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Watches can't be carried by the dead
On being informed of the existence of an episode of The Barbara Stanwyck Show (1960–61) written by A.I. Bezzerides, directed by Jacques Tourneur, and starring Stanwyck, Joan Blondell, and Dan Duryea, I just wanted it to be as good as its names. That it falls short of their combined powers is no fault of its stars, who could have passed around the phone book and delighted me. With a hard-lit assist from the cinematography of Hal Mohr, "Sign of the Zodiac" (1961) makes a strong enough case for itself in half an hour that I wanted it to be a feature, which is part of its problem.
In justice to the rest of the episode, its opening scenes are hard to beat for sea air, seediness, and the deniable supernatural. The title runs in with the tide through the pilings of an amusement pier where two women have come to see the fortune-teller who lives past the shooting gallery and the concessions stand, the painted owls and palmistry of his establishment flat-washed in the oncoming sunset like just another salt-faded attraction. Helene Terry (Blondell) is playfully excited to be recognized by name after three years, but her steelier, nervier sister-in-law Madge (Stanwyck) is less enchanted by the astrological charts and arcane tchotchkes, definitely not by the professional familiarity of the not even faintly French Pierre (Duryea) who forestalls her introduction, "Please—don't tell me your name. I prefer to get acquainted with you in my own fashion." Her unease with the visit creeps up as his attention widens not just toward her person but the tragedy that he claims to have sensed at once in her face, the death of Madge's husband, Helene's brother, not much more than a year ago, but when his knowledge seems suddenly to flip from the scattershot of a cold reading to confidences only a mentalist with a confederate or a real clairvoyant could know, she pushes over his crystal and tears out into the last of the day, peeling out so fast in her Lincoln Continental that she leaves Helene in the deserted parking lot behind her, her rough blonde curls a helm against the sea breeze, her face tilted in the westering light to an expression we can't fully read.
Considering that Stanwyck and Blondell had last shared a screen in 1931, it's sheerly fun to see them together with their chemistry in such a different key, but casting Duryea as a psychic of indefinite intentions works so well, I can't believe no noir of the classical period ever tried it. He's sinister and trivial at once, his light, naturally sarcastic voice cutting through the flowery dialogue that another actor might have succumbed to making a meal of; it keeps the audience off balance about his spiel whose serial charm stays barely the right side of sleaze, especially as we take in the implication that his clientele is primarily female and of a certain age. He sounds almost clinical as he offers the cards to Helene with the instruction, "Don't cut them, please, just lay your hand on them for the length of a breath to let the spirit pass through," and then outrageously insincere as he takes them back to deal them out, turning up the seven of diamonds like a tease: "You're such a warm person. Such a warm touch." When he goes off his own script, however, confronting an openly insulting Madge with the never-shared story of the name she was given in memoriam and discarded as soon as she could because it disturbed her to bear a dead woman's name, it's a jolt of unexpected and untrustworthy conviction, like a flash of the Stan Carlisle he never was. We can't get a read on him when we can't tell if it's all flim-flam—the cards, the crystal-gazing, the psychometry—or if Pierre really believes in his own powers. Or if the teleplay does, as the steadily darkening tone of the reading encourages the suspicion that the episode has just slipped a gear into the supernatural. He's so effectively ambiguous, in fact, he nearly camouflages whether we should be looking as closely at anyone else in this plot. Does Helene really put any stock in the prognostications of a man who was heard to flatter his last client until he had her safely out the door or is she just enjoying the ego boost of the game? Lighting a cigarette with a kind of impatient disapproval as Pierre links his hands around the glass for a better look at the future, Madge is obviously humoring her sister-in-law, but if she truly believes it's all "nonsense . . . anyone can see he's just a fake," why should it trouble her so much to have a charlatan hold her husband's heirloom watch and hear a voice crying havoc from the crystal, like the ghost of Antony? Is a watch that teleports worse than a body that vanishes, or the secret knowledge of the night-crying seagulls?
