"The Last Flight"



“The Last Flight”

Season One, Episode 18

Original air date:  February 5, 1960

                                                

Cast:

Flight Lieutenant William Decker: Kenneth Haigh

Major Wilson: Simon Scott

Major General George Harper: Alexander Scourby

Air Vice-Marshall Alexander Mackaye: Robert Warwick
Corporal: Harry Raybould
Guard: Jerry Catron

Crew:

Writer: Richard Matheson (original teleplay)

Director: William Claxton

Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
Set Decoration: Rudy Butler and Henry Grace
Assistant Director: Edward Denault
Casting: Mildred Gusse
Editor: Joseph Gluck
Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino

Music: Stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:

“This is the model of a Nieuport—fighter aircraft, vintage, World War One.  Next week it’s flown on a patrol over France in 1917 and its pilot discovers that time has passed him by.  Kenneth Haigh stars next week in Richard Matheson’s exciting story of ‘The Last Flight,’ on the Twilight Zone.  We hope you’ll join us.  Thank you and good night.”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:

“Witness Flight Lieutenant William Terrance Decker, Royal Flying Corps, returning from a patrol somewhere over France.  The year is 1917.  The problem is the Lieutenant is hopelessly lost.  Lieutenant Decker will soon discover that a man can be lost not only in terms of and maps and miles, but also in time, and time in this case can be measured in eternities.”

Summary:

            Flight Lieutenant William Decker of the Royal Flying Corps is on a routine patrol over France in 1917 when he gets lost and lands on an American SAC base.  Immediately upon landing he is met by American military officials who inquire into who he is and why he has landed on their airbase.  Decker notices that the base and all of its planes and equipment are far more advanced than anything he is accustomed to in Britain.  He is then taken inside for questioning.

            Once inside, Lieutenant Decker is escorted by Major Wilson to the office of Major General George Harper for briefing.  He begins to notice that everyone is eyeing him strangely.  In the General’s office Decker tells the two men that he is a pilot for the Royal Flying Corps and that he landed on their base because he was lost.  Major Wilson asks him what year it is and he says 1917.  The two Americans look suspiciously at one another and then inform him that it is not 1917 but 1959.  It’s clear to Decker that the men do not believe him and that he must look like a lunatic to them.  Decker mentions that the last thing he remembers is being on patrol with Captain Alexander Mackaye and then wandering into a mysterious cloud and getting lost.  The General informs him that Alexander Mackaye is now the Air Vice-Marshall for the Royal Air Force and is in fact on his way to their base for a routine inspection.  Decker tells them that that isn’t possible because Mackaye is dead.

            Later on Decker is being held in a room until Air Vice-Marshall Mackaye arrives.  Major Wilson enters and attempts to grill Decker for more information.  He asks Decker why he believes that Alexander Mackaye is dead.  Decker tells him that the last time he saw Mackaye they were being attacked by German pilots and that Decker ran from the fight and left Mackaye to die by himself.  But Wilson insists that it no longer matters because Mackaye survived the attack.  Decker knows that the reason Mackaye survived the attack is because someone must have saved him, but he realizes that the only person that could have done it is himself.  Somehow he needs to get back to his own time in order to save Mackaye’s life.  He decks Major Wilson across the face, races out of the room, manages to make it back to his plane and then takes off into the clouds, leaving 1959 behind him.

            Later, after Air Vice-Marshall Mackaye arrives at the base, he is greeted by Major General Harper and Major Wilson.  They ask him if he knows a man named William Decker.  Mackaye recounts the story of how they were on patrol one day when they were ambushed by a half dozen German planes.  He says that Decker disappeared into the clouds for a moment as if he were running from the fight, but then came back firing away at the German planes and took out several of them before they destroyed him.  He saved Mackaye’s life.   The General and Major Wilson share a glance between each other before they inform the Air Vice-Marshall that Lieutenant Decker, who died in 1917, left their airbase only hours ago.

