TZ Promo: "The Lateness of the Hour" (12/02/1960)

“The Lateness of the Hour”
Season Two, Episode 8 (#44 overall)
Cayuga Production # 173-3652

50 years ago tonight, something quite bizarre happened on The Twilight Zone, and it had nothing to do with the story being presented. The picture looked… well, different somehow. Perhaps viewers didn’t notice, given the low quality of TVs back then, but the filmed program they’d been enjoying every week for a year-and-a-half was suddenly not film at all.


Videotape. Oh god, the dreaded videotape. Six episodes were shot on video during season 2 as a cost-cutting measure. Videotape was a primitive format in 1960; it certainly wasn’t the high definition format of choice that it’s evolved into over the past 50 years. Back then, it looked terrible. It’s like watching the show through a fishbowl smeared with Vaseline. Thankfully, the cost-cutting wasn’t that consequential, so they stopped after six and returned to film. The experiment, unfortunately, yielded six episodes that are permanently and irrevocably inferior to their 35mm siblings; happily, though, most of them are actually fairly decent (and watchable) episodes despite their visual failings. One of them, however, is just plain awful… but we’ll get to that one next month. Another of them, meanwhile, is an absolute treasure that transcends its technical limitations… we’ll be checking it out in three weeks, just in time for Christmas (that’s a hint, folks).


The first of the six to be broadcast, “The Lateness of the Hour,” stars the lovely Inger Stevens (last seen in “The Hitch-hiker”) as Jana, the terminally unhappy daughter of Dr. Loren (John Hoyt), who has staffed their mansion with robot servants and apparently keeps her confined to the house at all times. Jana hates the robots, and demands that her father get rid of them. More unhappiness ensues.


Written by Rod Serling and directed by Jack Smight (who directed three of the six videotaped episodes, plus season 1's "The Lonely"), “The Lateness of the Hour” is infused with a palpable sense of claustrophobia, due in part to Jana’s confinement to the house, and also due to the limitations of shooting on video. The entire episode takes place in two rooms (and a staircase). Since this particular story is light on action and heavy on dialogue (it could easily translate to a stage play), not much is ultimately lost by shooting it on video.

Next week: Speaking of stage plays, we’ll spend some time with one Mr. Booth Templeton, a renowned thespian who yearns to escape to his younger days. Like Martin Sloan before him, he’ll get his chance… but with a catch.

TZ Promo: “The Hitch-hiker” (1/22/1960)

I discovered old radio shows like Suspense and Inner Sanctum a few years before I discovered The Twilight Zone. I bought a few of them on cassette, and one of them was "The Hitch-hiker," an episode of Suspense from 1942 that starred Orson Welles as a man who, while traveling cross-country by car, is menaced the same ominous man hitch-hiking along the way. The radio script was written by Lucille Fletcher, wife of film and radio composer Bernard Herrmann, who contributed the musical score for the radio production (a nice bit of synergy that would be repeated, in a fashion, 18 years later; more on this below). Fletcher also wrote Suspense's most famous episode, "Sorry, Wrong Number."

Rod Serling's take on "The Hitch-hiker" changes the protagonist from male to female (the beautiful Inger Stevens is marvelous in the role), but otherwise remains very faithful to Fletcher's original tale. Alvin Ganzer's direction is superb (watch for the scene where our heroine almost gets the business end of a moving train), and the cinematography by George T. Clemens is appropriately dark and moody (the final scene is masterfully done).

Perhaps the most interesting component of the episode, however, is the underscore. "The Hitch-hiker" doesn't feature a composer credit; rather, it is "stock-scored" (i.e. scored using assorted cues from the CBS Music Library, often by multiple composers and without any perceptible unifying theme). At some point in time before The Twilight Zone debuted, Bernard Herrmann recorded a number of suites (collections of short cues) designed to be used and re-used in various CBS shows. Much of the music he contributed was actually recycled music he'd written years earlier for various radio shows. And, delightfully (as these things tend to delight people like me), some of his original "Hitch-hiker" radio score appears in the TZ adaptation! This brilliant touch elevates an already-great episode to sheer excellence. Needless to say, it's one of my top ten favorite episodes of all time.

Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann's score (well, five out of nine total cues) was released on the 1983 vinyl LP The Outer Space Suite from Cerberus Records (which is obviously way out of print). Those same five cues were later released on CD in 1999 on the 4-disc Twilight Zone 40^th Anniversary collection (which, as far as I know, is still in print and easily obtained).

Incidentally, Suspense wasn't the only radio program to produce "The Hitch-hiker." It was first done by Campbell Playhouse in 1941, and later in 1946 by Mercury Summer Theater. Orson Welles starred in all three. The Suspense version can be found here.

Who exactly is the hitch-hiker? I won't give it away, but if you see him on the side of the road…. Man, keep on driving. Don't stop.

Next week's episode features a battle of wills between a cranky man in a Las Vegas casino and a most insistent slot machine. Take a gamble on it, won't you?