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| Oliver Pope (Edward Andrews): Distracted Driver |
“You Drive”
Season Five, Episode 134
Original Airdate: January 3, 1964
Cast:
Oliver Pope: Edward Andrews
Lillian Pope: Helen Westcott
Pete Ratcliff: Kevin Hagen
Muriel Hastings: Totty Ames
Timmy Danbers: Michael Gorfain
Policeman: John Hanek
Passerby: Robert McCord
Crew:
Writer: Earl Hamner, Jr.
Director: John Brahm
Producer: William Froug
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens, a.s.c.
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
Art Direction: George W. Davis and Malcolm Brown
Film Editor: Thomaas W. Scott
Set Decoration: Henry Grace and Robert R. Benton
Assistant Director: Charles Bonniwell, Jr.
Casting: Patricia Rose
Music: Stock
Sound: Franklin Milton and Joe Edmondson
Mr. Serling’s Wardrobe: Eagle Clothes
Filmed at MGM Studios and Culver City, CA
And Now, Mr. Serling:
Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
“Portrait of a nervous man. Oliver Pope by name, office manager by profession. A man beset by life’s problems: his job, his salary, the competition to get ahead. Obviously, Mr. Pope’s mind is not on his driving. “
The narration continues after Pope hits a young boy on a bicycle and flees the scene of the crime.
“Oliver Pope, businessman-turned-killer, on a rain-soaked street in the early evening of just another day during just another drive home from the office. The victim, a kid on a bicycle, lying injured, near death. But Mr. Pope hasn’t time for the victim, his only concern is himself. Oliver Pope, hit-and-run driver, just arrived at a crossroad in his life, and he’s chosen the wrong turn. The hit occurred in the world he knows, but the run will lead him straight into . . . The Twilight Zone.”
Summary:
Driving home one evening after an afternoon rainstorm, Oliver Pope, preoccupied by his own insecurity, runs into a young boy on a bicycle delivering newspapers. He stops the car and gets out to take inventory. The boy is on the ground, unconscious, his bicycle lies smashed and twisted a few feet away. In a moment’s hesitation, Oliver gets back in the car and drives away. A woman comes to the boy’s aid and shouts for Oliver to come back but he does not.
Once home, his wife, Lillian, asks him if they are still going to the movies. Oliver says he is not feeling well. He is jumpy and irritable. His wife asks if anything is wrong and he says that one of his co-workers, Pete Radcliff, is trying to steal his job. Lillian notices a blinking light coming from the garage. Oliver goes to investigate and finds the lights of his car blinking on and off. He cuts them off and goes back inside. He tells his wife that it must be faulty wiring. Lillian says that the newspaper is late and Oliver winces. Later, away from his wife, Oliver calls the police to find out how the boy is doing. The prognosis is grim.
Later that night, Oliver and his wife are awakened to the sound of a car horn blaring repeatedly. Realizing it’s his car, Oliver goes back to the garage. Frustrated, he lifts the hood and rips the horn out of the car and the sound stops. The hood abruptly slams shut, narrowly missing him.
The next day, Oliver reads in the paper that there was a witness, a woman, who saw a man fleeing the scene of the accident in a car. Oliver tells Lilian that he is still not feeling well and will not be going to the office. Suddenly, the car horn starts honking incessantly. Lilian decides to take it to a repair shop.
On her way to the shop, the car suddenly becomes uncontrollable and dies in the middle of an intersection. Lillian runs to a nearby payphone and calls a tow truck. When she returns home, she tells Oliver about the car and says she had it towed to a repair shop and took a cab home. They hear the car horn from the garage. They go into the garage and find the car sitting there, horn blaring. The telephone rings and Oliver answers. It’s the repair shop informing them that their car has gone missing. The doorbell rings. It’s Pete Radcliff, bringing Oliver some papers from the office. Oliver accuses him of trying to steal his job. Pete snaps back at him and gets up to leave. He apologizes to Lillian and tells her he is on edge because his son’s friend was the victim of a hit-and-run the night before. Lillian says she heard about it and asks about the boy’s condition. Pete tells her that the boy died earlier that day. On his way home, the witness to the crime mistakenly identifies Pete as the hit-and-run driver. Pete is arrested.