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:

“Dialogue from a play, Hamlet to Haratio: ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’  Dialogue from a play written long before men took to the sky.  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, and in the sky, that perhaps can be dreamt of.  And somewhere in between Heaven, the sky, the Earth…lies the Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:

            “The Last Flight” marks the first non-Serling script to go into production, although Charles Beaumont’s “Perchance to Dream” was the first to air.  By the time Matheson began writing for The Twilight Zone, he had already established a significant place for himself in the world of popular fiction as a prose writer.  But Hollywood, especially television, was still a predominantly new field for him.  “The Last Flight” was only the second television script that Matheson wrote by himself, the first being the 1958 pilot episode for an anthology series called Now is Tomorrow that never aired.  Up until this point, he and Charles Beaumont had collaborated on teleplays for various programs including Buckskin, Have Gun-Will Travel, and Wanted: Dead or Alive.  The two friends had known each other since the early 1950’s and had both recently decided to attempt a career in television after having tremendous success in the prose markets. Since it was a new medium to both of them, and they knew very little of the intricacies of the television industry, they decided to collaborate on a number of projects. They joined the Preminger-Stuart Agency in Los Angeles and began pitching ideas to producers on a regular basis.  This would eventually lead to Buck Houghton and Rod Serling.  
            In early 1959, in addition to opening submissions to freelance writers, Serling and Houghton held a screening of “Where is Everybody?” for several writers that had already established names for themselves, and Beaumont and Matheson were among those in attendance.  Unlike the shows they had previously submitted scripts and stories to, which were all either westerns or police dramas (two genres that were in abundance in the 1950’s), The Twilight Zone was more suited to their abilities as fantasists.  Since speculative fiction was second nature to both of them they decided that they wouldn’t need to collaborate on their scripts for the show.  After selling Houghton and Serling his two short stories, “Disappearing Act” and “Third From the Sun,” Matheson was unofficially hired to write his own scripts.  At first he wanted to write only original material for the show but later on he would adapt several of his own stories.  Matheson says that he sold Serling and Houghton the idea for “The Last Flight” with one sentence: a British World War I pilot gets lost and lands on an American SAC base in 1959.  He had no storyline other than this simple premise but the idea was peculiar and vivid enough that they bought it immediately.  The thing that sets The Twilight Zone apart from many television shows of this time period is that it was a devoutly writer-friendly program.   Matheson recalls that in all of the fourteen scripts that he submitted to Rod Serling, no word was ever changed.  Serling had already seen many of own scripts rewritten for various reasons (usually to appease the unforgiving scrutiny of oppressive network officials or prudent advertisers) so he handled the scripts of others with the utmost devotion to authenticity (although it should be noted that the title of this episode was changed from “Flight” to “The Last Flight” for unknown reasons).  Everything in this episode was written by Matheson with the exception of the opening and closing narrations which were written by Serling, as was all of the narration from the first season.  I am not exactly sure when Matheson began writing his own narration but I know that for his first few scripts he wasn’t aware that Serling preferred for writers to write their own intro and outro.

            Matheson’s episodes, like much of his fiction, are defined not so much by his characters, but by his ideas.  And while “The Last Flight” isn’t the most original idea he would bring to this program (for the time travel paradox is in fact one of the oldest and most overused plot devices in the field of science fiction), Matheson adds enough mystery and detail to the story to make it interesting.  It was a smart move to set the episode entirely in the present.  When the audience first encounters Decker they know absolutely nothing about him, which makes his past as mysterious to them as it does to Major Wilson and Major General Harper.  Another nice twist that defies the usual time travel paradox is that Decker does not want to return to his own time because he is afraid of being killed by the German planes.  But at the same time he is afraid of remaining in the present because he doesn’t want to face Mackaye.  It is only once he realizes that as long as he remains in 1959, Mackaye will never arrive at the SAC base because he will not have survived the attack.  And he arrives at the understanding that he has the opportunity to become a hero instead of remaining a coward. What he may or may not realize, however, is that he will sacrifice his own life in the process. 

