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| Theodore Bikel as Oliver Crangle, counting down to four o'clock |
“Four O’Clock”
Season Three, Episode 94
Original
Air Date: April 6, 1962
Cast:
Oliver
Crangle: Theodore Bikel
Mrs.
Lucas: Phyllis Love
Agent
Hall: Linden Chiles
Mrs.
Chloe Williams: Moyna MacGill
Crew:
Writer:
Rod Serling (based on the story by
Price Day)
Director:
Lamont Johnson
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:
stock
Optical
Effects: Pacific Title
Serling’s
Wardrobe: Eagle Clothes
Filmed
at M.G.M. Studios
And Now, Mr. Serling:
“Next
week an exceptionally fine actor named Theodore Bikel portrays a misguided kook
who fancies himself some kind of guardian of law and order. He decides that
it’s his mission in life to eradicate evil the world over. Now, this one is
told very far-out but considering the nature of the times it happens to be very
close-in. Next week an exercise in insanity. It’s called ‘Four O’Clock.’ Set
your watches and come on in.
“This
cigarette, Chesterfield King, gives all the advantages of extra length and much
more. The great taste of twenty-one vintage tobaccos grown mild, aged mild, and
blended mild. No wonder they satisfy so completely.”
Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
“That’s
Oliver Crangle, a dealer in petulance and poison. He’s rather arbitrarily
chosen four o’clock as his personal Götterdämmerung, and we are about to watch the
metamorphosis of a twisted fanatic, poisoned by the gangrene of prejudice, to
the status of an avenging angel, upright and omniscient, dedicated and
fearsome. Whatever your clocks say, it’s four o’clock, and wherever you are, it
happens to be The Twilight Zone.”
Summary:
Oliver
Crangle has one mission in life: to expose all the evil people of the world.
His view of evil, however, is fluid and morally ambiguous. His personal judgment
of his fellow man is corrupted by deep-seeded prejudices and a profound lack of
empathy. From within his cramped apartment, Crangle compiles documents on his
fellow citizens and spends his days making phone calls to employers and law
enforcement offices to cry warnings about those citizens he deems subversive.
Crangle
is visited by Mrs. Lucas, the wife of a doctor whom Crangle has vigorously
attempted to ruin. The doctor in question failed to save the life of a
grievously injured woman and Crangle therefore considers him an evil person.
Mrs. Lucas offers a prophetic warning, that Crangle is truly evil, that his
judgments are unfair and his attempts to ruin lives are cruel. Crangle arrogantly
dismisses the woman.
Crangle
fastens upon an idea. At four o’clock, this very day, he will mark all the evil
people of the world in a way that will uniquely identify their terrible inner
natures. After abandoning a number of unfeasible ideas, Crangle decides that he
will make every evil person in the world one third their size, or roughly two
feet in height. He calls an F.B.I. agent to his apartment to tell him that at
four o’clock law enforcement had better be prepared to arrest all the
diminutive people. Hall, the F.B.I. agent, questions Crangle’s sanity before
dismissing his crank idea and leaving.
Undeterred,
Crangle gazes out of the window, counting down the minutes until four o’clock.
When the moment arrives he rejoices the in exaltation of his efforts. He turns
again to the window and the terrible realization that he is only two feet tall.
Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
“At
four o’clock an evil man made his bed and lay in it, a pot called a kettle
black, a stone-thrower broke the windows of his glass house. You look for this
one under ‘F’ for Fanatic and ‘J’ for Justice in The Twilight Zone.”
Commentary:
“Four
O’Clock,” the short story by Price Day, originally appeared in the April, 1958
issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery
Magazine. It appeared in book form the following year as part of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: My Favorites in
Suspense, a Random House book ghost-edited by Robert Arthur, a prolific
short story writer, creator of The Three
Investigators series of children’s mysteries (to which Hitchcock lent his
name for a time), and the co-creator of The
Mysterious Traveler radio program. Arthur compiled several Hitchcock
anthologies for both adults and young readers in the late 1950s and 1960s
before his untimely death in 1969. He is underrated as an editor and his
anthologies come recommended. “Four O’Clock” appeared in paperback in 1960 in Alfred Hitchcock Presents: 14 of My
Favorites in Suspense from Dell. It is included in The Twilight Zone: The Original Stories, edited by Richard
Matheson, Martin H. Greenberg, and Charles G. Waugh for Avon Books in 1985.
