November 5, 2024: Our Twilight Zone rewatch continues with season 5, episodes 25-28!

Season 5, Episode 25, “The Masks”

This episode first aired March 20, 1964.

This was the only Twilight Zone episode to be directed by a woman. Ida Lupino, who previously appeared on the series as Barbara Jean Trenton in “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” assumed the directing reins on this one. On working on both sides of the camera, Lupino once remarked: “Directing is much easier than acting. The actor deals in false emotions, produced on cue. The director has his problems, but they are all normal. He doesn’t have to smile into a camera while suffering through an early morning grouch.”

Actress Brooke Hayward who played Paula Harper, recalled: “They had to do a life mask with the cast in advance. After we were done filming, Ida Lupino told us we could keep the masks, because they would not be needed. I used to have my mask for many years but I don’t recall what happened to it since. Rod Serling was on the set much of the time. He was involved with a lot of what was filmed on stage. He was terrific, a really nice man.”

“The Masks” would mark actor Robert Keith’s final acting role before his death at the age of 76.

Definitely among the best this season has to offer. Despite its somewhat predictable ending, it nevertheless delivers on its eerie final twist. The script delivers a wonderfully suspenseful build, and Lupino’s direction is all-around marvelous.

Season 5, Episode 26, “I Am the Night – Color Me Black”

This episode first aired March 27, 1964.

This episode was filmed entirely in studio. Earth was blown around the set to help convey a sense of the outdoors necessitating the crew and off-camera actors to wear nose-mouth filters.

Actor Michael Constantine, who played Sheriff Koch, is perhaps best remembered for his portrayal of the Windex-obsessed Gus Portokalos”in My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002). He reflected back on this episode: “I think I was most impressed not so much by my part, or the story, though they were good ones, but with seeing Rod Serling come down to the set and do his opening speech, which always, of course, ends with the line “The Twilight Zone.” I was already impressed with Serling because of his many great TV and film shows but assumed that he would simply read this opening speech from a cue card. Well, not Mr. Serling. He delivered the speech looking straight into the camera and did it all in one take. Then he smiled and went back up to his office. I was an actor who had worked for much of my career on the stage. I tended to frown on people who used cue cards. If I could memorize a whole play, why couldn’t they memorize a few sentences or paragraphs? My respect for Serling zoomed.”

Paul Fix, who played newspaper editor Colbey, is best remembered for his portrayal of “Marshal Micah Torrance” on the TV series The Rifleman (1958). He was a good friend of John Wayne and apparently suggested Wayne adopt his trademark rolling gait to set himself apart from other actors.

George Lindsey, who played Deputy Pierce, played the character of Goober Pyle”on the The Andy Griffith Show (1960), replacing Jim Nabors who took himself (and his character) to his own show Gomer Pyle: USMC (1964). Lindsey was apparently a good friend of actor Ernest Borgnine who battled depression and credited Lindsey with saving his life. He was apparently Gene Roddenberry’s first choice to play Spock, but he turned down the role.

Ivan Dixon, who played the Reverend, previously starred in “The Big Tall Wish” (1960).

Not quite as egregious as some of his comedic episodes, or quite as offensively ham-fisted as He’s Alive, but certainly not one of Serling’s better efforts. In the end, the biggest strike against it is that it’s quite dull.

Season 5, Episode 27, “Sounds and Silences”

This episode first aired April 3, 1964.

Shortly after this episode aired, a writer who had submitted a similar script idea with the same title two years earlier threatened a lawsuit. It was settled for $3500 but the litigation prevented this episode from being shown in syndication.

Serling, by this point, weary of the seemingly endless claims of intellectual theft and no doubt regretting his decision to open the show to unsolicited submissions early in the show’s run, had this to say: : “I can tell you quite unequivocally that I have never, in the course of some seventeen years of writing, ever, repeat, ever deliberately, knowingly or overtly taken another man’s work and substituted it as my own. In all areas of science fiction, and this is my experience after five years on the air, it is rare that we do a show in which at least ten people do not accost us, waving material of their own, and accuse us of plagiarism, conscious or otherwise. There is no question but that when you deal in this kind of storytelling, you automatically handle certain ideas in precisely the same manner that other science fictionaries do. It’s unhappy and unfortunate but I think it’s to be quite expected.”

