dig it

“Deliveries in the Rear” (NIGHT GALLERY, originally broadcast 2/9/1972)

For the record, I have always enjoyed stories about 19th century grave robbers.  There is a certain thorny, fertile dynamic at play in this singular moral quandary between lowly, sometimes murderous body snatchers (also known as “resurrection men”) and the unscrupulous doctors who hired them—invariably resolute in their claim to the furtherance of medical science. 

A good many stories of this type (including Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body Snatcher”) were inspired by the infamous case of Burke and Hare, a pair of Edinburgh, Scotland grave robbers who in 1828 were suspected of 16 murders, the victims of which were sold for dissection (in anatomy lectures) to a physician named Robert Knox.  Which brings us around to this particular segment of Night Gallery, “Deliveries in the Rear”, written by Rod Serling and starring Cornel Wilde and Rosemary Forsyth.

The story opens with the telltale, relaxing clip-clop of horseshoes on cobblestone, a dense early morning fog obscuring all but a passing carriage.  As it pulls to a stop near the rear-entrance of a medical school, two men climb off, acting with a degree of trepidation as they begin to unload their cargo.  It’s immediately apparent by their behavior—and by that of the man who receives them at the door—that what they are delivering is a cause of great concern.  

"Tell Dr. Fletcher we’ve brought…"  

"Never mind what you’ve brought!  Bring them in."

At the moment, the aforementioned Dr. Fletcher (the perfectly cast Cornel Wilde) is busy with a lecture, teaching a group of young men the tenets of surgery.  Aiding this class is a subject of dissection, a cadaver that has seen better days and causes a bit of queasiness with one student, who refers to it, breath bated, as “unappetizing”.  

“My dear would-be Dr. Tuttle…this poor, dead, nameless wretch is not on the restaurant menu.”  

This elicits laughter from the class, except Tuttle (a young Gerald McRaney), who promptly faints dead away.  

And it’s the first example of a certain determined indifference on Fletcher’s part towards his subjects of dissection, and more importantly, to "the sanctity of life itself", to quote Rod Serling, who has plenty to say on the matter (through the mouths of his characters). In his efforts to develop young physicians of a certain steely resolve, he regards his cadavers as objects and little more. The means of acquiring these cadavers, by extension, holds for Fletcher even less importance.

When the class lets out, the good doctor is led by his assistant, Jamie (Walter Burke), to meet his suppliers, a grimy, ghoulish pair of bottom scrubbers (Peter Whitney and John Maddison) who've lugged with them a pair of neatly-wrapped corpses. After admonishing them for the first one he examines, a rotter that has been dead for weeks, Fletcher is assured the other cadaver will exceed his expectations.

"Oh, but, doctor—you'll be pleased with this one.  Oh, this one's an absolute Jim Dandy." 

"More like it...not even rigor mortis here—this man has been dead less than two hours."  

"You said you preferred 'em fresh, doctor."

And in this moment, the true span of Dr. Fletcher's moral compass is revealed.  The highly esteemed professor and physician, known to most as a noble healer and saver of lives, has become complicit in murder.

After his rather unsettling guests have departed, Fletcher and his assistant have a closer look at the new cadaver.  "Oh, dear god!" 

"Dead about 2 hours." 

"The man's been bludgeoned...."  

"Mmm-hmm...skull fracture and instantaneous death, from the look of it. You know, Jamie, it's a moot question as to whether or not our suppliers merely disturb death or actually cause it, hmm? However, if I'm to teach young men the art of surgery, I cannot allow myself the luxury of moral outrage."  

Absolving himself any personal responsibility, Dr. Fletcher heads off to dinner with his fiance, telling his troubled assistant as he leaves, "Come now, Jamie.  No one else mourned him.  Why should you?"

At the family home of his young fiance, Barbara, Dr. Fletcher listens as his lovely bride-to-be plays the organ.  It's clear he isn't completely without humanity, as his love for the young woman is quite apparent.  

As the song ends, Barbara's father asks for a word with Fletcher in private.  It seems Dr. Fletcher's future father-in-law (Kent Smith) has been made aware of the dubious nature in which the physician acquires his cadavers.  A senior administrator at the medical school, Dr. Shockman (Peter Brocco), is friendly with the father and has made his growing disapproval of Fletcher's methods known.  And what begins cordially enough quickly escalates into a bitter standoff.

"About these cadavers..."  

"What about them?"  

"Dr. Shockman went as far as to suggest that...they were the victims of foul play." 

"I have no doubt."  

"You mean you'd accept(?!)..." 

"What Dr. Shockman did not say is that if they are indeed the victims of a knifing, a bludgeoning, a garrote, the victim, in each case, is himself a piece of scum.  A drunk, a derelict, a felon, a nameless wandering nonentity whose death goes quite unnoticed."

"John, you can't!" 

Fletcher follows with further justifications, that in death these individuals (having never amounted to much), finally have a purpose, and that no one life is worth its weight against progress made in the name of medical research.  