A
brief aside. An additional connection exists between Alfred Hitchcock and “Four
O’Clock,” at least as far as the title goes. Hitchcock filmed a now
well-regarded segment titled “Four O’Clock” for the anthology program Suspicion in 1957. It concerns a man
(E.G. Marshall) who, believing his wife is unfaithful, plants a bomb in his
home to kill his wife and her lover. The bomb is set to detonate at exactly
four o’clock. Not only is the man mistaken about his wife’s infidelity, he is
attacked by burglars in his home and tied up in the basement, forced to sweat
out the minutes counting down to four o’clock and the detonation of the bomb. This
segment was remade in 1986 for the revival Alfred
Hitchcock Presents series. The basis of both segments is Cornell Woolrich’s
1938 story, “Three O’Clock.” The title change appears to have been a
perfunctory move on the part of the production.
Price
Day, author of the short story, is best-known as a Pulitzer Prize winning
journalist. He tried his hand at poetry and fiction early in his career before
turning to journalism. He placed poetry with The New Yorker in 1931 and, though “Four O’Clock” is by far Day’s
most famous work of fiction, he wrote several short stories for Collier’s Weekly in the late 1930s and
early 1940s, many in collaboration with Charles Bradshaw, though none approach
the subject or tone of “Four O’Clock.”
Day was born in
Plainview, Texas in 1907 and attended Princeton University. He began his
journalistic career as a cartoonist and occasional freelance contributor to
newspapers in New York and Florida. Day was a reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Times in 1942 and moved
to the Baltimore Evening Sun that same
year before becoming a reporter for the Baltimore
Sun in 1943. Day was a war correspondent for the Sun and as such was one of the first civilians to witness and
report upon the conditions of the liberated Nazi death camps. Day was the only
reporter from an individual newspaper to witness the German surrender at Reims.
In 1949, Day received the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his
feature in the Sun, “Experiment in
Freedom – India and Its First Year of Independence.” He served as
Editor-in-Chief of the Sun from
1960-1975. Some of his Sun columns
were collected as The Spillway: Columns
from the Baltimore Sun, 1956-1960 (Baltimore Sun Press, 1997). Day’s sole
film credit is for one of his stories
with Charles Bradshaw, which was adapted by other writers into the 1939 film The Lady and the Mob, a film which
featured a young Ida Lupino, star of “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” and
director of “The Masks.” Price Day died in 1978.
Though Rod Serling
remained remarkably faithful to Day’s story, the brevity of the original story
require Serling to pad out the tale in order to bring it up to running time. As
such, the episode comes across as dialogue heavy, particularly since the
setting is so constrictive. It doesn’t help that “Four O’Clock” is a story
which exists only to serve a twist ending. It is a memorable twist ending (it
just cracked our Top 20 best of the series) but episodes which live and die by
the twist ending often have little besides which to recommended them.
Serling’s attraction to
the material should appear obvious as the story confronts the idiocy and
intolerance of modern American society, a fight against which Serling built his
entire creative career. Although The
Twilight Zone is frequently portrayed as the series Serling had to create
so he could say the confrontational things being muffled on the more
prestigious anthology programs, the series never really attempted to convincingly
camouflage these type of confrontational efforts. Any viewer of “The Shelter,”
"The Mirror," or “The Obsolete Man” who does not see beyond the
trappings of the thriller or the science fiction story is an unsophisticated
viewer indeed. In a rare instance of calling direct attention to the show’s
attempt to confront these issues, Serling speaks of “considering the nature of
the times” in his preview narration.
The internal time of
the short story consists of thirteen minutes, as it begins at 3:47. Price Day
provides the bulk of exposition in flashback. Serling could not utilize this
method and instead pushed the time back to the morning in order to develop the
narrative over the course of the day. As such, Serling needed to create
characters for Oliver Crangle to interact with. The short story contains only
the single character, Crangle, unless one considers Pet, the parrot. Serling’s creative
mastery was in character development and he effectively creates three foils to
Crangle’s madness, the simple-minded and long-suffering landlady, the desperate
spouse of one whom Crangle has attempted to ruin, and, perhaps most important,
the F.B.I. agent, who represents a rational enforcer of the law and the only
character to directly question Crangle’s sanity.
Some additional
interesting symbolic representations are present in the episode, particularly in the
construction of Crangle’s apartment, which manages to be both obsessively
organized and chaotically cramped at the same time, a useful symbol for the
mental workings of Crangle himself. The series excelled in the story told in a
single or highly constrained environment. This was likely due to budgetary
limitations but the production crew, particularly the art directors and set decorators, rose to
the challenge again and again to create interesting and engaging set design which often mirrored the theme of the tale. There is also the use of the parrot as a pet for Crangle, which is obvious in its symbolic representation as a communicative animal that can only repeat back what is spoken to it. The short story uses the parrot in a more interesting way than the episode, as well. Throughout the story, Crangle is repeatedly feeding the bird nuts and only realizes he has shrunk down to two feet when he tries to feed the bird a nut and his hand comes up short. In the episode, a shot is utilized to show Crangle unable to reach the bowl of nuts. Serling, in an unusual touch, presents a moment in which Crangle consults Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address for moral support. It is an expert illustration of the
dangerous way in which the morally reprehensible can favorably twist the
meanings of dogmatic writings to suit their purposes.