The first of the script's one-two twists hardly counts as such. All audience members who guessed that Pierre has been conspiring with Helene to gaslight Madge into confessing to the murder of her husband may turn in their nickels and collect their cups of coffee at the door. That said, it's a fair twist in that it makes more rather than less sense of what we have been seeing—Madge's willingness to gun down the pier-end crystal-gazer she accuses of setting her up for blackmail comes out of hecking nowhere in the moment, plays much more realistically in hindsight of the nail-biting guilt she has been concealing since the death of Edwin Terry, the much older, richer man she admitted to marrying for his money, trapping her in a marriage she came to want out of any way she could find. With her conscience supernaturally caught and her sense of reality dissolving, she needs little more than the sight of Pierre opening the door to his parlor, dressed black-on-black and unsmiling as the body she left on the floor of her drawing room with four bullets in it, to unravel in numb, snarling disbelief in front of witnesses, eventually demanding to be arrested before she can fall silent with a gasp of convulsive relief. Earlier in the day, Pierre cast an eye at the gulls swirling above the boardwalk and remarked to Madge with his air of imparting esoteric wisdom in the form of a pick-up line, "They tell me that gulls are the spirits of the dear departed. Sometimes I wonder what they're saying. Come in." Now as she's led out into the moonlit night, she looks up into their mewing and says quietly, shushing the policeman so that she can listen more carefully to the voices of the dead: "They're saying something. What? What are they saying?" It won't ever be the maritime Val Lewton I dreamed once, but it's a sturdy, spooky note on which to close the proceedings, a night-tide bookend to that surf-tumbling opening shot. There are four minutes left after the commercial break.
I don't even want to say that the second twist goes one too far, because the previous scenario is not all that complicated; it is not fatal for there to be more to it than meets the eye. It's just not optimal for there to be too much to fit into the epilogue of a half-hour TV slot, which is what happens the second Pierre reveals his discovery that Madge really didn't kill her husband—he died of the natural causes of a massive stroke and nothing she did could have brought it on or saved him—and he doesn't like being played for a sucker, having been hired to bring a murderess to justice only to realize he framed an innocent woman instead. "How long has your brother been dead now? More than a year, isn't it? It took all that time for you to cast a spell over Madge, to break her mind, to convince her that she was guilty . . . Witches are not always old hags who ride around on broomsticks." As Helene's brisk, post-conspiratorial complacency retreats into indignant shock, her inconveniently principled ex-partner follows up his broadside with one final prophecy, that not only will Madge be exonerated and recover and drive out of her life the sister-in-law she loved and unwisely trusted, Pierre himself is going to help her. He leans up in his doorway like a Tarot figure between the weathered boat-eyes of his owls and the moon-foiled sea, lighting a determined cigarette as the music rises to a climactic sting. Whereon we cut back to Stanwyck in her role as anthology host saying something scripted and inconsequential about the allure of fortune-telling in the face of rationality and I feel as though I've just watched the turn of a rather good, low-budget, noir-styled thriller whose second half is missing. It leaves the wrong kind of questions. I would love to see what happens when Pierre sets out to make his foretelling come true, but partly because I can't imagine what he is actually going to do: confess his part in a rather vicious long con to the police? His word against Helene's when she's well-off and reputable and he's a weird, slightly gigolo-ish practitioner of the paranormal who lives on the Santa Monica waterfront? For that matter, while it's admirable to hear the teshuvah in his voice as he declares, "She's going to get well—I'm going to help her get well," how does he expect Madge ever to trust him after the stunts he pulled on her, although even as I frame this question it strikes me that since she did her best to kill him, the conventions of this sort of thriller may dictate that in the process of working it out they end up a couple? Blondell makes such a convincingly cold heavy, she deserves more than the one abbreviated face-off with Pierre, especially since Helene's claim that her sister-in-law was morally responsible for her brother's death doesn't sound entirely self-serving—what if she really believes in her fury's cause, as Madge believes in her guilt and Pierre believes in his powers? If nothing else, if the teleplay had to stop itself so superfluously short, could it not have reprised the eerie chorus of the gulls? I half expected Pierre in that final shot to be listening for the ghost of Edwin among their white-winged gyre, clamoring a message after all.
