![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
My kind of strained idiocy was exactly the brand we all put on
This new state of affairs where I live more or less directly across the street from a library has its benefits: I came home this evening with five novels and have just requested a DVD of William Dieterle's The Last Flight (1931), because it stars Richard Barthelmess and John Monk Saunders wrote the script and apparently I am in a WWI aviation mood. In the meantime, the process of tracking the movie down on the internet led me to the 1960 Twilight Zone episode of the same name, which I watched this afternoon with the cats (on Netflix, but Hulu looks like it doesn't require a subscription if you're willing to put up with the ads). It got me to notice an actor I'm not sure I'll be able to find much of elsewhere. This is sadly usual.
"The Last Flight" is an elegant time-travel morality play, adapted by Richard Matheson from his own short story in his inaugural script for the show; Kenneth Haigh stars as Second Lieutenant William Terrance "Terry" Decker of the Royal Flying Corps, who pilots his Nieuport out of a curious white cloud looking for "56th Squadron, RFC" in 1917 and instead finds an American airbase in 1959. So he says, anyway. We see him from the outside; we don't know what he is any more than the suspicious base commander and his more sympathetic major. This is The Twilight Zone. He could be a ghost, a memory, a figment of the imagination. With his flying helmet off, he has a boyish, clear-eyed face and answers every question put to him with the same puzzled politeness; he accepts readily enough that he's forty-two years out of his time, but refuses with shocking vehemence to believe in the survival of his old comrade-in-arms Alexander Mackaye, now Air Vice-Marshal, a decorated veteran of two air wars, and due to arrive at the base for inspection any moment now. If he's telling the truth, there's more than one mystery here. And as even the base commander has to concede, no spy with their head screwed on straight would come up with a cover story this weird.
Haigh had made theater history in 1956 as Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, one of the original angry young men of the British New Wave, although he lost the film role to Richard Burton. Here he's very collected, very stiff-upper-lip until all of a sudden he isn't—cornered into confessing that Mackaye can't be alive in 1959 not because of the ordinary progress of time or the inevitable hazards of war but because Decker abandoned him to an unequal and unwinnable dogfight with the Germans, unable to overcome his fear even to save a friend's life. "All my life I've been running away, pretending to be something I never was, never could be. That's why I'm here, because I was trying to run away. Because I wanted so desperately to escape that I did escape," out of the very time he was afraid of, at the apparent cost of Mackaye's life and the lives of all the civilians saved by Mackaye's heroic actions during the Blitz. He should look vulnerable, admitting cowardice; he looks older and more cynical, almost insolent. He describes himself as lightly as a joke: "Up there I'm just as afraid as I am on the ground," and then, glancing deliberately at Major Wilson as if testing the depths of the contempt he can provoke, "You know, I've actually fired bullets through the cockpit walls so that the chaps will see them and be impressed. God help me." There is an obvious redemption waiting for anyone who knows a predestination paradox when they see one; the question is whether Decker will be brave enough to take it. Everyone around him is quite certain that Air Vice-Marshal Mackaye is alive, after all.
You can see from this description that we're talking Christmas Carol, It's a Wonderful Life time travel, the fantastic forecast of the difference a single life makes, but it works for me here as it does in both of those stories and it especially works because of a restrained choice on Matheson's part: Decker and Mackaye never meet in the present day. We never know if Decker was right, that Mackaye ceased to exist in some strange Schrödinger fashion for the few hours his old friend was in SAC custody in 1959, and Decker himself, though he theorizes that his unwitting flight into the future "wasn't an accident . . . that Time was giving me a second chance," will never have confirmation one way or the other. Have them come face-to-face, or at least allow for the possibility that they might be able to, and the ambiguity collapses. By keeping Mackaye offstage until Decker has vanished back into the clouds like the ghost he kind of was after all, Matheson leaves the sense that events could have gone either way, that the story until now has been taking place in some unresolved space between histories, outside of time, neither afterlife nor assured reality—in the best sense, in the Twilight Zone. I am not really surprised that Matheson went on to write fifteen more episodes of The Twilight Zone, including some of the ridiculously famous ones. This might still be my favorite of his. I wish it were easier to find Kenneth Haigh in leading roles. Or even character parts that didn't require me to rewatch Cleopatra (1963).
