The Twilight Zone: Queen of the Nile

Next up:

Originally aired March 6, 1964.

"Jordan Herrick, syndicated columnist, whose work appears in more than a hundred newspapers. By nature a cynic, a disbeliever, caught for the moment by a lovely vision. He knows the vision he's seen is no dream; she is Pamela Morris, renowned movie star, whose name is a household word and whose face is known to millions. 

"What Mr. Herrick does not know is that he has also just looked into the face -

 

"...of the Twilight Zone."

Today's selection again features a movie starlet as a principal character. If you're wondering how many Twilight Zone episodes had characters whose vocation was acting, the answer is five, about half as many as those featuring astronauts (ten) or soldiers - at least eleven, but I think I'm missing a couple.

(Robots? Eight. Aliens? Seven. I thought that last one would be higher, myself.)

"Queen of the Nile" is another TZ that would fit comfortably in the pages of Vault of Horror or other classic EC. Simplistic but satisfying. 

Jordan Herrick - great name- is a cynic, according to Rod's intro up there. He doesn't seem too cynical throughout the rest of the episode, but okay. He has been invited to the home of Pamela Morris, famous movie actress, in his official capacity as a journalist, one with a reputation for digging for the truth and not giving up until he finds it. And the truth he seeks is Pamela's actual age.

He's ushered into her study, and as he waits for her to finish her swim, he looks at her various portraits around the room, particularly the oil portrait hanging on the wall. 

Although the portrait is dated 1940, she still looks exactly the same in 1964.

Well, when she's not making faces.

An older woman (Mrs. Draper) appears and is reproached by the actress. ("Didn't I tell you to stay in your room?") She retreats, but not before saying "I'm not going to stand by and watch it happen this time."

Later, Mrs. Draper (whom Pamela introduces as her mother) joins them for tea, but when Herrick asks to interview her, the actress dismisses her, telling him "her mind wanders."

Mrs. Draper catches Herrick before he leaves. She tells him Miss Morris is not who she claims and that she (Mrs. Draper) is actually the daughter of the actress.

The actress flirts aggressively and seduces him - to a point. This was '64, after all, so just a lot of touching and kissing and dinner and what not. It has its intended effect, as Herrick falls more and more under her spell, even telling her what Mrs. Draper mentioned. 

His journalistic instincts aren't completely dulled, though, as he asks his editor to look up some inconsistencies in her story, as well as Queen of the Nile, Pamela's first film.

His editor tells him there have been two Queen of the Niles, the first being an old silent film that ended with the tragic on-set death of the leading lady, Constance Taylor. Intrigued, Herrick begins to yank the threads of the various stories he's been told, eventually unraveling the impossible truth that Pamela Harris and Constance Taylor are somehow one and the same.

Confronted with the accusation, Pamela promises to tell Herrick the unvarnished truth.

 
Alas, the truth is that the actress is an ancient Egyptian queen who survives by getting men off their guard and then stealing their life essence with a magical scarab.

"Viola, if you want to live another day, get rid of it quickly."

At episode's end, another handsome young columnist comes to interview her, and it appears as if the cycle will begin anew.

"Everyone knows Pamela Morris, the beautiful and eternally young movie star. Or does she have another name, even more famous, an Egyptian name from centuries past? It's best not to be too curious, lest you wind up like Jordan Herrick, a pile of dust and old clothing discarded in the endless eternity...

of the Twilight Zone."

The inspiration for "Queen of the Nile" would appear to be the infamous Cleopatra with Liz Taylor (whom the episode's star resembles) and Richard Burton. Though the film almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, it - or rather, its massive cost overruns and the torrid extramarital hi-jinks of Burton and Taylor - fascinated the public and ensured further immortality for the last native ruler of Ancient Egypt. A Cleopatra-infused episode of The Twilight Zone was just smart business in 1964.
Yet "Queen" doesn't seem to be one of the TZ's most popular episodes, nor was it as far as I can tell a ratings bonanza. I'm not here to tell you it's one of the series' best episodes, but, like "Black Leather Jackets" or some of the others covered in these pages, it's stuck with me over the years as a nice and particularly-Twilight-Zone-y little story. 

