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| Mr. Williams (Geoffrey Horne), who comes bearing gifts. |
“The Gift”
Season Three, Episode 97
Original Air Date: April
27, 1962
Cast:
Williams: Geoffrey
Horne
Doctor: Nico
Minardos
Pedro: Edmund
Vargas
Manuelo: Cliff
Osmond
Guitar Player [Ignacio]: Vladimir
Sokoloff
Sanchez: Henry
Corden
Police Officer: Paul
Mazurka
Rudolpho: Vito
Scotti
Woman #1: Carmen
Danton
Woman #2: Lea
Marmer
Man #1: Joe
Perry
Man #2: David
Fresco
Crew:
Writer: Rod
Serling (original teleplay)
Director: Allen
H. Miner
Producer: Buck
Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph
W. Nelson
Director of Photography: George
T. Clemens
Art Direction: George
W. Davis and Merrill Pye
Set Decoration: Keogh
Gleason
Assistant Director: E.
Darrell Hallenbeck
Casting: Robert
Walker
Editor: Jason
H. Bernie
Sound:
Franklin Milton and Bill Edmondson
Music: Laurindo
Almeida
Optical Effects: Pacific
Title
Rod Serling’s Wardrobe: Eagle
Clothes
Filmed at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Studios
And Now, Mr. Serling:
“Next week on the Twilight Zone,
we tell the story that we think might prove a rather haunting little item in
the scheme of things. It tells of a small Mexican boy and a visitor from
another planet, and it tells further what happens when this extra-terrestrial
traveler is faced with some of the less-personable instincts of human beings,
like fear, superstitions, and intolerance. Our story is called ‘The Gift.’”
Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
“The place is Mexico, just across
the Texas border, a mountain village held back in time by its remoteness and
suddenly intruded upon by the twentieth century. And this is Pedro, nine years
old, a lonely, rootless little boy, who will soon make the acquaintance of a
traveler from a distant place. We are at present forty miles from the Rio
Grande, but any place and all places can be the Twilight Zone.”
Summary:
After an
unidentified air vessel crashes in a small, Mexican village a police officer
rushes into the local cantina and tells the town postman to deliver a letter.
As a crowd of people listen, he explains that he and another officer heard the
aircraft land and approached with caution. Shots were fired and the other
officer was fatally wounded. He proceeded to fire as the suspect fled the
scene. The officer tells the postman to deliver the letter to the military.
Later, a strange man wonders into the cantina. The only occupants
are an ugly, overweight bartender named Manuelo, an old blind man playing the
guitar, a doctor, and a young boy named Pedro who works there. Manuelo tells
the man that they are closed but the man appears dazed and sits at a table
anyway. The bartender reluctantly brings the man a bottle of wine and notices
that his hands are bloody. Fearing he is the suspected shooter Manuelo runs for
door to alert the authorities but the man clubs him with the bottle before he
can get anywhere. He tells the doctor and Pedro that he does not wish to harm them
and then falls to floor.
Later, the stranger, who calls himself Mr. Williams, awaits surgery
in the back room of the cantina. Young Pedro, an orphan, feels a spiritual
kinship with Williams because is also without a home. Williams gives Pedro a
gift that he says is for the people of town and tells him to keep it a secret
until later.
After the doctor has removed the bullets from Williams he tells
Pedro that, according to medical standards, his friend should not have survived
his injury. Manuelo tells the doctor that he has informed the authorities of
the stranger’s location.
When the authorities arrive the people of town turn into an angry,
violent mob. Williams tells Pedro to give his gift to the doctor but Manuelo
grabs it and set fire to it. Astounded, Williams asks them why they will not
accept his kindness. Someone accuses him of trying to harm young Pedro and he
is shot dead.
The doctor walks over to the fire and picks up what is left of the
gift. He says it is the formula for a vaccine against all forms of cancer. But
he can no longer read it because the formula has been burned off.
Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
“Madeiro, Mexico, the present. The
subject: fear. The cure: a little more faith. An Rx off a shelf in the Twilight
Zone.”
Commentary:
Many fans and
historians of The Twilight Zone have
made the claim that as the show approached the tail end of its third season its
creative stride began to show signs of fatigue. Although the show would run for
another two seasons—a season and a half, really—it would never quite feel the
same. There are numerous potential explanations for this. One reason is that
after the departure of Buck Houghton, the show went through a quick succession
of producers, each with a different idea of how it should be run. Another is
that season four saw the show change to an hour-long format which, although it
did produce some extraordinary episodes, ultimately did not fit the tone of the
show. Another reason is that writers Richard Matheson and George Clayton
Johnson both left the show during its fifth season after creative disputes with
producer William Froug and prolific Twilight
Zone contributor Charles Beaumont had begun to show signs of the disease
which would eventually claim his life and he also left the show. This resulted
in an almost totally new writing staff at the end of the fifth season.
