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Five lost characters searching for a way back
to their own stories |
“Five Characters in Search of
an Exit”
Season Three, Episode 79
Original Air Date: December 22, 1961
Cast:
Major: William
Windom
Ballerina: Susan
Harrison
Clown: Murray
Matheson
Tramp:
Kelton Garwood
Bagpiper: Clark
Allen
Woman with Bell: Carol Hill
Girl: Mona
Houghton
Crew:
Writer: Rod
Serling (teleplay based on the story “The Depository” by Marvin Petal)
Director: Lamont
Johnson
Producer: Buck
Houghton
Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
Art Direction: George
W. Davis, Phil Barber
Set Decoration: H.
Web Arrowsmith
Make Up: William
Tuttle
Assistant Director: E. Darrell Halenbeck
Editor: Bill
Mosher
Story Consultant: Richard McDonagh
Sound:
Franklin Milton, Bill Edmondson
Casting: Stamaster-Lister
Music: Stock
And Now, Mr. Serling:
“Next week on the Twilight Zone, you’ll find yourself
inexplicably entangled in this dark dungeon. You’ll meet an incredible group of
people who, like you, will be quite unable to explain how they got there, why
they got there, or how they’re going to get out. And at the end, we’re going to
belt you with one of the most surprising endings we’ve ever had. Next week,
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit,” on the Twilight Zone.”
Rod Serling’s Opening Narration:
“Clown, Hobo, Ballet Dancer, Bagpiper, and an Army
Major. A collection of question marks. Five improbable entities stuck together
into a pit of darkness. No logic. No reason. No explanation. Just a prolonged
nightmare in which fear, loneliness, and the unexplainable walk hand-in-hand
through the shadows. In a moment we’ll start collecting clues as to the why’s,
the what’s, and the where’s. We will not end the nightmare we’ll only explain
it. Because this…is the Twilight Zone.”
Summary:
A man awakens in a dark room, unsure of how he got there.
He wears a military uniform. United States Army. Rank: Major. The room is small
and circular and the top is exposed to the air. With him in the room are a clown, a tramp,
a Scottish bagpiper, and a ballerina. None of them can recall how they arrived
in the room, although they have all been there much longer than the major.
Every now and then, a loud ringing shakes the room and knocks them to the
ground.
The major is determined to find a way out. First, he
tries to break through the wall. Then he attempts to dig a tunnel in the
ground. Finally, he suggests that he and his roommates form a human ladder
against the wall. The clown is opposed to the plan because it is dangerous but he
is eventually persuaded. They form a ladder by standing on each other’s
shoulders. The ballerina goes last. When she gets to the top she finds that her
hands cannot quite reach the top of the cylinder. A bell rings violently and
sends the five strangers tumbling to the ground. As a result the ballerina
injures her leg. The major insists that they try it again, this time fashioning
a rope from their clothes and tying it to the end of a sword. They form another
ladder without the injured ballerina. The major goes last this time. When he
gets to the top of the ladder he swings the rope over the top of the cylinder
and hooks it onto the ledge. He pulls himself up and makes it out of the
cylinder. Before he has a chance to tell the others what he sees he plummets to
the ground below.
City sidewalk. Winter.
A
young girl finds an army doll lying on the ground covered in snow. She picks it
up and hands it to a woman ringing a bell next to a box marked 17th
Annual Christmas Doll Drive. The woman tells her to put it back inside the bin.
Back in the place at the bottom of the barrel, five
lonely people attempt to find comfort in the fact that, at least for now, they have
each other.
Rod Serling’s Closing Narration:
“Just a barrel, a dark depository where are kept the
counterfeit, make-believe pieces of plaster and cloth wrought in the distorted
image of human life. But this added hopeful note: perhaps they are unloved only
for the moment. In the arms of children there can be nothing but love. A clown,
a tramp, a bagpipe player, a ballet dancer, and a major. Tonight’s cast of
players on the odd stage known as the Twilight Zone.”
Commentary:
Episode 79 of The
Twilight Zone is one of the most memorable the show would ever produce.