The next morning, Oliver reads in the paper that Pete has been identified as the hit-and-run driver. He seems pleased when he tells his wife this. They hear a noise from the garage. Lillian thinks there’s a prowler. Oliver reluctantly goes to investigate. The front bumper of the car abruptly falls off and the engine attempts to start on its own. Oliver is terrified. That night, he and Lillian are woken up by loud rock music. Oliver returns to the garage. The music is coming from his car. It stops and a news bulletin begins. It’s about the arrest of the hit-and-run driver. Olliver cuts the radio off. It turns on again by itself. Olivers smashes it with a hammer. The front lights blink on and off. He smashes them with the hammer as well. The horn begins to blare. He lifts the hood and smashes it too. Satisfied, he returns to bed.
The next morning Oliver tells his wife that the car is falling apart and he intends to sell it. He says he is going to walk to work. After he leaves, Lillian sees the garage door open and the car, with no driver, back out into the street and drive away. It pulls up beside Oliver on the sidewalk. Oliver runs in the other direction, through backyards, but the car finds him and nearly runs him over. The passenger door opens, and Oliver gets inside. The car drives slowly to the police station so he can confess to the crime.
Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
“All persons attempting to conceal criminal acts involving their cars are hereby warned: check first to see that underneath that chrome there does not lie a conscience, especially if you’re driving along a rain-soaked highway…in the Twilight Zone.”
Commentary:
After Rod Serling, Earl Hamner, Jr. was the second most prolific writer of The Twilight Zone’s final season, seeing five of his eight episodes produced during the show’s fifth season. Hamner, who went on to fame as the creator of The Waltons, which he based on his own childhood in rural Virginia, held an immense affection for the area in which he was raised, a region not often represented on network television at the time. Much of his work, including several of his Twilight Zone episodes, is set in rural areas and features rural characters presented as complex people instead of the stereotypes often applied to characters from such backgrounds. But Hamner also seemed fascinated by, and perhaps somewhat cynical of, contemporary culture in twentieth century America. Hamner seemed torn between being a writer for hire in Hollywood and his humble beginnings in Schuyler, Virginia on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. His examination of contemporary culture is often not a flattering one and he seems to make the connection that people are not happy because they are distracted by things like social status and material possessions. This is most evident in his final script produced for The Twilight Zone, which also became the final episode of the show, “The Bewitchin’ Pool,” in which these two worlds are directly juxtaposed against one another. Hamner’s stories about contemporary urban life ultimately prove to be his least effective material for the show, lacking the authenticity of his folkloric stories from earlier seasons and relying largely on themes and ideas which were either derivative or simply did not work. Although it has some interesting moments, “You Drive” ultimately falls into this category.
Like his first script for the show, season three’s “The Hunt,” “You Drive” is a revised version of an earlier script written by Hamner. In 1954, Hamner wrote an episode of the NBC series Justice titled “Hit and Run.” Serling’s use of the word "justice" in the trailer for this episode is likely a deliberate nod to that series. I have not seen this episode nor have I read the script for it so it is difficult to say how it differs specifically from “You Drive” but all of the synopses I found online give the description as this: a man is driving home through a rainstorm when he accidentally strikes a newsboy on a bicycle. He gets out to confirm what has happened and, like Oliver Pope, he panics and flees the scene. He tells no one, not even his wife. He spends the rest of the episode a nervous wreck trying to secretly evade the consequences of his wrong doing. The episode stars Dane Clark, E.G. Marshall, Ed Begley, and Betty Field. It was directed by Daniel Petrie. “You Drive” appears to take this exact premise and just adds a supernatural component.
The history of sentient machinery, specifically possessed or self-aware automobiles, is too lengthy to go into detail here. The most famous example without question is Stephen King’s 1983 novel Christine, about a murderous 1958 Plymouth Fury, and its subsequent film adaptation directed by John Carpenter that same year. But as Tony Albarella points out in The Twilight Zone Scripts of Earl Hamner, sentient machinery had been a regular theme on The Twilight Zone since the show’s inception. And there had already been two episodes featuring vaguely intelligent automobiles both of which share other thematic elements with "You Drive" as well. Season two’s “The Whole Truth” features a used car salesman who swindles people into buying cheap, broken vehicles for a high price. One day he buys an old car that is supposedly haunted and then finds that he is unable to tell a lie and thus unable to sell any of his broken cars. In another season two episode, “A Thing About Machines,” a rude and unapologetic food critic, Bartlett Finchley, lives alone in a house in which all of the machinery—the television, electric razors, an electric typewriter, the radio—seem to be self-aware and also seems to hate him. The man is eventually chased through the streets by his car until it chases him into a pool where he drowns, a scene not unlike the chase scene in “You Drive.” But, as is emblematic of Hamner’s fiction, which often has a strong moral undercurrent, Oliver Pope is simply made to do the right thing and confess to his crime, while Finchley, whose transgressions are far less severe, is murdered by his vehicle.