I hope I have left myself enough time to sleep before my orthodontist's appointment in the morning. I am not entirely certain I can fit television reviews under the remit of my Patreon.
"The Last Flight" is an elegant time-travel morality play, adapted by Richard Matheson from his own short story in his inaugural script for the show; Kenneth Haigh stars as Second Lieutenant William Terrance "Terry" Decker of the Royal Flying Corps, who pilots his Nieuport out of a curious white cloud looking for "56th Squadron, RFC" in 1917 and instead finds an American airbase in 1959. So he says, anyway. We see him from the outside; we don't know what he is any more than the suspicious base commander and his more sympathetic major. This is The Twilight Zone. He could be a ghost, a memory, a figment of the imagination. With his flying helmet off, he has a boyish, clear-eyed face and answers every question put to him with the same puzzled politeness; he accepts readily enough that he's forty-two years out of his time, but refuses with shocking vehemence to believe in the survival of his old comrade-in-arms Alexander Mackaye, now Air Vice-Marshal, a decorated veteran of two air wars, and due to arrive at the base for inspection any moment now. If he's telling the truth, there's more than one mystery here. And as even the base commander has to concede, no spy with their head screwed on straight would come up with a cover story this weird.
Haigh had made theater history in 1956 as Jimmy Porter in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, one of the original angry young men of the British New Wave, although he lost the film role to Richard Burton. Here he's very collected, very stiff-upper-lip until all of a sudden he isn't—cornered into confessing that Mackaye can't be alive in 1959 not because of the ordinary progress of time or the inevitable hazards of war but because Decker abandoned him to an unequal and unwinnable dogfight with the Germans, unable to overcome his fear even to save a friend's life. "All my life I've been running away, pretending to be something I never was, never could be. That's why I'm here, because I was trying to run away. Because I wanted so desperately to escape that I did escape," out of the very time he was afraid of, at the apparent cost of Mackaye's life and the lives of all the civilians saved by Mackaye's heroic actions during the Blitz. He should look vulnerable, admitting cowardice; he looks older and more cynical, almost insolent. He describes himself as lightly as a joke: "Up there I'm just as afraid as I am on the ground," and then, glancing deliberately at Major Wilson as if testing the depths of the contempt he can provoke, "You know, I've actually fired bullets through the cockpit walls so that the chaps will see them and be impressed. God help me." There is an obvious redemption waiting for anyone who knows a predestination paradox when they see one; the question is whether Decker will be brave enough to take it. Everyone around him is quite certain that Air Vice-Marshal Mackaye is alive, after all.
You can see from this description that we're talking Christmas Carol, It's a Wonderful Life time travel, the fantastic forecast of the difference a single life makes, but it works for me here as it does in both of those stories and it especially works because of a restrained choice on Matheson's part: Decker and Mackaye never meet in the present day. We never know if Decker was right, that Mackaye ceased to exist in some strange Schrödinger fashion for the few hours his old friend was in SAC custody in 1959, and Decker himself, though he theorizes that his unwitting flight into the future "wasn't an accident . . . that Time was giving me a second chance," will never have confirmation one way or the other. Have them come face-to-face, or at least allow for the possibility that they might be able to, and the ambiguity collapses. By keeping Mackaye offstage until Decker has vanished back into the clouds like the ghost he kind of was after all, Matheson leaves the sense that events could have gone either way, that the story until now has been taking place in some unresolved space between histories, outside of time, neither afterlife nor assured reality—in the best sense, in the Twilight Zone. I am not really surprised that Matheson went on to write fifteen more episodes of The Twilight Zone, including some of the ridiculously famous ones. This might still be my favorite of his. I wish it were easier to find Kenneth Haigh in leading roles. Or even character parts that didn't require me to rewatch Cleopatra (1963).
I hope I have left myself enough time to sleep before my orthodontist's appointment in the morning. I am not entirely certain I can fit television reviews under the remit of my Patreon.
no subject
Also, this sounds like a fascinatingly ambiguous episode. I've never actually seen any of The Twilight Zone, but I get the impression it specialized in fascinatingly ambiguous, or at least that it was at its best when walking that tightrope.
no subject
Thank you. I always hope it bears some relation to Media as Viewed by Other Interested Parties! I would like people to be able to see what I see and appreciate/disagree with it, not wonder where the hell I got that incomprehensible headcanon.