It’s also one of the best. It’s a premise that revolves almost exclusively
around its twist ending and in the hands of lesser storytellers it could have
been mediocre and predictable. It is to Rod Serling and Buck Houghton’s credit
that they saw in writer Marvin Petal’s five page story more than just a simple
plot twist to be stretched into a 25 minute teleplay. Instead, they saw a
clever idea with interesting characters and a generous amount of screen time in
which to develop them. The result is a weird, existential film that manages to
be emotionally compelling and philosophically hopeless at the same time.
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” is Serling’s
adaptation of Marvin Petal’s (1929 – 2013) unpublished short story “The
Depository.” Petal was a successful journalist who wrote for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and
later worked for former news conglomerate McGraw-Hill World News throughout the
1960’s and 1970’s. He began his
career at television station KTLA in Los Angeles where he wrote scripts for
local sports programs, court procedurals, and legal documentaries. He met
Serling at a political rally held at the home of actor Robert Ryan in 1960.
Anticipating that Serling would be there, Petal brought along a five page story
he had written called “The Depository” with the hope that he could convince
Serling to buy it for The Twilight Zone.
Serling seemed interested enough and suggested that he submit it to Buck
Houghton for consideration. Houghton saw the potential and promptly purchased
the story.
One of Serling’s strongest attributes as a writer was his
eye for adaptation. Many of his best episodes were either adapted from the works
of others or inspired by true events, although he did write a number of
original teleplays that were brilliant. Serling had always possessed a knack
for adaptation even in his days as a writer for live television—his 1957
adaptation of Ernest Lehman’s story “The Comedian” for Playhouse 90 earned him an Emmy Award—but on The Twilight Zone he began to rely on existing source material more
and more. This is likely due to his contractual obligation to write 80 percent
of the teleplays for the first three seasons. However, this proved to be
beneficial and many of his adaptations are among the best episodes of the show.
“The Depository” has never been published so no comparison can be drawn between
the two versions. According to Petal, other than the omission of a minor
character, Serling remained relatively faithful to the original story. Given
the short length of Petal’s story, it can be assumed that most of the dialogue
was added by Serling. Dialogue was always Serling’s greatest strength as a
writer and it has never been more apparent than in this episode. His words are
crisp and clever and overflowing with emotion.
The title is a reference to Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, first
performed in Rome in 1921. The play tells the story of a family of six who
interrupt rehearsals for a play written by Pirandello. The group claims to be Pirandello’s
unfinished characters and they need to find him in order to be complete. The
director agrees to let them stay and rehearse with the actors. The six
newcomers immediately begin to argue with each other and with the rest of the
cast and crew for no apparent reason. It is revealed that their family history
is one of deceit, adultery, and a multitude of morally questionable offenses.
The play ends with one of the children committing suicide on stage and another
drowning in a fountain. The remaining characters exit the stage leaving the
cast and crew to process the day’s events.
Although
“Five Characters in Search of an Exit” bears little resemblance to the
experimental and highly explicit play from which it takes its name, the
reference to Pirandello is almost certainly deliberate. Luigi Pirandello is
largely considered the major predecessor to the movement in European drama
prevalent during the mid-twentieth century known as the Theatre of the Absurd.
The movement was born out of Elizabethan tragi-comedy and was heavily
influenced by existentialism, particularly the darker themes of Franz Kafka and
Albert Camus. It was also influenced by the devastation of war witnessed
throughout Europe during the first half of the century. Authors associated with
the Theatre of the Absurd stress a deterioration of the human condition and a
breakdown in communication in modern society. Their works usually avoid a
traditional plot structure and conflicts are seldom resolved. The dialogue is
repetitive and characters often babble back and forth at one another without moving
the conversation forward. Characters usually find themselves trapped in
situations they cannot control or understand. Vaudeville was also a significant
inspiration. Authors juxtapose satire and farce with hopelessness and despair
to emphasize a pessimistic view of humanity. Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and
Edward Albee are all closely associated with the Theatre of the Absurd.
Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), a
play practically devoid of plot in which two men wait aimlessly for a person
named Godot who never appears, is considered the masterpiece of the genre.
If Serling was influenced by writers like Pirandello then
it seems obvious that The Twilight Zone also
carries that influence to a certain degree. An ordinary episode of the show
commonly features a character, or characters, inexplicably thrust into an
unfamiliar and sometimes hostile environment which they cannot control and
often cannot share with anyone else. Serling’s ambition as a writer was to point
out society’s flaws much like the works commonly placed under the umbrella of
the Theatre of the Absurd. But Serling’s work is rooted more in honesty and realism
which sets it apart from his European contemporaries.
