Season 4, Episode 17
(#119 overall)
Cayuga Production #
4869
Originally aired May
9, 1963
Ah, that thin line between love and hate.
50 years ago tonight, a couple
suffering a disintegrating marriage quarreled and bickered their way onto the
Lady Anne, a British cruise ship on its final voyage. What awaits them out on that open sea? Reconciliation? Death?
An iceberg???
I'm really sorry for this, folks.
Allan and Eileen Ransome snip at
one another viciously, their exchanges bristling with resentment. Their mutual
tension hangs in the air almost as palpably thick as the fog that perpetually
engulfs the ship. Still, we see brief
glimpses of affection; clearly love still exists beneath the bitterness (or at the
very least lust: check out time stamp 14:10 to see Eileen bending over to look
into a vanity mirror, and Allan blatantly checking out her ass).
The Lady Anne was, in its heyday,
a luxury liner catering to young lovers. The Ransomes are surprised to discover that everyone else on the ship is
at least 75 years of age, and all of them were married on the Lady Anne, and
are on board to celebrate the old girl’s legacy on her final expedition before
being decommissioned. Some are traveling
alone, having already lost their partners, but all are united in their passionate
devotion to the ship. 
The passengers initially object
to the Ransomes’ presence, viewing them as interlopers, but they soon warm up
to the young couple and (subtly) encourage reconciliation. The Ransomes submit
to the Lady Anne’s romantic spell in fairly short order, and all seems well… until
Allan notices that they’re sailing away
from their destination. The engines
abruptly stop, a pistol is drawn, and it becomes pretty goddamned evident that
something is amiss.
On the surface, it appears that
the Ransomes have stumbled innocently (and quite accidentally) into/under the
Lady Anne’s enchantment; however, upon analysis it’s clear that they’re being
maneuvered at every turn. The events that
unfold, along with the people they encounter, form a design that seems geared specifically
toward saving their marriage. Said
design seems to require repeated attempts by multiple characters to steer them
away from the cruise, which invariably results in the Ransomes rebuffing them
and barreling ahead with increased resolve (their mutual stubbornness is likely
why they’re still together after six years of apparent misery). 
In other words, pushing them away
only serves to draw them in further, a kind of reverse psychology approach, and
virtually everyone in the episode, including the prologue’s travel agent, seems
to be in on it… but whose design is this?
I get the how, I get the why…. I’m haunted by the who. Maybe it’s God, maybe
it’s Cupid, or maybe it’s the spirit of the Lady Anne herself. And hey, maybe I’m overthinking this. Part of The
Twilight Zone’s appeal, after all, is that element of the unresolved, the
unexplained. 
The Lady Anne herself is a
marvelous construct, a ridiculously ornate relic from an earlier time (it was a
relic in 1963, so it’s even more so now). She’s spoken of so lovingly by her passengers, and what we see of her is
so lavish and detailed (not to mention that sumptuous fog always swirling about
her), that it’s difficult not to view her as a living, breathing character in
the proceedings.
“Passage on the Lady Anne” feels
at times like early Hitchcock (The Lady
Vanishes and Suspicion come to
mind), not in plot but tone. It’s a charming mystery, gentle and
sophisticated (and veddy British), lightly
sprinkled with bits of suspense throughout. It never really feels like a Twilight
Zone, but that’s not necessarily a strike against it. It’s a bit slow and overlong (a hallmark of
most season four episodes), but our patience is rewarded with an absolutely
delightful cast (Wilfrid Hyde-White in particular). It’s easy to spend an hour with this group,
and most of their faces should be quite familiar to genre fans.
Lee Philips (Allan Ransome) stops by for his first TZ role; we’ll also see him next season
in “Queen of the Nile.” Phillips also appeared in the pilot episode of The Outer Limits (“The Galaxy Being”) as
radio-deejay Gene “Buddy” Maxwell.
Joyce Van Patten is quite good as Eileen Ransome in
her only TZ appearance, but she was
also seen on The Outer Limits (“A
Feasibility Study”) the following year. I’m gonna go ahead and call her a TZ babe: she’s sufficiently attractive
(and, um, sufficiently buxom as well), and she possesses a certain spark that I
find quite endearing. It’s interesting to note that she was briefly married to TZ alum Martin Balsam (1958-1962).