My last complaint about "Sign of the Zodiac" is its failure to take advantage of its title beyond establishing that Madge is a Leo and Helene a Sagittarius, of which Pierre could easily have made something as part of his patter. All the same, I am indebted to Tim Blankenship for alerting me to its existence, complete with a pointer to YouTube. It's an impeccable job of liminal, carnival atmosphere and as an excuse for Stanwyck and Blondell and Duryea to be captured on film together, I'll take it. According to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch, if I want more than a half-hour of weirdness between a fortune-teller and two strangers, I should look into Peter Shaffer's White Lies (1967). This nonsense brought to you by my warm backers at Patreon.
In justice to the rest of the episode, its opening scenes are hard to beat for sea air, seediness, and the deniable supernatural. The title runs in with the tide through the pilings of an amusement pier where two women have come to see the fortune-teller who lives past the shooting gallery and the concessions stand, the painted owls and palmistry of his establishment flat-washed in the oncoming sunset like just another salt-faded attraction. Helene Terry (Blondell) is playfully excited to be recognized by name after three years, but her steelier, nervier sister-in-law Madge (Stanwyck) is less enchanted by the astrological charts and arcane tchotchkes, definitely not by the professional familiarity of the not even faintly French Pierre (Duryea) who forestalls her introduction, "Please—don't tell me your name. I prefer to get acquainted with you in my own fashion." Her unease with the visit creeps up as his attention widens not just toward her person but the tragedy that he claims to have sensed at once in her face, the death of Madge's husband, Helene's brother, not much more than a year ago, but when his knowledge seems suddenly to flip from the scattershot of a cold reading to confidences only a mentalist with a confederate or a real clairvoyant could know, she pushes over his crystal and tears out into the last of the day, peeling out so fast in her Lincoln Continental that she leaves Helene in the deserted parking lot behind her, her rough blonde curls a helm against the sea breeze, her face tilted in the westering light to an expression we can't fully read.
Considering that Stanwyck and Blondell had last shared a screen in 1931, it's sheerly fun to see them together with their chemistry in such a different key, but casting Duryea as a psychic of indefinite intentions works so well, I can't believe no noir of the classical period ever tried it. He's sinister and trivial at once, his light, naturally sarcastic voice cutting through the flowery dialogue that another actor might have succumbed to making a meal of; it keeps the audience off balance about his spiel whose serial charm stays barely the right side of sleaze, especially as we take in the implication that his clientele is primarily female and of a certain age. He sounds almost clinical as he offers the cards to Helene with the instruction, "Don't cut them, please, just lay your hand on them for the length of a breath to let the spirit pass through," and then outrageously insincere as he takes them back to deal them out, turning up the seven of diamonds like a tease: "You're such a warm person. Such a warm touch." When he goes off his own script, however, confronting an openly insulting Madge with the never-shared story of the name she was given in memoriam and discarded as soon as she could because it disturbed her to bear a dead woman's name, it's a jolt of unexpected and untrustworthy conviction, like a flash of the Stan Carlisle he never was. We can't get a read on him when we can't tell if it's all flim-flam—the cards, the crystal-gazing, the psychometry—or if Pierre really believes in his own powers. Or if the teleplay does, as the steadily darkening tone of the reading encourages the suspicion that the episode has just slipped a gear into the supernatural. He's so effectively ambiguous, in fact, he nearly camouflages whether we should be looking as closely at anyone else in this plot. Does Helene really put any stock in the prognostications of a man who was heard to flatter his last client until he had her safely out the door or is she just enjoying the ego boost of the game? Lighting a cigarette with a kind of impatient disapproval as Pierre links his hands around the glass for a better look at the future, Madge is obviously humoring her sister-in-law, but if she truly believes it's all "nonsense . . . anyone can see he's just a fake," why should it trouble her so much to have a charlatan hold her husband's heirloom watch and hear a voice crying havoc from the crystal, like the ghost of Antony? Is a watch that teleports worse than a body that vanishes, or the secret knowledge of the night-crying seagulls?