As for Serling, the
constant fight to meet his contractual obligation of writing the majority of
the episodes each season had most certainly taken its toll. He had grown weary
of the show and had increasingly begun to recycle themes and story lines. When
it appeared that The Twilight Zone would
not be renewed for a fourth season he accepted a teaching position at
his Alma Mater, Antioch College, in Yellow Springs, Ohio. He would reside in Ohio and mail his scripts for the show, which was being rebooted in a different format and under a new producer, back to Los Angeles. By the time the
show was cancelled for the third time after the fifth season Serling was ready
to let it go. The show had made its mark and was becoming almost a ghost of its
former self.
If a specific
episode could be used to mark the point at which the series began to decline
then “The Gift” would be a good example. It is definitely not the worst episode
of the series but it is the worst episode up to this point in the series which
is significant. The show had already had a few not-so-great episodes and still had some fantastic episodes left in its reservoir—the
following week would see “The Dummy” make its debut and become an instant
classic and the remaining seasons each had their share of memorable episodes. But
the ratio of good episodes to bad would noticeably shift between the broadcast
of “The Gift” and the end of the series two years later.
Seemingly unsure
of exactly what it wants to be, “The Gift” is a hybrid of a standard
invaders-from-space story and a twentieth century religious parable with undertones
of McCarthyism present because it is a Rod Serling script. It seems to have
been a story that Serling was somewhat attached to for he attempted to see it
made three different times. But the finished product here falls short of the
standard that The Twilight Zone had
established. The acting is poor, the dialogue forced, the setting awkward and unnecessary,
and the heavy religious implications inappropriate and pretentious. At times it
feels almost like an imitation of a Twilight
Zone episode rather than the real thing.
Serling’s first
attempt at getting this story made was as an hour-long pilot episode for The Twilight Zone which he submitted to
CBS in 1958 called “I Shot an Arrow into the Air.” It’s the story of a humanoid
being from another planet whose space craft crashes near the site of an Earth
vessel that was recently launched into orbit. The creature, who goes by the
name of John Williams, befriends a boy named David after he rescues the young
lad from neighborhood bullies. To return the favor the boy attempts to bring
Williams home so he can recover from wounds received after being shot by a police officer. Instead, his father calls the police and Williams is taken
into custody. He eventually manages to escape and later reveals to David that he is
from another planet. He came to Earth to study human beings but has decided
that mankind is not yet ready to be introduced to extraterrestrials. Then,
unbeknownst to David, he telepathically instills in the boy the knowledge that
will eventually cause him to become an astronaut twenty years later. Upon his
first voyage into space he and Williams are reunited.
This script was
one of several unproduced pilots that Serling wrote in the year leading up to
the premier of The Twilight Zone. He
recycled the title “I Shot an Arrow into the Air” for a season one episode of
the show, which bears no resemblance to this longer story, and rewrote the plot
to fit a half hour format which eventually became “The Gift”—after being
changed from “The Guest.” Several years later, in an unsuccessful effort to get
a feature-length Twilight Zone film
off the ground after the show went off the air, Serling tried to expand this
story into a full-length screenplay.
The Twilight Zone produced many episodes
over its five season run which featured implied religious themes or motifs
among them Serling’s “Escape Clause,” Charles Beaumont’s “The Howling Man” and
“Printer’s Devil,” Earl Hamner’s debut episode “The Hunt,” and “Still Valley,”
Serling’s adaptation of a story by Manly Wade Wellman. “The Gift,” however, is
probably the episode that is the most openly didactic with its religious
ideals. Serling’s insistence on making virtually every aspect of this story an
allusion to Christianity comes off as incredibly forced and distracts the
audience from what would otherwise be a fairly compelling tale about the flaws
of humanity. At its core the story has more to do with fear than with religion
which is why the religious angle feels so out of place. Among the more obvious
allusions to the story of Christ are Manuelo’s betrayal of Williams in a scene
where the doctor refers to him as Judas and the camera pans down to reveal him
counting out coins on the bar. Another is Williams’s vow to Pedro to return
some day when humanity is mature enough to accept him in which he references
Christ specifically. Add to this numerous images and references to wine and
blood and Williams’s apparent crucifixion-like stance before being killed in
the final scene and the episode quickly becomes a caricature of what Serling
intended it to be. It is also worth noting that this episode aired just days
after Easter and was likely intended to be a holiday episode although it is
never referred to as such.