“Five
Characters in Search of an Exit” is perhaps the closest the show ever came to
this type of drama. The story begins without explanation, forcing the
characters and the audience to immediately begin evaluating the situation. The
characters are archetypal, a trait common to absurdist plays. The atmosphere is
bleak but features totally absurd characteristics like bagpipe melodies and
ballet dancing which give it a highly unsettling quality. It also deals with
identity crisis, probably the most common recurring theme on the show, but
features two distinct sides of the dilemma. The four initial characters have presumably
gone through stages of anger, confusion, and denial repeatedly for an
undisclosed amount of time and have come to accept their reality. But for the
Major the situation is new and the nihilistic attitudes of his cellmates are
appalling. His despair is only highlighted by the Clown’s mockery of him. When
he is placed back into the barrel at the end of the episode, having been exposed
to the truth, one can assume that he too will now accept his fate and as more
dolls arrive the process will be repeated over and over again. This episode
also owes a debt to the works of Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose play No Exit (1944) features a similar plot
in which three characters are trapped in a room for all of eternity.
What
makes this such a remarkable episode is that every element is perfectly
measured and executed. It is such a delicate plot that if any of the forces at
work here were to falter then the entire episode would collapse. The audience
is presented with a mystery as soon as the story begins so their attention is
immediately drawn to its solution. But Serling’s dialogue is so engaging and
the performances of the actors so compelling that the audience is distracted
just long enough for the plot to unfold naturally. If the episode had been any
longer or if any of the characters had been weak or uninteresting then this
would not have worked and the audience would have solved the mystery
prematurely.
Director Lamont Johnson (1922 – 2010) proves himself an invaluable
contributor to the show with this episode, which he considers his favorite of
the eight he directed. Johnson was no stranger to the Theatre of the Absurd and
had recently directed a string of Samuel Beckett plays for the UCLA theatre
department. He plays into the bizarre nature of the story very well
particularly at the beginning when the Major first meets the four other
characters. Both the set and the plot are sparse so he has almost the entire
episode to experiment with the camera. He makes great use of high contrast
lighting, letting the shadows set the tone of the story. There is also an
impressive low-angle shot of William Windom as he attempts to dig a tunnel in
the ground. There were two barrels used while filming the episode, a vertical
one used for the dialogue scenes and a horizontal one that could be tilted
allowing the actors to stand on top of one another safely. The circular shape
of the barrel proved to be a hassle for director of photography George T.
Clemens as it made the scenes difficult to light. This is another reason for all
the shadows. Johnson was nominated for eleven Primetime Emmy Awards during his
career as a director, winning two for the films Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story (1985) and Lincoln (1988).
The closing shot of the dolls is not a shot of the actors
but of life-size mannequins made in their image. Before shooting began a cast
was made of each actor’s face so their replica would look as realistic as
possible. Although Tuttle gets the on-screen credit the masks were mostly
designed by long-time friend and make-up legend Charles Schram (1911 – 2008),
who constructed similar masks for season one’s “The After-Hours.”
The performances of the three leading actors are all remarkable. Each is so effective in their roles it is hard to imagine anyone
else playing them. Although their on-screen chemistry is totally believable,
according to actor William Windom there was friction between himself and
actress Susan Harrison (b. 1938) over who would receive top billing. At the
time, Harrison was actually the bigger name, having landed leading roles in the
1957 film-noir The Sweet Smell of Success
and the 1960 crime thriller Key
Witness. She had also appeared on Bonanza
and Alfred Hitchcock Presents—in
Robert Bloch’s “The Gloating Place”—and had a successful stage career. Windom,
who is clearly the lead, claims the two argued throughout the filming of the
episode—a fight he apparently lost for Harrison indeed gets top billing.
Ironically, she retired from acting not long after appearing in this episode.