The first of the script's one-two twists hardly counts as such. All audience members who guessed that Pierre has been conspiring with Helene to gaslight Madge into confessing to the murder of her husband may turn in their nickels and collect their cups of coffee at the door. That said, it's a fair twist in that it makes more rather than less sense of what we have been seeing—Madge's willingness to gun down the pier-end crystal-gazer she accuses of setting her up for blackmail comes out of hecking nowhere in the moment, plays much more realistically in hindsight of the nail-biting guilt she has been concealing since the death of Edwin Terry, the much older, richer man she admitted to marrying for his money, trapping her in a marriage she came to want out of any way she could find. With her conscience supernaturally caught and her sense of reality dissolving, she needs little more than the sight of Pierre opening the door to his parlor, dressed black-on-black and unsmiling as the body she left on the floor of her drawing room with four bullets in it, to unravel in numb, snarling disbelief in front of witnesses, eventually demanding to be arrested before she can fall silent with a gasp of convulsive relief. Earlier in the day, Pierre cast an eye at the gulls swirling above the boardwalk and remarked to Madge with his air of imparting esoteric wisdom in the form of a pick-up line, "They tell me that gulls are the spirits of the dear departed. Sometimes I wonder what they're saying. Come in." Now as she's led out into the moonlit night, she looks up into their mewing and says quietly, shushing the policeman so that she can listen more carefully to the voices of the dead: "They're saying something. What? What are they saying?" It won't ever be the maritime Val Lewton I dreamed once, but it's a sturdy, spooky note on which to close the proceedings, a night-tide bookend to that surf-tumbling opening shot. There are four minutes left after the commercial break.
I don't even want to say that the second twist goes one too far, because the previous scenario is not all that complicated; it is not fatal for there to be more to it than meets the eye. It's just not optimal for there to be too much to fit into the epilogue of a half-hour TV slot, which is what happens the second Pierre reveals his discovery that Madge really didn't kill her husband—he died of the natural causes of a massive stroke and nothing she did could have brought it on or saved him—and he doesn't like being played for a sucker, having been hired to bring a murderess to justice only to realize he framed an innocent woman instead. "How long has your brother been dead now? More than a year, isn't it? It took all that time for you to cast a spell over Madge, to break her mind, to convince her that she was guilty . . . Witches are not always old hags who ride around on broomsticks." As Helene's brisk, post-conspiratorial complacency retreats into indignant shock, her inconveniently principled ex-partner follows up his broadside with one final prophecy, that not only will Madge be exonerated and recover and drive out of her life the sister-in-law she loved and unwisely trusted, Pierre himself is going to help her. He leans up in his doorway like a Tarot figure between the weathered boat-eyes of his owls and the moon-foiled sea, lighting a determined cigarette as the music rises to a climactic sting. Whereon we cut back to Stanwyck in her role as anthology host saying something scripted and inconsequential about the allure of fortune-telling in the face of rationality and I feel as though I've just watched the turn of a rather good, low-budget, noir-styled thriller whose second half is missing. It leaves the wrong kind of questions. I would love to see what happens when Pierre sets out to make his foretelling come true, but partly because I can't imagine what he is actually going to do: confess his part in a rather vicious long con to the police? His word against Helene's when she's well-off and reputable and he's a weird, slightly gigolo-ish practitioner of the paranormal who lives on the Santa Monica waterfront? For that matter, while it's admirable to hear the teshuvah in his voice as he declares, "She's going to get well—I'm going to help her get well," how does he expect Madge ever to trust him after the stunts he pulled on her, although even as I frame this question it strikes me that since she did her best to kill him, the conventions of this sort of thriller may dictate that in the process of working it out they end up a couple? Blondell makes such a convincingly cold heavy, she deserves more than the one abbreviated face-off with Pierre, especially since Helene's claim that her sister-in-law was morally responsible for her brother's death doesn't sound entirely self-serving—what if she really believes in her fury's cause, as Madge believes in her guilt and Pierre believes in his powers? If nothing else, if the teleplay had to stop itself so superfluously short, could it not have reprised the eerie chorus of the gulls? I half expected Pierre in that final shot to be listening for the ghost of Edwin among their white-winged gyre, clamoring a message after all.