Villainous space
invaders have been prevalent in science fiction since before space travel was
even possible. But benevolent alien beings were largely absent from the genre until
around the middle of twentieth century and appeared significantly less than
their sinister counterparts. Probably the most famous story of well intentioned
alien visitors is Robert Wise’s 1951 film The
Day the Earth Stood Still, a movie whose plot is actually quite similar to
“The Gift” including its religious undertones which screenwriter Edmund H.
North admits to having snuck into his script when adapting Harry Bates 1941
novella “Farewell to the Master.”
Another reason this
episode seems stilted is that by this point in the series fans had already seen
this story several times. One of Serling’s deepest concerns as a writer was
humanity’s potential to become its own worst enemy. In “The Gift” humble villagers
are transformed into a violent angry mob out of fear and paranoia much like the
neighbors in “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” and “The Shelter.” All
three tales feature a paranoid conservative who fans the flames of hysteria, a
liberal-minded voice of reason, frightened townspeople who are easily
influenced, and children who unintentionally cause the downfall of everyone
else. The fact that “The Gift” is set in rural Mexico feels like a mere
afterthought simply to differentiate it from the two previous episodes.
Aside from the
problems with the script the other fatal flaw of this episode is poor casting. Nico
Minardos does an adequate job as the rational Doctor but Cliff Osmond is
ridiculously over the top as Manuelo and Geoffrey Horne ridiculously wooden as Williams.
Another unfortunate aspect of Serling’s script is that it places several key
emotional scenes on the shoulders of young Edmund Vargas. Casting children in
roles with a lot of emotional weight is always risky and unfortunately this
time it proved to be a bad decision for the scene in the back room between
Vargas and Williams feels stilted and very slow. Vladimir Sokoloff also gives a
brief but very compelling performance as Ignacio the guitar player. Despite
being Russian, Sokoloff played a Hispanic character all three times he appeared
on the show. He also appeared in season two’s “Dust” and the season three
episode “The Mirror.” Sadly, the day
after shooting wrapped for “The Gift” Sokoloff suffered a major stroke and died
at the age of 72 ending a career that dates back to the era of silent films.
This was director
Allen H. Miner’s only Twilight Zone episode.
Miner began his career as a combat photographer in World War II. His camera
captured General Douglas MacArthur’s initial landing in the Philippines. His brief
career in Hollywood was spent working mostly in television usually as a writer
and director of western programs including directing four episodes of Serling’s
western series The Loner. Miner
directed his first feature film The Black
Pirates in 1954 and appears to have left the industry all together in 1972.
His direction on this episode is more or less uneventful. He does manage to capture
a specific mood in Serling’s script. There is a sense of anxiety present
throughout the episode. This is interrupted several times, however, by long
scenes of mundane dialogue.
The best thing about this episode is Brazilian guitarist Laurindo Almeida’s
restrained musical score. It fits the atmosphere of the episode nicely, never
intruding upon the story but moving it along the best it can. Almeida was a
Grammy Award winner that managed to flourish as both a classical and jazz guitarist.
His music also appeared in numerous western films including Rio Bravo (1959), The Alamo (1960) and Unforgiven
(1992). This is his only contribution to the show.
Although “The
Gift” has a few minor praise-worthy elements, they are not enough to save it
from being a sore spot on the show’s overall catalog. Poor casting and a bad
script are ultimately to blame for this episode’s shortcomings. If you are a
new fan of the show still making your way through the odyssey that is The Twilight Zone then you can rest easy knowing that "The Gift" is reserved only for the completist. This one, unfortunately, is not recommended.
Grade: F
Grateful acknowledgement to:
The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the
Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams, Jr. (OTR
Publishing, 2008)
Los Angeles Times;
Obituaries, January 16, 2004; Allen H. Miner
Notes:
--Vladimir Sokoloff also appeared
in season two’s “Dust” and the season three episode “The Mirror.” “The Gift” was his last screen appearance.
--Paul Mazursky also appeared in
the season one episode “The Purple Testament” and the season four episode “He’s
Alive.”
--Vito Scotti also appeared in
season one’s “Mr. Bevis.”
--Allen H. Miner later directed
four episodes of Rod Serling’s western series The
Loner.
--Check out the Twilight
Zone Radio Drama starring Danny Goldring.
--Brian