"I submit to you, John—that may be professionally expedient, but it is neither right, nor just, nor moral!"

Catching her two favorite men in the midst of the rather acrimonious exchange, Barbara interjects cautiously.  

"It appears that I've absented myself too long." 

 "Well, your father and I had a minor disagreement, but it's finished."

"I don't consider it a minor disagreement, and it's hardly finished. We'll talk about this again, John."

That evening as he arrives home, Fletcher is confronted by an irate, drunken elderly peasant woman (Marjorie Bennett) who claims her husband Charlie has been murdered and sold to the doctor for dissection.  

"You've got me Charlie!  You've got him in that hellhole of yours. You've got him lying on a slab, and every day you cut into him! Every day!"

"Now, you listen to me, mother.  I don't have your Charlie.  I don't even know who Charlie is.  But if you don't get off my front steps, I'll have a policeman here in a minute and then you'll see."

"Don't give me that about a policeman!  Don't give me that!  That's what I should've brought here first.  You're no better than the ghouls you hire!  You're just a ghoul yourself!  That's what you are.  You're just a ghoul!"

The next morning at the school, Fletcher is confronted by the aforementioned Dr. Shockman, who has now also met with the distraught old woman.  It appears the police will be paying the school a visit today, and if they find ol' Charlie's remains on the premises, Fletcher can forget about the wedding, his career...everything.

Assuring Dr. Shockman that this woman's missing husband isn't in the building, Dr. Fletcher peppers his indignation with yet another falsehood.  

"Dr. Shockman, we have no male subject here at all.  As a matter of fact, we have the body of a woman, which should lay at rest any interest the police might have in the matter."

"I hope for your sake, that is the case...for the time being, I would discontinue the dissection of humans.  Use animals."

"Animals?  Dr. Shockman, we are trying to graduate a class of surgeons here, not taxidermists!"

"Better taxidermists than sanctimonious collaborators in murder!"

And following Shockman's exit...

And so in a dash to produce a female corpse, Fletcher's ghouls set out on the town.

And passing through the frame at a brisk pace, a somewhat familiar face...

monsters abound

Monsters are at large!  Or at least money-grubbing vultures are, ready to pounce on the burgeoning cable television boom, as highlighted below in this fairly groovy smear ad hatched by theater owners back in 1971. 

Alas, cable television did rise and take over, and some would argue it indeed abominable.  But as time rolls on, and everything's ultimately eventual, so too will be the demise of cable.      

aspersions reflected

"The Painted Mirror" (NIGHT GALLERY, originally broadcast December 15, 1971)

Can a born or inherited quality (or inclination), or one’s natural language, also be considered a talent?  Should the ability to make the world know and hate you so acutely be patently dismissed as one's innate demeanor?  I ask these questions, naturally, because I am considering the talent and career of the recently-passed socialite and actress, Zsa Zsa Gabor, whom—to nobody's surprise—managed to claw her way within 2 months of her 100th birthday.

Whenever Zsa Zsa would enter the frame, my frame, whether it a guest appearance on TV, or movie cameo, or in the gossip pages, she never failed to elicit a visceral response.  I really detested that woman; hell, hated her, without any seeming right to beyond what she projected to the world.

She was the very face of glamour and extravagance, both casually cruel and impenitently ostentatious, and wore her cool, callous heart plainly.  The rest of us, shabby, common, and unadorned, were the object of her considerable disdain. 

Can that be right?  Could anyone be so awful, much less a performer from whom such behavior was more or less expected?  Whether she was or not, one thing is certain: she had a remarkable ability to project that unabated hauteur straight through your television set.  You knew if you ever met her she might spit right in your eye; on a gut level, at least, that much was understood.

I might be taking the long way around getting into this particular vignette of The Night Gallery (brief as it may be), but Zsa Zsa is the star of this one and its success seems hinged on just how much we're supposed to dislike her.  Because what they do to her here is just plain nasty, and while it is passed off rather routinely as due comeuppance, there is a bitter aftertaste that lingers, as if these just desserts cannot possibly bode well for one's digestion.  

Under the tutelage of executive producer/showrunner Jack Laird, Night Gallery had earned a reputation for unevenness, both in quality and tenor; early on, a struggle for control of the show between the gruff producer and writer/host Rod Serling resulted in a wild array of content.  

Executive producer Jack Laird, left, as the hunchback in the second season vignette, "The Funeral".

Whereas Serling had wanted to keep the approach to the fantasy anthology format much as he had honed on The Twilight Zone, Laird wanted something else entirely. With the then-recent popular resurgence of the Universal horror monsters on late-night TV, as well as the success of the idiom established by Hammer Studios of England (and the popularity of Famous Monsters of Filmland and the Revel models), Laird, perhaps aiming for a younger demographic, felt the show's viability would pivot squarely amidst the kooky riffs of "The Monster Mash" and creature feature free-for-alls such as FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN (1943) and HOUSE OF DRACULA (1945). The man wanted his monsters, something Rod Serling had been determined to avoid when he'd initially signed on to the show.

