The Ray Bradbury Theater: The Town Where No One Got Off

Superman has his Fortress of Solitude; I have the TV Tomb of Mystery. Speak, friend, and enter. You are not imagining this.

Today's excursion:

The fourth episode of the first season of:

These days naming an episode "The Town Where No One Got Off" might give rise to a few snickers from the audience. It did at the time, too, at least for me. I first saw this some Saturday afternoon in the late 80s and though it cast a long shadow in my imagination, at the time and for years afterward I had no idea what show it was. (Insert long digression on no cable guide at the time and no TV Guide handy.)

Incidentally, one of the first things I ever looked up at imdb, within days of first getting an AOL account, was Jeff Goldblum, just to finally put a name to the "That one story with the train where he's walking around that small town."

The 80s were the last great age of anthology shows. The Ray Bradbury Theater, which ran on HBO for two seasons and on the USA Network for four additional seasons, premiered in an era that had revivals of both The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and original content anthologies like Freddy's Nightmares and Amazing Stories.

What separated TRBT from all of them - and any other show that has ever been produced, to my knowledge - was that not only was every episode based on the work of a single author but also that the author himself wrote every episode. (And like all anthology shows, you need a distinctive opening.)

Bradbury was reluctant to return to television when Larry Wilcox (yes of CHiPS fame) approached him with the idea of the show: "I had been spoiled by my experiences with Hitchcock and after he left TV more than twenty years ago, I did very little... [Wilcox] assured me he would be very protective. I would be in on casting, editing, and could write whatever I wanted to write."

In addition to his many years as a playwright and theater director, Bradbury had a considerable background in television and film, having written Moby Dick for John Huston, so he brought a lot of experience to the table both with adapting an author's work and working with actors. Which worked pretty well for the show in my opinion. More often than not, an author's involvement in the realization of his or her work in another medium works against it. Not so here. The Bradbury of the page is transferred pretty faithfully to the screen.

Your own take on things will likely depend on one of two things: your opinion of Bradbury's work itself and your tolerance for deteriorated film stock. A proper transfer - if still actually possible; who knows the state of the original film - would probably enhance the show's reputation. Production value decreased from season to season, sometimes from episode to episode. This sometimes helps more than hurts as it focuses attention on the prose or the theme, but to be sure, sometimes it's distracting.

The opening credits were trimmed over the years until they just basically just flashed the title onscreen with barely any of the original narration. And while the old intro definitely went on too long, it was not without its charms.

The different mementos of Bradbury's office are of if nothing else anthropological interest.

And they made a big deal of Bradbury looking around the room "Now-let-me-see-here"-ing things, before the camera settled on an object, which would fade into the opening of the episode itself.

Or in the case of "The Town Where No One Got Off" into a whole 'nother preamble.

This one with a cameo from Disney legend Ward Kimball.

He and Bradbury were friends of longstanding.

Onto the episode itself. I've read a fair bit of Bradbury but never this particular short story, so I can't weigh in on whether or not it's a successful transition from page to screen. I love what we see, though. The atmosphere of this one - from the synth scoring to the wind blowing the autumn leaves down unfriendly, empty small town streets - is top notch.

The plot is simple enough. Cogswell, an unpublished writer, looks dreamily out the train window at the small town beyond.

Sounding a little like the protagonist of the Twilight Zone episode "A Stop at Willoughby," he sees the town as a representation of a less hurried, less manic way of life. The passenger sitting across from him teases him for being overly idealistic. ("Bleeding hearts and their heads buried in the past...") He dares Cogswell to get off at the town and see for himself whether or not his romantic ideas live up to reality.

Which he does, rather impulsively.

Old Man played by Ed McNamara.

From the station, he walks around town, looking for a room and finding only unfriendly locals and deserted streets.

The location scout deserves a shout-out; the town is perfect. (And perfectly photographed.)

He suddenly realizes the Old Man from the station is tailing him.

The heart of the episode is the ensuing conversation between the Old Man and Cogswell. It slowly dawns on Cogswell, as the Old Man talks about having murder in his heart and how he's been waiting for an opportunity to kill someone - a drifter, say, whom no one knows, who just happened to get off the train - that he might be in physical danger.

This does not stop him - somewhat improbably - from following the Old Man into his murderin' lair some kind of abandoned structure. 

"I've got a bottle in there," he provides as explanation.

Uhhh...

Just as the Old Man seems to be working to the climax of his "And now I will murder you, random stranger" speech, Cogswell turns the tables by declaring how remarkable it is to meet someone with whom he has so much in common. He, too, has dreamed of murdering someone and thought perhaps if he could only get off in a town where no one knows him, he might happen upon a stranger, himself, and get him alone so he could shoot him with "this revolver in my pocket."

The Old Man - showing the same sort of gullibility as Cogswell did, following him into the shack - accepts his assurance that he has a revolver and they leave in an uneasy stalemate.

The episode ends with each of them back where they started:

Cogswell looking out the window  -

- and the Old Man waiting - probably in vain - outside of it.

At least one viewer decried the difference in tone between the original prose and this adaptation. As discussed here:

"Bradbury's original ending makes it clear that the town represents a state of mind for our hero: Now the darkness that had brought us together stood between. The old man, the station, the town, the forest, were lost in the night. For an hour I stood in the roaring blast staring back at all that darkness."

"Although this is an effective little shocker, and appealing for its almost reverential attempt to dramatize the central dialogue between Cogswell and the old man, it disappointingly takes away any role for the imagination, or for psychological explanations of the hero's behavior."

Reverential is a good word for the overall Bradbury approach. It's probably more interesting to wonder at story's end whether or not Cogswell is or is not a killer himself, but I also like the disillusioned but quick-thinking Cogswell of the episode.

I don't love every episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater - which makes sense as I don't love every story I've read by him, either - but the ones I do, like this one, are a successful blend of dreamscape and verisimilitude. No one quite sounds like anyone you've ever met yet they're all familiar; no one's actions or motivations are traditionally explainable yet their inner worlds are easy to see and well-described.

Bradbury once wrote that "you have to stay drunk on writing so reality won't destroy you." This explains to my satisfaction why I often find his stories to be somewhat disorienting. But usually worth it and always unique. Alternately nostalgic and eccentric, with unexpected darkness, it's tempting to see his work as an intoxicating hedge against reality's war of attrition against your childhood sense of wonder.

"The Town Where No One Got Off" was directed by Don McBrearty and adapted by Ray Bradbury from his original short story.

The Closet of Mystery is an ongoing catalog of one man's attempt to stave off the acquisition of any more impulse-buy DVDs until he can take better inventory of the ones already in his possession.