I like this sequence of the scarab's stealing Herrick's vital energies:

 

THE CAST

A long career in Hollywood appears to have come to an end with a 1985 episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Gave up acting for directing in the 70s.

The former Mrs. Peter Lorre was also T'Pau of the Vulcan High Command.

And as mentioned here:

"This was the final writing credit for Charles Beaumont, though it was his friend Jerry Sohl who conceived of the idea. 'I had a scarab ring many years ago,' Sohl told The Twilight Zone Companion author Marc Scott Zicree, 'and knew that the scarab ring was the symbol of fertility and immortality in Egyptian times. ... After about half an hour we had the story worked out. I just went home and did it, sent it in, and they shot it the way I wrote it.'

Beaumont was ailing from an illness that was, most likely, Alzheimer's Disease, and had lost the ability to concentrate sufficiently to complete any work. His friends pitched in to help out Beaumont and his family, with Beaumont receiving sole screen credit, though the fees were split. Beaumont died three years later, at the age of 38."

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The Twilight Zone: A Nice Place To Visit

Next up:

"A Nice Place To Visit," Season 1, Episode 28.

"Portrait of a man at work, the only work he's ever done, the only work he knows. His name is Henry Francis Valentine, but he calls himself 'Rocky,' because that's the way his life has been - rocky and perilous and uphill at a dead run all the way. He's tired now, tired of running or wanting, of waiting for the breaks that come to others but never to him, never to Rocky Valentine. 

"A scared, angry little man. He thinks it's all over now but he's wrong. For Rocky Valentine, it's just the beginning."

Today's episode is one of TZ's more one-note affairs. But sometimes one-note affairs are very satisfying. My elder daughter and I have been watching Fantasia lately, and the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence is a good example. The story's as old as the beard of Moses (even older, actually) and the message is immediate and not complex. Yet there's something renewably pleasant about seeing Mickey get in over his head and need to be rescued, time and time again. Same here with Rocky's "Be Careful What You Wish For - You Might Get It" eternal comeuppance.

Professional crook Henry "Rocky" Valentine is shot by the police after robbing a pawnshop. He "wakes" in the presence of a pleasant and portly (as Rocky insists on reminding him every few sentence with the sobriquet "Fats") individual named Pip. 

Pip tells Rocky that he is his "guide, as it were." Rocky's wish is his command.

To assuage his doubts and hostility, Pip takes Rocky to his new, lavish digs.

Pip serves Rocky some food, which he won't eat because it might be poisoned. He tells Pip to do so, but Pip answers he hasn't eaten in two or three centuries. That's enough of your smart mouth, Fatso:

Rocky slowly begins to realize that maybe he didn't survive his run-in with the cops. ("You're my guardian angel or something like that?" (Laughs) "Something like that, yes.") He wastes no time in demanding Pip produce a million smackeroos and a "broad, stacked - like beautiful, huh?"). Pip does so. Then they all hit the casino, where Rocky attracts even more wealth and dames. Outside he berates a cop, ridicules the valet, and generally acts like a lout.

 

Rocky asks to see some of his former friends who have died. Pip says that won't be possible, as this "paradise" is his own private world, and none of the people are real except for Rocky and Pip. Eventually, Rocky begins to wonder how the hell he was allowed into Heaven; he was a rotten crook his whole life. Pip takes him to what is the visual signature of the episode:

The only things in his file, though, are his misdeeds.

"'Age of six, slaughtered small dog.' Well, why not? It bit me."

Rocky is puzzled but he decides that if it doesn't bother God, it won't bother him. Pip disappears, and Rocky goes back to the Craps and Dolls.

Naturally, Rocky becomes bored with having his every whim satisfied. He replaces his original floosies with all new ones and switches to slots from the tables. But nothing works. He wins - easily - at everything he tries. 