My last complaint about "Sign of the Zodiac" is its failure to take advantage of its title beyond establishing that Madge is a Leo and Helene a Sagittarius, of which Pierre could easily have made something as part of his patter. All the same, I am indebted to Tim Blankenship for alerting me to its existence, complete with a pointer to YouTube. It's an impeccable job of liminal, carnival atmosphere and as an excuse for Stanwyck and Blondell and Duryea to be captured on film together, I'll take it. According to
spatch, if I want more than a half-hour of weirdness between a fortune-teller and two strangers, I should look into Peter Shaffer's White Lies (1967). This nonsense brought to you by my warm backers at Patreon.
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I'd never seen an episode before! I gather it came into being by analogy/competition with The Loretta Young Show (1953–61), which at least to begin with had a similar gimmick of the host starring in a different half-hour drama every week. It seems to have won Stanwyck an Emmy, so either there were better scripts or she was consistently better than them, but it didn't pan out more than the one season. I am still kind of amazed it survived to be shared on YouTube because my experience with even American mid-century television is indeed much more in the line of "if you can get to the Paley Center, maybe" or "are you kidding, it was live TV." I'd never seen any of the three leads so late in their careers, either. They all had good faces.
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What a stunning bit of imagery!
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Thank you!
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It seems strikingly un-noir to have the conclusion be: "I've found out the truth, and therefore everything will be fine."
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Thank you! I liked so much about the production.
It seems strikingly un-noir to have the conclusion be: "I've found out the truth, and therefore everything will be fine."
I have seen cathartic noirs, but it still usually takes a little more than that!
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I did actually think of Serling et al. while watching, partly because of the quasi-supernatural aspect and partly because I suspect Richard Matheson would not have blown the ending. Sorry, Bezzerides! I loved Thieves' Highway (1949)!
But I will definitely check this one out, because Stanwyck, Blondell, and Duryea!
Enjoy!
The other thing I can't believe is that Stanwyck and Duryea never acted opposite one another except in this one episode of TV. (Ball of Fire (1941) does not count. I can't even remember if they share scenes.) She did enough noir. They work really well together. Were they just never at the same studio at the same time?
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I have seen many finely scripted features by A.I. Bezzerides—okay, I've seen, like, three, but none of them had the problems of this episode, so I really think it was the half-hour format that did for it, but it's such a left-field failure mode. I really wanted the rest of the movie!
And I'm interested to see how the gaslighting worked--at 30 minutes, I can watch it while doing ironing; thanks!
You're welcome! Enjoy!
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"When you've been through Herbert and J. Edgar Hoover / Anything else is a laugh . . ."
And her world-weary experience both in-character and from out of Hollywood colors her every move and reaction and decision. Her survivors are as tough as Stanwyck's are.
I love this description of Blondell. Her monologue in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1957)! She's like the secret weapon of every film she's been in.
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I genuinely think the timing has to be a glitch in the script because it makes so much no sense of anything Pierre says. The rest of it does hang together as a turn for me, but not the kind of turn you can just take on faith!