Except for some of the handful of episodes written by Serling himself, gone was the moral imperative and social conscience that had often been guiding principles of The Twilight Zone.  As a result, there were a fair share of morally ambiguous episodes; some even flaunted pronounced mean streaks, such as this one and the memorably sadistic, "A Feast of Blood".

Written and directed by Gene Kearney (based on a short story by Donald Wandrei), "The Painted Mirror" begins with an interminable clatter, as the story takes place in a thrift shop located in the middle of a busy urban construction zone.  The unavoidable noise seems to have everyone a bit on edge, especially the elderly proprietor of the shop, Mr. Frank Standish (Arthur O'Connell), who'd recently sold half his store's space and interest to the younger, far more assertive Mrs. Moore (Zsa Zsa Gabor).

And her answer to all that noise is more noise, as she blasts the volume on her record player and tells the man installing the already blaring doorbell that it needs to be louder yet.  "Louder, Mrs. Moore?", bemoans Frank.  "Yes, Mr. Standish.  Loud, clear, and business-like."

Mr. Standish is a kindly, charitable soul, which is one of the reasons why his business has been struggling.  This much is apparent when long-time patron and friend, Ellen Chase (Rosemary DeCamp), stops by with an old, paint-covered mirror to sell.  As becomes clear, this isn't the first dusty relic Ellen has scavenged and brought to his shop for resale. What's equally clear is the immediacy of her dire financial situation and the desperation it's fostered.  She's all but in tears when he insists on giving her money up front, rather than on consignment.

But it seems he's rather in the same financial straits as Ellen, and has to beg Mrs. Moore—hell, Zsa Zsa—for ten dollars.  Which Zsa Zsa more or less dangles before mocking the man and his business acumen.  Adding insult to injury, she then focuses her scorn on Ellen, who storms off after selling her only means of transporting goods to the store, a handcart, for one dollar.

"A dollar for your cart, Mrs. Chase."  "A dollar-fifty."  "A dollar."

And so Mr. Standish sets about removing the paint from the mirror, a task that necessitates a chisel when the usual solvent doesn't seem to work.

But there's something strange underneath that paint.  Something otherworldly...

"Rise and shine, Mr. Standish!"  The next morning, Frank is very rudely, abruptly awoken when Zsa Zsa arrives, blaring loud music and placing her perpetually barking dog, Pookie, on his counter-top perch.  Part of their recent deal involved assurances from Frank that he would be moving out of the back room where he sleeps, which hasn't happened fast enough for her liking.  

And just as soon as he's out of bed, he's back to the mirror, scraping away.  Moments later, Ellen arrives, vexing the already annoyed Zsa Zsa.  "This is a place of business, Mrs. Chase.  We've no time for social events."

After calling her lawyer to inquire about a clause in their deal, Zsa Zsa tells Frank she's buying him out, an option in the contract he apparently was unaware of.  Head slunk, the timid old shopkeeper resigns himself to fate.  "It appears I'm not the businessman I thought I was."  And just like that, with a meager check in hand, his business is no more. "That should be enough to put you up in a hotel for a couple of months...until you find another job."

But then, chasing a ball tossed into the strange mirror by Ellen, Zsa Zsa's beloved Pookie runs into the other world beyond the frame. "You awful woman, see what you've done now!"  And so Zsa Zsa chases after him, seeming not to register her bizarre surroundings.

A stowaway from the Black Lagoon, angling for a comeback.

And back in the room, Ellen, having initiated this course, spurs things along even further.

Everything uttered from inside this other dimension is carried by echo, and so every time Zsa Zsa yells for little Pookie in her grating Hungarian timbre, it is amplified—as if the producers want us to beg them to shut her up.  

And then, confronted by some unseen horror, Zsa Zsa is screaming for dear life and barreling back towards the other side of the mirror from which she came.

And kindly old Frank, somehow now sinister and beaming with devilish delight, hurriedly paints over the last strip of mirror just as the screaming Zsa Zsa returns.  And then the screaming stops.

One can only guess what Zsa Zsa had to gain by appearing in this 14 minute segment on Night Gallery.  She certainly didn't need what little money this offered, having already burned through 5 of what would be 9 husbands (including hotelier Conrad Hilton and movie star George Sanders).  She had countless roles on TV and in movies, so why appear in something so unflattering, and just to be the sacrificial lamb?  

The simple answer would be that this was the kind of role she thrived in.  She was hated for a reason.  While nobody ever made the case that she was a great actress, she was an absolutely believable villain.  

Or perhaps it was just, strange as it may sound, her way of giving back.  Maybe by taking this role, Zsa Zsa was saying, with a bit of a wink and nod, "yes, isn't this what you want after all, dah-link?"  .