The logical
problems of the story are presented to the viewer in the form of complete ambiguity. The result is that some natural questions arise in
the mind of the viewer. From whence does Crangle derive his information? His
power? His income? Where does this story take place? Leaving such questions
unanswered is undoubtedly an attempt to give the story the feeling of a moral
allegory but it can be frustrating for one who requires a base line of logic
even in tales of fantasy. The short story offers a marginal bit of explanation
about Crangle’s power and seems to suggest it is a divine gift. Day writes: “.
. . since that morning three weeks ago when, as he sat on a bench in a park,
looking at the pictures in the clouds across the lake, it came to him that he
had the power to do this thing, that upon him at that moment had been bestowed
the gift of putting a mark on all the bad people on earth, so that they should
be known.”
There
is also the issue of the mental state of Crangle as portrayed by actor Theodore
Bikel. Near the end of the episode the true severity of Crangle’s delusion is
revealed in language making reference to gallows and electric chairs. Crangle
strikes the viewer as suffering from both a psychotic disorder as well as a
severe social anxiety disorder, one characterized by obsessive and repetitive
behavior, unusual mannerisms and use of language, and an inability to engage in
normal social behavior. Bikel’s performance is frequently dismissed as
over-the-top and manic but it is a far more nuanced performance than it is
given credit for.
Theodore
Bikel was born in Vienna in 1924 and studied acting with both an Israeli
company and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London before moving to the
United States in 1954. He is likely best-known for his stage role as Tevye the
milkman in Fiddler on the Roof. Bikel
is also known for his role in the film My
Fair Lady (1964), his long career as a folk music singer, and for his
political activism. Despite the fact that Bikel was frequently cast as a shady
or outright villainous German or Russian character, he was capable of great
versatility, illustrated in one instance with his role as a Southern sheriff
who pursues Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier in the 1958 film The Defiant Ones. That film was made at
the height of the Blacklist era, co-written by a blacklisted writer (Ned Young)
whose script won the Academy Award, and whose story and theme perfectly
shadowed in film what Rod Serling was continuously doing in television. There
is little doubt that a politically active humanitarian like Bikel relished the
opportunity to play the bigot Crangle in “Four O’Clock.” Bikel did little
additional genre work but was memorable in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents adaptation of Thomas Burke’s
Jack-the-Ripper inspired story, “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole,” from the second
season of that series. In an interesting, and not altogether successful,
choice, Bikel was selected to narrate Serling’s short story “The Monsters are
Due on Maple Street” for Harper Audio Books in 1993 as part of a series featuring
actors/actresses from the original series reading Serling’s short story
adaptations for the audio book market. I highly recommend Tom Elliot's podcast episode on those audio books, which can be found here. Bikel died in Los Angeles in 2015.
As
the above commentary indicates, “Four O’Clock” is a fascinating episode layered
with symbol and interpretive meaning. The story cannot, however, sustain itself
under the weight of the immense amount of circular dialogue leading to a rather
predictable twist ending. Bikel’s performance is a rewarding one but it is the
only element of the story which repays repeat viewings. Perhaps the story feels
too familiar. After all, the series traded in “bully gets comeuppance” quite
often and would continue to do so well into the fifth and final season. One
need only look to “The Last Night of a Jockey” to see this point illustrated in
a particularly relative way. All in all, “Four O’Clock” is par for the course.
One
final note. “Four O’Clock” was selected to be read on the NPR program Selected Shorts when that program
featured a Twilight Zone special in
October, 2016. “Four O’Clock” was read by actor Zachary Quinto in a crowd
pleasing performance. You can read our review of it here.
Grade:
C
Grateful acknowledgement to:
-The Internet Speculative Fiction Database
(isfdb.org)
-The Internet Movie Database (imdb.com)
-Unz.org publication database
-Who’s
Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners by
Elizabeth A. Brennan and Elizabeth C. Clarage (Greenwood Publishing, 1998)
Notes:
-“Four O’Clock” by Price Day originally
appeared in the April, 1958 issue of Alfred
Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.
-Theodore Bikel narrated Rod Serling’s
short story adaptation of “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” for Harper
Audio Books in 1993.
-Director Lamont Johnson was at the helm
for some of the most memorable episodes of the series, including “Five
Characters in Search of an Exit,” “Nothing in the Dark,” “Kick the Can,” and
“Passage on the Lady Anne.”
-“Four O’Clock” was adapted as a Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring Stan
Freberg.
-JP
