform beckons to Marsha. Marsha informs him she's after something very specific -- a gold thimble -- to which he dryly responds that she wants the "specialties" department on the 9th floor. Except, after the door closes and it cuts to a close-up of the floor indicators above the elevator, we see there is no 9th floor!
The elevator doors open on a dimly lit, seemingly abandoned floor with empty, dusty display cases. Even as Marsha protests that "there's nothing here," the operator silently closes the doors, stranding her on the mysterious 9th floor.
As Marsha nervously looks around, a figure emerges from the shadows in the form of an elegantly dressed woman (Elizabeth Allen), who asks Marsha, "Can I show you something?" Oddly, the only piece of merchandise is the very gold thimble that Marsha was looking for. More suspicious still, the sales woman knows Marsha's name.
Marsha, increasingly nervous, only wants to pay for the gift and get out of there. As she heads for the elevator, the woman calls after her, "Marsha, are you happy?," as if they've known each other for years. When Marsha retorts that it's none of her business, she reacts strangely, throwing up her hands in exasperation, "Alright Miss White, suit yourself, it's none of my business!"
In the elevator, Marsha notices that the thimble she just bought is scratched and dented. The equally exasperated elevator operator drops her off at the Complaints dept. on the 3rd floor, where she proceeds to harass the management with her story of being sold damaged goods by a very odd sales woman on the non-existent 9th floor. Assistant manager Mr. Armbruster (James Millhollin), already a nervous type himself, has his hands full with the dissatisfied customer.
As Armbruster and his boss the store manager try to make sense of Marsha's story, she spies the very woman who sold her the thimble, who is standing across the room, her back turned to her. Just as Marsha calls out, she gets a bad shock when a store employee literally picks up the mysterious sales woman, who turns out to be a very lifelike display mannequin.
Ready to faint, Marsha is deposited on a couch in a store office, while Armbruster complains about the young woman to another employee. As it nears closing time, both the nervous assistant manager and the employee are distracted by duties and forget about Marsha, who wakes up to find herself in an eerily still, shadowy room long after the store has closed.
If the 9th floor seemed odd, her present predicament is positively frightening, as the elevators aren't working and she's effectively locked in. The mannequins situated around the room certainly don't help ease her anxiety, and when she hears them calling out her name, she realizes in a panic that she's not in Kansas anymore, so to speak.
Many of the series' best episodes featured dark fairy tales superimposed on the most prosaic of mid-20th century settings, i.e., "After Hours'" downtown department store. The moment Marsha gets on the elevator, she, and we, know that something is very off, not the least of which is the stiff, laconic elevator jockey.
The deserted 9th floor ups the weirdness factor a notch or two, as does the materialization of the sales woman out of the shadows, as if she's not just an employee, but a part of the very building itself. Her penetrating stare as she "helps" Marsha find her thimble, and her more vulnerable reaction of exasperation as Marsha retreats to the exit, combine to unsettle both the viewer and the story's protagonist.
But it's not just the sales woman who is odd. Marsha's quest for a gold thimble for her mother seems a bit peculiar (although you can never tell what a collector might obsess over). This is a strange object to be looking for in a bustling urban department store, which reinforces the folk tale quality of the story.
Sterling's script wisely interposes the comic relief of assistant manager Armbruster between the weirdness of the 9th floor and the terror of the shadowy Complaints department. Actor James Millhollin, with his doughy, everyman face and nervous ticks, perfectly captures a character who has neither the time, inclination or imagination to solve his problem customer's mystery. Armbruster is emblematic of the ordinariness of busy, everyday life that is in stark contrast to the haunted fantasy world that Marsha experiences when she becomes trapped in the deserted store.
On the other hand, the mannequins in "After Hours" represent a bridge from the prosaic world we all know to Marsha's nightmare world. They are the ultimate uncanny objects -- at a glance they look like real, honest-to-goodness people, but upon closer examination, the differences become more than a little unnerving, especially in the stillness of the night.
Japanese robot expert Midi Mashahiro called the instinctive repulsion toward things that appear almost but not quite human the "uncanny valley." (Michael Dylan Foster, The Book of Yokai, University of California Press, 2024, p. 105.) Recently, AI generated "people" have taken over from mannequins and robots in plumbing the depths of the valley, resulting in a good deal of public backlash.
"After Hours" exploits that natural repulsion, effectively raising goosebumps when night falls on the department store and its spooky denizens. But by the conclusion, Serling is winking at us, turning the lights on after figuratively yelling "Boo!" and transforming shudders into a sense of wonder. What if something made to be so very lifelike could actually capture the essence of life, if even for a short time? And what if, like in any society, there were rules for using that gift?
In The Twilight Zone Companion, author Marc Scott Zicree has high praise for the people who helped Serling turn his ordinary department store into a dark fantasy world. Zicree credits director Douglas Heyes with making "use of a wide variety of shots to create tension: long shots of silhouetted figures, closeups of Anne Francis's feet as she walks down darkened aisles, shots through pebbled glass of her face -- and through all of this, the camera is almost always in motion, as though it were itself a character, nervously stalking."
As for Anne Francis, at the time of this episode, her iconic appearance in Forbidden Planet (1956) was behind her, and her starring role in in the trailblazing TV show Honey West was several years in the future. Zicree sings her praises: "No amount of visual flair could make this episode work without a strong central presence, and this is where the contribution of Anne Francis comes in. ... There's an energy about her and a freshness, an individuality."
He also quotes Francis herself as saying, "I still have people who walk up to me and say 'The favorite show that I ever saw was that ["After Hours"].' It did make a mark, it did make an impression." (Marc Scott Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 3rd Edition, silk and names Press, 2018, pp. 117-118.)
Credit too goes to actress Elizabeth Allen for making a big impression in a small part as the enigmatic sales woman on the 9th floor. Her strange familiarity helps build the atmosphere of unease and mystery. (See also my post about Allen's contribution to the creepy Thriller episode "The Grim Reaper.")
All this talent coalesced into the making of a very unique modern fairy tale of an unseen world with a world, one of the better episodes of the series.