He suspects his unhappiness has something to do with the odds forever being in his favor, so he asks Pip if he could stage some kind of robbery where he won't get caught. Pip says sure, but it's clear that even getting caught will be a planned spontaneity. 

"Just between you and me, Fats, I don't think I belong in Heaven, see? I want to go to the other place."

"Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place."

MWAAAAHAHAHAHAHAA! 

"A scared, angry, little man who never got a break. Now he has everything he ever wanted, and he's going to have to live with it for eternity... in the Twilight Zone."

As the good folks at FilmSchoolRejects wrote, "Rocky goes insane because there’s no more challenge in his existence, there’s no more effort needed, and there’s nothing to hope for because it all exists as soon as he wants it. This is a bit like the lesson from The Escape Clause  - which features a fat Satan making a deal with an idiotic human who thinks he can cheat the system. Just as death defines life in that episode, the challenge of working for and possibly not getting what you want defines desire here."

Or, as a certain Starfleet Captain puts it at the end of "This Side of Paradise:" "Maybe we weren't meant for paradise. Maybe we were meant to fight our way through, struggle, claw our way up, scratch for every inch of the way. Maybe we can't stroll to the music of the lute. We must march to the sound of drums." A rather anti-Marxist message, as all sensible messages are.

Or maybe it's just that Hell is repetition. Or (FSR again:)

"Rocky was handed the keys to Heaven but ended up making it Hell himself."

THE CAST

Larry Blyden mostly worked in television over his twenty-plus year career as an actor. The script doesn't call for him to be much more than a lowlife hood who never ascends past the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The punitive aspect of Hell in "A Nice Place To Visit" seems to be allowing the individual to glimpse life above or beyond those immediate-gratification levels but never allowing them to transcend them. 

Sebastian Cabot does fine work as the unflappable Mr. Pip. Perhaps best-known as either the voice actor from Winnie the Pooh and The Sword in the Stone or as Mr. French in Eight Is Enough. (EDIT: Please see comments; my bad. Should've IMDB'd him instead of trying to do it from memory.)

Two of the "Dolls" are worth mentioning:

and

Well, this is embarrassing. I was under the mistaken impression that Barbara English was actually Barbara Nichols, from Sweet Smell of Success and the much-maligned TZ episode "Twenty-Two." Whoops. Outside of her imdb, I can find little about Ms. English, though it looks like she never graduated from these sort of "Dancing Girl" parts. I could delete her, I suppose, as well as this paragraph of explanation, but I also wanted to point out her similarity to Jennifer Lawrence in those screencaps up there. The resemblance is eerie, if you ask me.

Sandra Warner, on the other hand, I recognized as the model from a bunch of Martin Denny albums and other Space Ace Exotica from yesteryear:

I'm a fan of this musical genre, and this playlist of Full Groovy Albums is one of my go-tos for blog-writing, actually. (Not today, though; today I write these words to the sounds of Tommy Dorsey, that Sentimental Man of Swing.) It's agreeable background music for writing, I've found. Anyway, it surprised me to recognize her in some TV from 50 years ago via a playlist I made on YouTube in the 21st century. She has a speaking part in this episode, and her line "Is there anything else I can do for you?" prompted a CBS exec to issue a cautionary note to Rod Serling: "Please be certain that the girl deliver this line in a sweet manner." It's more than obvious what she is offering, of course, especially as the camera lingers on Sandra's face in close-up, but whatever made the censors happy, I guess.

Donald Trump, of all people, mentions this episode as a personal favorite in Wayne Barrett's The Deals and the Downfall. (According to Mr. Barrett, he didn't seem to wrest the same meaning from it that the rest of us did - go figure.) And it is both paid homage to and name-checked in The Sopranos episode "Kennedy and Heidi."  

One last bit of legacy: Anthony Horowitz, the author of the fantastic Bond continuation novel Trigger Mortis, also paid homage to this in his horror short story "Howard's End." 

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