This is Wilfrid Hyde-White’s only Twilight Zone appearance (as Toby
McKenzie). I’m mentioning him because last week’s episode co-starred Tim
O’Connor, who would go on to co-star on TV’s Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, a series which also featured
Hyde-White (as Dr. Goodfellow). He’s
also a supporting character in one of my all-time favorite films, 1949’s The Third Man.
Gladys Cooper (Millie McKenzie) previously appeared
in “Nothing in the Dark,” and will appear again in season five’s “Night
Call.” She also visited The Outer Limits as a
medium-slash-con-artist in “The Borderland.”
Cecil Kellaway (Burgess) previously entertained us
in season one’s “Elegy” as the murderous android Jeremy Wickwire. Cyril Delevanti shows up
as an unnamed officer (brandishing a pistol, no less!) in this, his fourth and
final TZ appearance (he previously
graced “A Penny for Your Thoughts,” “The Silence,” and “A Piano in the House”).
Alan Napier (Capt. Protheroe) only appeared on TZ this one time, but he subsequently showed up on Serling’s Night Gallery three different times. He’s
probably best remembered as Alfred the butler on TV’s Batman. 
Mr. Spiereto, the travel agent who books the
Ransomes on their trip, is played by Don Keefer. Keefer holds a special place in the pantheon
of TZ alumni: he played Dan Hollis in
season three’s “It’s a Good Life,” in which Anthony Freemont turned him in to a
human jack-in-the-box before wishing him away into the cornfield. Happily, he's much less slobbery this time around. He’ll swing through The Twilight Zone one more time, in season five’s “From Agnes, With Love.”
“Passage on the Lady Anne”
features an original musical score by Rene Garriguenc (one of four he would
ultimately contribute to the series). There’s nothing really memorable here, but it does fit the proceedings
(the underscore is a bit old-timey and melodramatic, which is totally
appropriate). Garriguenc’s score is
isolated on both DVD releases (volume 40 and the season 4 Definitive Edition
set) and the more recent blu-ray release of season 4, so you know where to go
if you need music for your next Murder Mystery Party.
“Passage on the Lady Anne” is the
final Twilight Zone episode written
by Charles Beaumont (he adapted his 1960 short story “Song for a Lady”). There will be three episodes in season five
credited to him, but his involvement with them will be peripheral at best
(ghostwriters will pen the actual teleplays, as we saw recently with “The New Exhibit” and season three’s “Dead Man’s Shoes”). Interestingly, all three will be among the better
offerings of the series’ final, wildly uneven season.
In two weeks:
Bo
‘Bandit’ Darville tries to find his tertiary motivation and ends up getting
decked by William Shakespeare.
Don’t
believe me? Tune in.
1 comment:
This one began promisingly enough, but in the end I’m afraid I found it rather disappointing.
The highlight of the episode is the great veteran cast, of course. It’s always a pleasure to see Gladys Cooper again (I remember her best as the stern matriarch from “Now Voyager” back in 1942.) And the complex relationship between the bickering leads was interesting, though for the first three-quarters of the show Alan had the sort of super-irritating personality that made me want to give him a good shake.
Alan’s abrupt change of heart didn’t really work for me, though; it was too sudden. He couldn’t find his wife for half an hour, and suddenly he goes from loathing her to loving her, just like that. Well, I guess it’s a case of you don’t know what you’ll miss until it’s gone? Or you always want what you can’t have? Anyway---just happened very suddenly, given that they had an extremely dysfunctional marriage.
And Eileen’s disappearance was a bit confusing. Seemed like a supernatural occurrence, but was it? Because the way I see it, there’s really nothing else supernatural in this episode (which was disappointing in and of itself)---so just where did she go?
The ending felt very flat indeed, to me; I felt like the whole show was a mystery, slowly working its way, building up, to a big reveal---and then, eh, nothing much.
The way I read it, after the credits had rolled, is that this voyage was basically a suicide mission---all these elderly people decided to take one last voyage on the ship they loved, and then crash into an iceberg or something (they were travelling north, remember) and go down with the ship, end of story. I didn’t see anything supernatural about the ship at all.
Though---how likely was it that you’d get so many people happy to end it all in just that way? Not really very convincing---but then, neither is any supernatural explanation.
So, this one gets high marks from me for the cast and some of the characterizations, but not for the plot itself---precisely the opposite reaction that I had to “The Incredible World of Horace Ford.”
(The ship’s interior was so ornate---was that constructed just for this episode, or was it a left-over set from something else?)
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