This episode is a great example of Matheson’s skill at being able to adapt easily to the format of The Twilight Zone, a format which, as Matheson has said many times, was one of the key features to the show’s success.  He grabs the audience’s attention at the very beginning (the vivid contrast of a single engine Nieuport airplane from 1917 landing next to an advanced, military jet aircraft from 1959), and holds their interest until the end of Act I where he leaves them with a cliffhanger (Decker saying that Mackaye is dead) and then reveals everything in Act II (Decker confessing his cowardice) and wraps up the story with a logical explanation of the events (Mackaye’s story of how Decker saved his life).  He also knew that time travel should remain purely fantasy and should not be given any kind of theoretical explanation.  This way the audience focuses more on the story than on the science and the writer can get away with more.

While “The Last Flight” isn’t one of Matheson’s more memorable episodes (for he scripted some of the finest episodes that this program has to offer), it remains an enjoyable story with a solid script and fine acting from all four of the major players. 

Grade: B

Notes:

--This is the first of four episodes directed by William Claxton, who also directed the season two episode “The Jungle” and the season three episodes “The Little People” and “I Sing the Body Electric.” 
--"The Last Flight" was adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Charles Shaughnessy (Falcon Picture Group, 2002).

--Brian Durant

"The Fever"

Franklin Gibbs (Everett Sloan), stalked by the One Armed Bandit

“The Fever”

Season One, Episode 17

Original Air Date: January 29, 1960

Cast:

Franklin Gibbs: Everett Sloan

Flora Gibbs: Vivi Janiss

Public Relations Man: William Kendis

Floor Manager: Lee Sands

Sherriff: Arthur Peterson

Drunk: Art Lewis

Cashier: Marc Towers

Crew:

Writer: Rod Serling (original teleplay)

Director: Robert Florey

Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
Set Decoration: Rudy Butler and Henry Grace
Assistant Director: Edward Denault
Casting: Mildred Gusse
Editor: Joseph Gluck

Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino

Music: Stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:

“Specie of machine known variously as slot machine or one-armed bandit.  And if you’ve ever played with one of these things for a while you’ve probably gotten a peculiar feeling that this is a machine with a mind and a will of its own.  This is precisely what happens when Everett Sloan contacts a fatal ailment we call ‘the Fever.’  You’ll be an eye-witness to it next week on The Twilight Zone.”

Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:

“Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights, all expenses paid, at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs knack with a phrase.  But unbeknownst to either Mr. or Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there’s a prize in their package neither expected nor bargained for.  In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce.  A most inoperative, deadly, life-shattering affliction known as…the Fever.”

Summary:

            Flora and Franklin Gibbs have won an all-expenses paid vacation to Las Vegas for three days and two nights at a lavish hotel casino.  Upon arriving Franklin reminds his wife of his adamant hatred and disgust for gambling and tells her that he refuses to participate in such a degrading sport.  After saying this, however, Franklin is given a silver dollar by a drunk who forces him to put into a slot machine.  He hits the jackpot and the machine pays off.

            Back in their hotel room that evening Franklin can’t sleep.  He fools himself into thinking that he needs to put the tainted money back into the one-armed bandit where it belongs and he hops out of bed and heads down to the casino, leaving his wife in the room.  Some time later Flora comes down to the casino to find her husband in the grips a fevered gambling binge.  He has apparently been at it for hours and has gained the attention of the staff, who eye him suspiciously.  Flora pleads with him to return to bed but he refuses to do so until the machine pays off.  Several hours later, Franklin puts his last dollar into the machine and—as if mocking him—it stops working.  Franklin becomes enraged and violently pushes the slot machine to the ground.  He is apprehended by security and escorted back to his room.

            Franklin awakens several hours later convinced that he hears the sound of the one arm bandit outside of the hotel room.  Flora tells him that there is nothing there but he is in such a state of paranoia that he sees an illusion of a slot machine racing toward him.  He panics and trips over backwards, falling out of the window to his death many stories below.  Afterwards the one-armed bandit appears at the scene of the crime and triumphantly returns Franklin’s silver dollar back to his lifeless corpse.

Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:

“Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason and finally his life to an inanimate metal machine variously described as a one armed bandit, a slot machine or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs’s words, a monster with a will of its own.  Four our purposes we’ll stick with the later definition, because we’re in the Twilight Zone.”

Commentary:

"Three hours later Franklin stood by the machine, his tie knot pulled down, his shirt unbuttoned, his coat open. He was unconscious of time or noise or the way he looked or anything else. His whole existence had resolved itself into a simple set of actions. Put the coin in. Pull down the lever. Watch and wait." 
           "The Fever" by Rod Serling, Stories from the Twilight Zone (1960) 

            “The Fever” is Serling’s tongue in cheek stance on the debilitation of addiction.  Overall, this is not one of the more memorable episodes of the first season as comedy was not something that The Zone often did very successfully.  But it deserves a viewing or two.  This script’s greatest attribute is that it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  It’s almost a mockery of itself.  Serling said that he got the idea while playing slot machines in Las Vegas when he suddenly realized that there was an urge in him to keep playing until the machine paid off.  I don’t think Serling wanted to comment on gambling in particular, but on how helpless an individual can feel when in the grips of compulsion.  But he knew that overt didacticism wasn’t the way to get his message across.  On the surface “The Fever” is a simple parable about the helplessness of addiction and how completely it can consume a person.  But twenty-five minutes is not enough time to rationally tackle a subject as immensely serious as this one, so Serling  cartoonishly exaggerates Franklin’s neurosis in an attempt to make his point with humor.   Franklin begins the episode as an archetypal curmudgeon who has a distaste not only for gambling but, so it seems, for any sort of unbridled revelry.  And within a matter of hours he is transformed into a shamelessly degenerate gambler, all because of one lucky win.  Finally, after he’s been torn away from the casino floor, his fixation with gambling is so intense that he begins hallucinating that a slot machine is chasing him around his Las Vegas hotel, calling his name.  This is Serling’s attempt to poke fun at his own moralistic viewpoint while articulating his message at the same time, and for the most part it’s effective.  There are several possible endings to this episode but Serling choose to keep the source of Franklin’s tension purely psychological which I think was a smart choice.  The final scene in which the one-armed bandit can now be seen from the audience’s viewpoint, not Franklin’s, is simply Serling’s attempt to lighten the tone and end the story on a humorous note.

            One thing I always notice about this episode is its interesting use of sound.  Director Robert Florey and sound engineers Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino designed a unique voice for the one-armed bandit by mixing an actor’s voice with the sound of falling coins.  The performances in this episode also deserve a nod.  Vivi Janiss is wonderful as the eternally loyal, tolerant wife and Everett Sloane is absolutely remarkable as the maniacal Franklin Gibbs.  Sloane was known primarily as a character actor and years before had been a member of Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre, and was featured in many of Welles’s early films including Citizen Kane and The Lady from Shanghai. Sloane was nominated for an Emmy for his flawless portrayal of ruthless corporate executive Walter Ramsey in Rod Serling’s Patterns which aired on Kraft Television Theatre in 1955.  He reprised the role for the film version in 1956.  “The Fever” is his only contribution to The Twilight Zone.

Grade: C

Notes:

--The great Robert Florey also directed the season one episode “Perchance to Dream” and the season five episode “The Long Morrow.”

--Vivi Janiss also starred in the season two episode “The Man in the Bottle.”

--Serling adapted "The Fever" into a short story for his collection, Stories from the Twilight Zone (Bantam, 1960).  It was also adapted into a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Stacy Keach and Kathy Garver (Falcon Picture Group, 2002).