(I mean, I'd read you review the phone book, but that's because in any case you'd only review the phone book if you had interesting things to say about it.)
Well, I would try to find an interesting phone book.
I've never actually seen any of The Twilight Zone, but I get the impression it specialized in fascinatingly ambiguous, or at least that it was at its best when walking that tightrope.
It's one of the shows I have difficulty evaluating in the aggregate because I saw so much of it in childhood and adolescence: "The Last Flight" was actually unusual in staying so completely off my radar until now. The constant between all the episodes was some kind of speculative element, whether science fiction, the supernatural, the fantastic in all grades from ambiguous to outright, or just plain weird fiction, almost always combined with some socially or politically relevant theme. Some of the stories were comedic, although a percentage of the funny ones also have really nasty bites. The twist ending is the best-known feature, but it's not actually universal. There isn't one in "The Last Flight," for example—hearing the end of Decker's story from a character who didn't know the middle of it is the last click of a puzzle-piece, not a zinger. What I really like about the script in addition to Haigh's performance is how explicitly it engages with the show's title conceit. Serling's first-season voiceover describes the Twilight Zone as "a fifth dimension . . . as vast as space and as timeless as infinity . . . the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition . . . it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge . . . the dimension of imagination." Most episodes, then, use it as license for any kind of non-mimetic fiction: if it couldn't quite happen in our world today, it's taking place in the Twilight Zone. Which is a nice destabilizing idea of its own, that at any moment you could step out of the ordinary world and into somewhere the rules of reality don't quite apply (and never notice until it's too late), but I just enjoy that Matheson straight-out builds his story around a liminal space, a little window of uncertainty within which the course of history is undecided until Terry Decker makes the choice either to save his own skin or risk sacrificing it, not just for his old friend but for people he's never met, many of whom aren't even alive in his past-present day; an uncollapsed wavefront. And history ends up going the way it has always gone, but it didn't have to. Nothing worse would have happened to Decker than having to live with himself, in 1959. You can envision a downer version of the story where he decides to wait for the arrival of Air Vice-Marshal Mackaye, only to find himself waiting forever for a man who ceased to exist in 1917. I'm just think it's neater, and definitely more ambiguous, as it is.
(I realize also, belatedly, that the way that Decker talks about time in this episode reminds me of The Dark Is Rising. I'm not sure what to make of that, but at this hour fic is probably not the best option.)
no subject
It does! At least in my experience. It's always recognizably the same film or book I saw or read, but viewed through very different eyes, which is one of my very favorite kinds of reviews to read.
I realize also, belatedly, that the way that Decker talks about time in this episode reminds me of The Dark Is Rising. I'm not sure what to make of that, but at this hour fic is probably not the best option.
Oooooh. I'm intrigued, all the same! I really love the way The Dark is Rising juggles time: strict rules, but all numinous, none spelled out, learned bone-deep so that they constrain but don't need to be described. It's a supernatural freedom but only within mysterious limits. This sounds like a really interesting take on the same kind of constrained mystery.
no subject
You should totally write up more of your views of fiction! I also enjoy differing viewpoints.
It's a supernatural freedom but only within mysterious limits. This sounds like a really interesting take on the same kind of constrained mystery.
You should totally write up your views on this episode if you see it.
(Edited because it'd be shameful to not take the chance to use this icon)
Yeah, excellent choice.
no subject
I've just Googled it- and- good gracious- it seems the whole thing is up on YouTube. I watched the opening sequence- which has Haigh driving across flowerbeds in a pony cart, blowing a hunting horn. I think this is something you might want to see.
no subject
That sounds about right.
I watched the opening sequence- which has Haigh driving across flowerbeds in a pony cart, blowing a hunting horn. I think this is something you might want to see.
I think you're right. Thank you!
no subject
no subject
Okay! I had been planning not to count television on the grounds of ongoing long-form narrative, but The Twilight Zone is basically an anthology of short film, so all right!