SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

By: Lynn Peril
November 30, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of favorite horror movies. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

NIGHT GALLERY | d. BORIS SAGAL, STEVEN SPIELBERG, BARRY SHEAR | 1969

“Good evening, and welcome to a private showing,” intones the one-and-only Rod Serling. Thus begins a visit to the Night Gallery, a made-for-TV movie featuring a trilogy of stories written by Serling, each hinging on a painting that “suspends in time and space a frozen moment of a nightmare.” There’s “The Cemetery,” wherein an avaricious nephew hastens his uncle’s demise and thus his inheritance, only to be outmaneuvered by the family’s “faithful retainer,” Portifoy. In “Eyes,” Joan Crawford plays a rich blind woman who blackmails a doctor to transplant a “hoodlum’s” central optic nerve into her head, thus buying her a few hours of sight. Finally, there’s “The Escape Route,” in which a Nazi war criminal hiding in Argentina meets his fate at an art museum.

Each episode has a satisfying twist ending (“Eyes” especially so), but watching Night Gallery 55 years after its original broadcast, one is struck less by its creepiness than by its campiness. Playing the evil scion of a plantation family in the first story, Roddy McDowell sports an accent that is to the Deep South what Dick Van Dyke’s is to East London in his Mary Poppins role of Bert, the cockney chimneysweep. McDowell slides in and out of broadest Foghorn Leghorn and the actor’s own British often within the length of a sentence. There are only five actors with speaking roles in “The Cemetery,” but the frequency with which they call for “Portifoy” has inspired some modern viewers to play a drinking game. The day after Night Gallery’s original broadcast, a columnist for The Montreal Star noted that the segment should have been called “Portifoy’s Complaint.”

Reviewers generally found “Eyes” to be the most effective story (perhaps in part because it was directed by 22-year-old Steven Spielberg), and I agree. Joan Crawford’s performance as Claudia Menlo, the evil blind woman, is delightfully over-the-top. One of my favorite scenes comes when post-op Claudia, seated on a throne-like chair, wearing a gown the color of orange sherbet and a pair of extremely mod white shades, listens to and then promptly ignores her doctor’s instructions to wait before removing her bandages. She immediately unwraps her eyes … the chandelier comes into focus… then darkness. “No, no, no, no,” she screams — the great New York blackout of 1965 has begun!

(Regarding the third story, I have nothing to add to syndicated television columnist Cynthia Lowry’s review: “It was pretty far out and far too long.”)

Night Gallery was “a labor of love,” Serling told a reporter in 1969, as his novel upon which it was based (1967’s The Season to Be Wary) “didn’t sell too well.” Serling also swore that, after five years of The Twilight Zone, he “wouldn’t get involved with another series for $80 million” and that he’d “never want to go back into the vineyards in a week-after-week series form.”

The Night Gallery television series debuted in 1970.

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SCREAM YOUR ENTHUSIASM (18)

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