--Everett Sloan also starred in Rod Serling’s Noon on Doomsday which originally aired on The United States Steel Hour in 1956, alongside fellow Zone actors Jack Warden, Albert Salmi, and Philip Abbott. This original drama was one of the more heavily censored of Serling's scripts, as it was based on the murder of Emmett Till.  He also wrote the seldom heard lyrics to the theme from The Andy Griffith Show.  Reportedly depressed by the onset of blindness caused by glaucoma, the talented actor committed suicide in 1965.  He was fifty- five.
--"The Fever" was adapted into comic book form for the 1979 book Stories from the Twilight Zone (Bantam; a Skylark Illustrated Book) by Rod Serling, adapted by Horace J. Elias and illustrated by Carl Pfeufer.



--Brian Durant

"The Hitch-Hiker"

A haunted woman: Inger Stevens as Nan Adams

"The Hitch-Hiker"

Season One, Episode 16

Original Air Date: January 22, 1960

Cast:

Nan Adams: Inger Stevens

Hitch-Hiker: Leonard Strong

Sailor: Adam Williams

Gas Station Owner: George Mitchell

Mechanic: Lew Gallo

Counterman: Russ Bender

Highway Worker: Dwight Townsend

Crew:

Writer: Rod Serling (based on the radio play by Lucille Fletcher)

Director: Alvin Ganzer

Producer: Buck Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson

Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
Set Decoration: Rudy Butler and Henry Grace
Assistant Director: Edward Denault
Casting: Mildred Gusse
Editor: Bill Mosher
Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino

Music: stock

And Now, Mr. Serling:

                "Next week we'll drive with Miss Inger Stevens, who starts out on what begins as a vacation and ends as a desperate flight. She begins her trip next week on The Twilight Zone. And you'll be with her when she meets . . . "The Hitch-Hiker." We hope you'll be alongside. Goodnight."

Rod Serling's Opening Narration:

                "Her name is Nan Adams. She's twenty-seven years old. Her occupation: buyer at a New York department store. At present on vacation, driving cross-country to Los Angeles, California, from Manhattan. Minor incident on Highway 11 in Pennsylvania, perhaps to be filed away under accidents you walk away from. But from this moment on, Nan Adam's companion on a trip to California will be terror, her route fear, her destination quite unknown."

Summary:          

Leonard Strong as the Hitchhiker

                After her vehicle suffers a tire blowout, Nan Adams is assisted on the side of the highway by a mechanic from a nearby service station. After telling Nan that she's lucky to be alive, the mechanic puts a spare tire on her car and instructs her to follow him into town so that he can get a proper tire placed on her car. It is after climbing back into her car that Nan first sees the figure that will torment her for the remainder of her journey. He is a middle-aged man, shabbily dressed, standing on the side of the road, motioning, as a hitch-hiker does, for a ride. Even at first sight, it is clear that his presence disturbs Nan.

                Back in town, the mechanic puts a new tire on Nan's car. While standing outside the gas station, Nan spies the shabby hitch-hiker in a mirror. He is standing on the shoulder of the highway behind her. She looks away, unnerved by the sight of the man. The mechanic notices the change in Nan's behavior. When prompted, Nan tells the mechanic about the hitch-hiker. When the mechanic looks, he doesn't see a hitch-hiker. The man has vanished. Nan shrugs this off and drives away from the gas station.

                Nan's panic concerning the hitch-hiker increases as she continues her journey. She sees him more and more often, always standing on the side of the road, holding his thumb out for a ride. Nan drives faster, panicked by the fact that it is impossible for the hitch-hiker to stay ahead of her and yet he does. The hitch-hiker never does anything outright threatening but Nan still fears him. When she is stopped by a highway flagman at a construction site, the hitch-hiker appears at her back passenger window, asking if she is headed west. Nan cries out and hits the gas, swerving around the construction site, to the dismay of the flagman.