Actress Penny Singleton, who played Mrs. Flemington, is perhaps best known for her portrayal of Blondie Bumstead in the Blondie! movies of the 30’s and 40’s. She was also the voice of Jane Jetson on The Jetsons (1962).

While not a particularly strong episode, I really did like John McGiver’s inspired performance and I did find a couple of instances quite funny – the squeaky shoes scene and the fact Roswell kept referring to his wife as “Madam”.

Season 5, Episode 28, “Caesar and Me”

This episode first aired April 10, 1964.

This was the only Twilight Zone episode written by a woman. The writer, Adele T. Strassfield, was the secretary of producer William Froug who joined the show in its fifth season. According to Froug: “She “was an exceptionally bright woman, and she said to me, ‘I can show you I’m a writer. I want to write a “Twilight Zone.”‘ So she came up with a notion. She’d never written a script before and has never written once since. In effect, I sort of wrote it with her. I wanted her to have the credit, and she got a great thrill out of it.”

Froug comes across as a little condescending in the aforementioned quote, and then downright inept in this one: “I didn’t know it, but the story had been done before, about a magician whose dummy comes to life and murders him. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have given her an OK to write it — it had been produced three years before — but since nobody had remembered it, it didn’t matter.” He didn’t know the show he was producing had already done a talking ventriloquist episode? And, according to him, nobody remembered it? What nonsense is this?

Strassfield’s television-writing career was short-lived. She followed Froug to Gilligan’s Island where she received a credit on an episode where Russian cosmonauts visit the island. After that, she had only one more writing credit. She died in 1977 at the age of 53.

The ventriloquist’s dummy featured in this episode was re-use from the earlier similarly-themed episode, “The Dummy”.

Across Morgan Brittany, who makes her third and final Twilight Zone appearance in this episode as the bratty Susan, recalled: “I had so much fun playing a bad girl. The director, Robert Butler, would work with me and he really encouraged me to be this mean girl. In one scene where I’m listening at Jackie Cooper’s door and I get busted, he told me to get right up in Jackie’s face and stand my ground.“

She reflected back on working with Jackie Cooper: “Jackie was great to work with. He had been a child actor so he knew exactly how to relate to me. We had a ball. It’s wonderful when you can work with people like that – when you have such a connection, which we really did.”

As for that creepy dummy: “The dummy didn’t freak me out because the guy who was doing the voice was sitting over on the side – he was a funny old dude who made me laugh between shots when he’d make noises or tell jokes in the dummy’s voice.”

According to Brittany, script revisions (tracked by colored pages) were rare on The Twilight Zone: “The other thing I distinctly remember was the lack of colored pages in the script. Over the years, I’ve worked on a lot of shows where we had all the colored script revisions – pink, blue, yellow, green, etc. On The Twilight Zone, you got maybe one or two colored pages. That was it. They knew what they were doing.”

And finally, Brittany reflected fondly back on Serling’s on-set presence: “Rod would come down to the set sometimes, but he would sit in a high director chair, usually under one of the arcs lights with the steam rising out of the top. And he would be in total silhouette. He had his legs crossed, he ws smoking a cigarette, and he never said anything.”

When I first saw the synopsis for this episode, I was a little leery, assuming it would just be a knock-off of “The Dummy” and, while it wasn’t anywhere near as great as that episode, it was different enough to set it apart – and Morgan Brittany’s performance as the devilish little girl really elevated this episode for me. Cooper’s Irish accent was…a little suspect…but I still did feel sorry for how it all turned out for him. And I especially loved the ending, knowing the evil dummy is going to lead that kid to ruin.

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