William Windom (1923 – 2012) began his career at the dawn
of television in New York City. After spending a decade appearing in live
dramas he moved to Hollywood to pursue a film career. This episode was one of
the first jobs he was offered after he moved to California. Windom was at his
best when playing likable characters in a state of panic or disillusionment
such as his Army Major. He had an empathetic quality that allowed him to
connect with audiences no matter how frantic the character. Windom would return
to the show during season four in the Charles Beaumont classic “Miniature.” His
other notable television appearances include the Star Trek episode “The Doomsday Machine” and two episodes of Night Gallery including Serling’s
poignant season one finale “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” which was nominated for an Emmy Award. He starred alongside
fellow Twilight Zone alumni Inger
Stevens for three seasons in the ABC sitcom The
Farmer’s Daughter (1963 – 1966) and won an Emmy for his role in the NBC
series My World and Welcome to It (1969
– 1970). In 1962 he played the District Attorney in To Kill a Mockingbird. And in 1971 he played the President of the
United States in Escape from the Planet
of the Apes.
If this episode has a hero then it is unquestionably
Murray Matheson (1912 – 1985) who gives one of the best performances in the
show’s history. Much like Shakespearean clowns, Matheson’s clown is witty and
sarcastic but doesn’t hesitate to point out the reality of their situation. Serling
gives him some of his wittiest dialogue and Matheson delivers it flawlessly
every time. Matheson was an Australian stage actor who moved to the states
after World War II. He made a decent career for himself in television but is
mostly remembered for his performance in this episode. In 1983 he appeared in Twilight Zone: The Movie as Mr. Agee in
the Steven Spielberg remake of “Kick of the Can,” originally directed by Lamont
Johnson.
Kelton Garwood (1928 – 1991) gives a reserved but solid performance here as the Hobo and his dazed expression and slowed
mannerisms are completely convincing. A theatrically trained actor, Garwood had
a limited career in Hollywood appearing mostly in westerns. Mona Houghton, the
little girl who picks up the doll at the end of the episode, was Buck
Houghton’s daughter.
While many critics have expressed their distaste at the
twist ending—which could seem a bit cheap after such a philosophically heavy
set-up—and others have accused it of being a recycled version of Serling’s “The
After Hours” from season one—which in some ways it is—“Five Characters is
Search of an Exit” has still managed to become one of the most recognizable episodes
of the show. Both CBS and the producers deserve credit for putting something so
strange and original on television in 1961. It’s a weird, dark story, which
doesn’t really have a happy ending, that the producers chose to run as the
season’s Christmas episode. Its existential ramblings about Hell and the
meaning of life no doubt puzzled viewers who expected a repeat of the previous
season’s Christmas tale “The Night of the Meek.” This episode was a bold choice for the show but it proved to be worth the risk. It's as effective today as it was in 1961 and has justly earned its place in the archives of popular culture.
Grade: A
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following:
The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic by Martin Grams, Jr. (OTR Publishing, 2008)
The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Scott Zicree (Second Edition, 1989)
The Twilight Zone Definitive Edition DVD, Season Three
(Image Entertainment, 2004)
--Lamont Johnson audio interview
with Marc Scott Zicree
--William Windom audio
commentary for “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”
Notes:
--William Windom also appeared in the season four
episode “Miniature.” In 1971 he appeared in Serling’s Emmy-nominated “They’re
Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” for the finale of the first season of Night Gallery. The
following year he appeared in the finale for season two in the segment “Little
Girl Lost.”
--Murray Matheson also appeared in the third and final season of Night Gallery in the segment "The Doll of Death." In 1983 he played Mr.Agee in Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) in Steven Spielberg’s remake of writer George
Clayton Johnson’s “Kick the Can.” It was one of his final performances. He died in 1985 at the age of 72.
--Lamont Johnson directed eight episodes of the show
including the fan favorites “Nothing in the Dark” and “Kick the Can.” In 2000,
at the request of producer J. J. Abrams, Johnson directed an episode of the
television series Felicity called “Help for the Lovelorn” for the show’s
second season. The episode is Abrams’ love letter to The Twilight Zone and was filmed in black and white and
features stock music from the show. There are Easter eggs hidden throughout the
episode and the plot is a loose combination of the plots of “Five Characters…”
and season one’s “The Chaser.” It was Johnson’s last work as a director.
--Listen to the Twilight Zone Radio Drama starring
Jason Alexander.
--Brian Durant