                Nan's next encounter with the hitch-hiker proves to be the most terrifying. Stopping at railroad tracks to allow an oncoming train to pass, Nan sees the hitch-hiker on the opposite side of the tracks. Once again feeling the pressure of panic, Nan decides to quickly cross the railroad tracks before the train arrives only to have her car stall on the tracks. With the train bearing down on her, Nan manages to get the car moving again at the last second and backs off of the tracks to the safety of the roadway. Nan believes the hitch-hiker compelled her onto the railroad tracks in an attempt to kill her.

                Night falls and Nan attempts to lose the hitch-hiker by getting off the main highway. She runs out of gas on a back road. She runs down the road, frightened and jumping at every shadow, until she reaches a gas station after closing hours. Nan pounds on the door in desperation, waking up the proprietor, a surly man who refuses to provide Nan with the gas she needs until regular hours the following morning. She tries to tell the gas station owner about the hitch-hiker but is unable to say in what way the hitch-hiker is actually threatening her. From out of the darkness comes a hand on Nan's shoulder. She turns around, sure that it will be the hitch-hiker only to find a sailor standing there. The young man is on leave and has been hitching his way back to San Diego to meet up with his shipmates. The sailor manages to get some gas for Nan's car and is eager to hitch a ride with her when Nan tells him that she will drive him all the way to San Diego. 

                Nan sees the hitch-hiker on the side of the road and this time she is determined to kill the man. She swerves dangerously onto the shoulder twice in an attempt to kill the hitch-hiker. The sailor manages to stop the car and tells Nan that there isn't any hitch-hiker on the road, that there wasn't anything there at all. The sailor decides it's safer to hitch his way than to stay in the car with Nan and, despite her frantic pleading, he takes off in the opposite direction, leaving Nan alone once again.

                Nan stops to use a payphone to call her mother and hear a familiar voice. The call is answered by someone Nan doesn't know, a Mrs. Whitney. This woman informs her that Mrs. Adams, Nan's mother, has suffered a nervous breakdown, brought on by the sudden death of her daughter, Nan, when Nan's car suffered a blowout days before on a Pennsylvania highway.      

                Suddenly, Nan understands everything, the panic, the detachment, the road trip that seems never to end. She drops the phone and returns to her car. She sees the hitch-hiker sitting in the back seat. He smiles and says, "I believe you're going my way."

Rod Serling's Closing Narration:
                "Nan Adams, age twenty-seven. She was driving to California, to Los Angeles. She didn't make it. There was a detour. . . through the Twilight Zone."

 Commentary:

"Outside it is night - the vast, soulless night of New Mexico. A million stars are in the sky. Ahead of me stretch a thousand miles of empty mesa, mountains, prairies - desert. Somewhere among them, he is waiting for me. Somewhere I shall know who he is, and who . . . I . . . am." 
     -"The Hitchhiker" by Lucille Fletcher 

"Going my way?"

                 "The Hitch-Hiker" is an excellent stand-out thriller during a first season in which the show was trying to find its niche by trying many different story types on for size. It is one of the show's earliest attempts at outright terror and formed a template for Rod Serling and the other core writers on the series to create a number of episodes involving a single, isolated character menaced by a supernatural device. Serling recreated the structure of "The Hitch-Hiker" for later episodes such as "The After Hours," "Mirror Image," and "Nightmare as a Child."
              As the setting moves from bright sunshine to dark and lonely night, "The Hitch-Hiker" manages to create a high level of tension very much in the style of classic radio and film thrillers of the thirties and forties, no coincidence since the source material is one of the more famous radio thrillers of the forties. The voice-over narration and unadorned directing style give the episode a feeling of quaintness, but render it no less effective. The cast and crew are superb in this one. Inger Stevens provides a highly credible and sympathetic performance as she emotionally unravels in the role of Nan Adams. Leonard Strong plays the Hitch-Hiker in a very unusual manner. He seems largely benign, yet manages to be menacing due to some well designed scenes by director Alvin Ganzer. The use of a mirror became a primary symbolic device for the series ("Mirror Image," "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room," "The Mirror," "Number Twelve Looks Just Like You," a dozen more) and is put to excellent and effective use in this episode with the rear-view mirror and the mirror in the makeup case.
               Rod Serling displays his skill in adapting another's work with "The Hitch-Hiker." His major innovation in adapting Lucille Fletcher's radio play for television was to change the gender of the main character from male to female, which perhaps further worked at the sympathies of the audience. Serling recognized the excellence of his source material and wisely changed little else, as it is Fletcher's original radio play which truly deserves the credit for story excellence.