This is the first of two episodes John Brahm directed for The Twilight Zone’s final season. Charles Beaumont and Jerry Sohl’s “Queen of the Nile” would be his last effort for the show. Brahm is the most prolific director the show ever employed, helming twelve episodes of the program. He is also the only director present in all five seasons of the show. Brahm, a German-born director who began his career in England before moving to Hollywood, was well versed in the expressionist films that emerged from Europe in the 1920s and 30s and this is evident in much of his work, specifically the film noirs he made during the 1940s. Once he made the transition from film to television he was often limited creatively and would have to adhere to the established tone and style of the program he was working on. An anthology series as stylistically broad as The Twilight Zone offered Brahm the same kind of creative freedom he had experienced as a director of feature films.
Given that Brahm directed five episodes during the show’s first season, all of them fan favorites and all of them carrying his unmistakable expressionist gloom, it isn’t a stretch to say that the show, to some extent at least, owes its look and tone to Brahm, although this could also be said of several other key directors as well. However, the two episodes he directed for season five are atypical episodes for Brahm. Both are set in contemporary suburban America and, perhaps because of this fact, they lack the overtly stylish ambiance found in most of his episodes, leaving them feeling sort of flat. Still, Brahm does include several special effects shots that are very interesting and difficult to execute for the era. There is a shot near the end of the episode which features Pope lying in the street after falling. The Fairlane races towards him and comes to an abrupt halt inches away from his head. The scene is shot in reverse with the car beginning near Andrews and descending in reverse. But it ends up being a very effective sequence and Andrews’ reaction is very convincing. The sequence where the car drives by itself may seem familiar today but at the time it was not an easy effect to pull off convincingly. To accomplish this, an effects person was stationed underneath the dash—some accounts say he was in the trunk—with remote controls to steer, accelerate, and brake and also a periscope that popped slightly up from beneath the hood in order to see. The end result is convincing even if it does seem kind of silly to a modern audience.
Edward Andrews appeared in two episodes of the show. He played the particularly deplorable villain, Carling, in season one’s “Third from the Sun.” Andrews got his start on the Broadway stage in the late 1930s and by the dawn of television had made the transition to live anthology series. He was often cast as either older characters, given that he looked much older than his actual age, or as villains and other unlikeable characters, such as Oliver Pope. He enjoyed a prolific career as a character actor on Broadway, television, and in feature films into the 1980s. His notable film roles include The Harder They Fall (1956), Elmer Gentry (1960), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), Sixteen Candles (1984), and Gremlins (1984). He also appeared in episodes of Thriller and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. He seems to excel at unlikable characters because he is convincing in both his appearances on the show. As Oliver Pope, he is a convincingly insecure man whose selfishness is his entire personality which is much different than the calm and determined stalker, Carling.
Helen Westcott had been performing on stage and screen nearly her entire life. As an adult she had notable roles in The Gun Fighter (1950), Phone Call from a Stranger (1952), and Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953). This was her only appearance on The Twilight Zone. Kevin Hagen had already made an appearance on the show in its first season as one of three ill-fated astronauts in “Elegy.” Today he is best remembered as Dr. Hiram Baker on Little House on the Prairie. He also appeared in episodes of Yancy Derringer, Thriller, and Amazing Stories.
“You Drive” is not a terrible episode but its predictability and clichéd fantasy devices make for a fairly uninspiring experience. John Brahm does the best with the material he is given but he is probably the wrong director for this episode. Still, it is a mildly amusing episode with a good performance from Edward Andrews and interesting special effects which make it at least worth a viewing or two.
Grade: C
Up Next in the Vortex: A look at the March/April, 1984 issue of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone Magazine. See you then.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following:
The Internet Movie Database
Wikipedia
Notes:
I feel like this is a memorable episode, perhaps because it is often rerun. I get it mixed up with "A Thing About Machines." Thanks for the fascinating review!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Jack. Some of the imagery in this one is memorable and the final act is pretty similar to the end of "A Thing About Machines." I think i just found myself not really concerned with the plot or the characters. There's some interesting stuff in it though.
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