               Lucille Fletcher (1912-2000) was best-known for writing the 30-minute radio play "Sorry, Wrong Number," which was originally produced for the Suspense radio series, broadcast on May 25, 1943, starring Agnes Moorehead (star of the second season Twilight Zone episode "The Invaders"). The radio play was later adapted by Fletcher into the 1948 film from Paramount starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster. The screenplay was adapted into a novel that same year by Allan Ullman, who also provided the novelization of Fletcher's screenplay, "Night Man" (1951)* Three years earlier, in 1941, Fletcher wrote "The Hitch-Hiker" as a vehicle for Orson Welles. 
               Orson Welles first starred as the doomed motorist Ronald Adams in the original radio play for The Mercury Theatre on the Air on November 17, 1941. Welles reprised his role for Suspense on September 2, 1942. An additional performance from Welles was heard on October 16, 1942 for The Philip Morris Playhouse. Welles's final performance in "The Hitch-Hiker" was for The Mercury Summer Theater on the Air on June 21, 1946. 

                The radio play was scored by Fletcher's then-husband Bernard Herrmann (they divorced in 1948), a frequent contributor to The Twilight Zone who did much to establish the musical identity of the series. Herrmann composed the first season's main title theme music, created original scores for several notable episodes, and his music was used in more than seventy episodes. Despite the lack of an original composition for The Twilight Zone episode of "The Hitch-Hiker," Herrmann's score from the 1946 broadcast of the radio play was used liberally. Lucille Fletcher told author Marc Scott Zicree, in The Twilight Zone Companion (1982), that the idea for the story occurred to her while driving cross-country with Herrmann and twice seeing an odd-looking hitch-hiker in two different locations, giving the appearance that the hitchhiker was moving forward in some preternatural way. "The Hitch-Hiker" was the only episode of The Twilight Zone adapted from a radio play. 

                The effectiveness of the episode is the result of many small nuances placed into the story by director Alvin Ganzer and also by what Rod Serling transposed and transfigured from Fletcher's original radio play. The first noticeable thing is Serling's incorporation of the tropes of a radio play into the television film, most notably with the ongoing use of the lead character's voice-over narration. The only other time Serling prominently used this device during the first season was for "Mirror Image," a very similar episode to "The Hitch-Hiker" in which a woman, played by Vera Miles, is stalked by her doppelganger in the waiting area of a bus station. The similarity between these two episodes is profound and it is evident that Fletcher's story creatively energized Serling and inspired him again when shaping the teleplays for several thematically related episodes. Serling's script for "The Hitch-Hiker" also injects some morbid humor into the play by dropping some not-so-subtle clues as to the true nature of Nan's plight. The conversation between Nan and the mechanic at the beginning of the episode features remarks that Nan "should have called for a hearse" instead of a mechanic, and that the new tire for Nan's car is "cheaper than a funeral."

                It is interesting to note that the tale of a hitch-hiking ghost has a long history in folklore as well as in several works in the popular culture. The most well-known folktale of a hitchhiking ghost concerns a person who picks up a hitch-hiker who is revealed to have been a ghost some time after their encounter when the driver attempts to return a belonging the ghost left behind in the vehicle. Of the many films and television plays with elements similar to "The Hitch-Hiker," perhaps the most notable is director Herk Harvey's 1962 cult film Carnival of Souls. The film stars Candace Hilligoss as a young woman who seemingly survives a drag-racing accident only to find herself afterwards feeling emotionally detached from those around her. More disturbing is that she is terrorized by a dark-eyed, pale-faced figure (played by director Harvey). At the film's conclusion, the young woman discovers that she is actually dead, having not survived the car accident, when she joins in with a group of spectral figures for a dance of death at some abandoned seaside carnival grounds. The film is an effectively moody chiller and sure to please any fan of The Twilight Zone in general and especially those viewers who enjoy "The Hitch-Hiker."
                 Another tale worth mentioning is Stephen King's novella "Riding the Bullet," which had the distinction of being the first mass-market e-book when it was released in 2000. The story concerns a college student who hitches a ride with a dangerous, and very dead, driver who forces the young man who face his fears and insecurities. The story was collected in King's 2002 collection Everything's Eventual and adapted for film in 2004 by writer/director Mick Garris. 

                 "The Hitch-Hiker" is an easy episode to enjoy, with its steady pacing, compelling lead performance, and pleasingly menacing atmosphere. The final, revelatory scene which finds Nan standing in a phone booth on a stretch of desolate highway is a highlight of the entire series, as is Leonard Strong's placid face and "going my way?" persistence. In all, it's a classic and among the best the series has to offer.

Grade: A

*The Ullman novelization of "Sorry, Wrong Number" was later included in the 1965 anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories Not for the Nervous, ghost-edited by Robert Arthur. This volume is of interest to Zone fans as it also includes stories by Ray Bradbury ("To the Future"), Richard Matheson ("Lemmings"), and Margaret St. Clair, whose contribution "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes" was adapted for Rod Serling's Night Gallery.

Lucille Fletcher snippet biography
from Volume Two (Spring, 1963) of Reader's Digest Condensed Books

Notes:

Illustration by Douglas Snow

for a 1985 reprint of

Lucille Fletcher's radio play

- Alfred Hitchcock attempted to purchase the rights to "The Hitch-Hiker" from Lucille Fletcher for Alfred Hitchcock Presents prior to its appearance on The Twilight Zone, but Fletcher turned down the $2,000 offered. $2,000 was the price for which the story was later purchased for The Twilight Zone. 
- According to a press release during the week of the episode's original airing, Rod Serling completed the adaptation of the radio play into a television script in just six hours. 
- Rod Serling named the lead character, Nan, after his daughter Anne. Nan was her family nickname. The character was named Ronald Adams in the radio play. 

- "The Hitch-Hiker" was remade as the 1997 short film "End of the Road" starring Nora Rickert as a college student terrorized by a menacing hitch-hiker played by Matthew Sutton.

-Director Alvin Ganzer also directed the first season episodes "What You Need," "Nightmare As a Child," and early sequences of "The Mighty Casey."

-Actress Inger Stevens also starred in the second season episode "The Lateness of the Hour." The talented actress died at 35 years of age on April 30, 1970 from acute barbiturate poisoning.
-Adam Williams also appeared in the second season episode "A Most Unusual Camera." 
-Lew Gallo also appeared in the second season episode "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" and the fourth season episode "On Thursday We Leave for Home." 
-George Mitchell also appeared in the first season episode "Execution," the fourth season episode "Jess-Belle," and the fifth season episode "Ring-A-Ding Girl." 
-Russ Bender also appeared in the third season episode "The Fugitive" and the fourth season episode "On Thursday We Leave for Home." 
-Listen to the original radio play, "The Hitch-Hiker," and other classic Suspense radio plays by clicking here: The Old Time Radio Network
-A 4-page unauthorized adaptation of Lucille Fletcher's radio play can be found in Atlas (now Marvel) Comics Marvel Tales #107 (June, 1952) under the title "Going My Way?" There is no mystery, however, as to the nature of the man pursuing the traveler in this adaptation. Death is illustrated as a grinning skeleton in a top hat. The story was written by Stan Lee and illustrated by Bernard Krigstein. The story can be found in the 2013 volume Messages in a Bottle: Comic Book Stories by B. Krigstein, edited by Gred Sadowski (Fantagraphics). 

--Jordan Prejean