Rod Serling's live television dramas

Requiem For a Heavyweight is pretty good! The others...

From IMDb at this link, fair use.

Patterns (1955). Grade: C. Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956). Grade: B. The Comedian (1957). Grade: D

These are all available on the Criterion disc, The Golden Age of Television, with a very interesting booklet by radio/television curator Ron Simon. There’s eight programs in total; three are written by Rod Serling.

These were all part of a brief period where you had anthology shows broadcast live. (An anthology show is one where there’s a different story, with different characters, every episode — as opposed to a regular series.) The shows had titles like Kraft Television Theater or Playhouse 90. And, at first, they were only shown once, live in Eastern/Central time zones, poor quality kinescope for Mountain/Pacific. (Kinescope was how live video was recorded before better-quality videotape.)

Gore Vidal frequently wrote for anthology television. Ronald Reagan became more popular as a host of anthology shows than he ever had as a movie actor. And live anthology shows were how Rod Serling branched out into independent writing.

Serling had been a staff writer for various TV shows, and hated it. He later wrote that these shows “‘needed only two elements: a hayseed M.C. who strummed a guitar and said, “Shucks, friends”; and a girl yodeler whose falsetto could break a beer mug at twenty paces.’”¹ He quit that to focus solely on freelance TV writing in 1951, with a new wife and a baby on the way. It was enough to scrape by for four years.

When Patterns aired in 1955, it recieved widespread critical praise, and that made it much easier for Serling to sell scripts. (And to get his own anthology show in 1959, called The Twilight Teen Vampires/Werewolves in Love Zone, or something like that).

Patterns doesn’t have a terrible script. It’s a little on the simple side, though. Everett Sloane plays the heavy, a non-nonsense head of some wealthy company (it’s not specified what they do). Ed Begley (Jr.’s dad) is a longtime executive who Sloane wants to force out. Richard Kiley is the young(ish) exec Sloane wants to replace him. June Dayton is the somewhat Pushy Wife goading Kiley to stomp Begley’s soul to get ahead.

It shows the business world as convinced of its own ruthless benificence (this much rings true). When Sloane proposes a move that would devastate some small town, Begley resists him, worrying how many people that would put out of work. Sloane belittles him, saying that losing those jobs now will create far more later — they’re not destroying the town, they’re saving it.

All this is fairly standard stuff (and reminiscent of Norman Jewison’s Other People’s Money in 1991). It’s a bit preposterous, though, when Serling has Sloane complain about all the old-timers in the company who decry his heartless methods, who want to hinder progress.

Sure — that IS something a top business guy might say. But it would be a complaint about government regulators, not the “old-fashioned” business execs who cared about workers/communities! What past era of business goodness could anybody be imagining existed before 1955? The industrialists who hated the New Deal from the start? The union-busters who hired goons like the Pinkertons to crack the skulls of union activists? The kind of companies that gave us The Jungle’s meatpacking plants, or the deathtrap factories/workfloors that gave us the Triangle Shirtwaist fire which killed 146 workers? (Workers jumped to their deaths rather than face the flames; here’s a powerful song² about a similar fire.)

Serling’s clearly right to decry the ways companies would become… but it’s silly to say they were ever anything but rotten heartless exploiters who’d posion anything and work to death anyone if it made them an extra dime. In 1955, though, with McCarthyism running amok, you probably didn’t want to say business was ALWAYS bad, though…

Comedian is a worse script — and it’s got a HORRIBLE performance by Mickey Rooney. He’s a tyrannical star of a popular TV comedy, and he treats all his writers like trash; his brother (Mel Torme), too. It’s suspected that the comedian being pilloried here was Merton Berle, and Berle supposedly complained that he was never that bad. (Although there are similar stories about Sid Caesar’s bad temper as star of Your Show of Shows… that bit in Blazing Saddles where “Mongo” punches a horse is something Mel Brooks claimed he saw Caesar do.)

Rooney is just loud and repugnant and never lets up. He’s got a big, toothy “haw-haw” laugh when he’s bullying others into laughing at his jokes. It’s like the big toothy madman laugh Jack Nicholson would do to signify “manic,” and it’s annoying when Jack does it, too.

The plot concerns Torme trying to get Rooney to stop making fun of him on TV. Why would he care? If the stories aren’t true (and they aren’t), it only makes him the imaginary buffoon. Oh, but his Pushy Wife (a poorly used Kim Hunter) wants him to stick up for himself. Not just in making his brother be personally nicer, but especially to demand he stop making mean jokes on the show? Whatever.

Meanwhile, the head writer (a pretty good Edmond O’Brien) is running out of clever comedy ideas. So he swipes a script he’s been hiding for years, one written by a dead writer that was never aired. This is seen as a big crisis of conscience. Why, on Earth, would it be? I’m sure the dead guy’s family would be thrilled to see their relative’s name get on the screen. And they could probably use the checks.

This isn’t Sterling at his best, and it’s director John Frankenheimer at his worst. Frankenheimer did a LOT of live TV, and was a master at the technical side of it. (For example, getting another set put up while shooting was happening, so that with a brief break, the actors could appear on the new set… then doing this again, and again.) Yet for him to let Rooney give this performance — and to admire it, as Frankenheimer said he did — shows a stunning lack of judgment. It’s mistaking pushiness and volume for acting.

I would never have guessed, from this, that Frankenheimer would be the guy to get Frank Sinatra’s best side on the screen in The Manchurian Candidate… or Rock Hudson’s in Seconds. Or the really stunning, sensitive acting by Michael Gambon as LBJ in HBO’s Path To War. Well, everyone has their blind side, I guess.

And with Serling, maybe his blind side was how much he hated being a TV comedy writer (for very good reasons!). So, he overdid how soul-sucking it was. Well, at the very same time, British playwright John Osborne (no stranger to dramas about soul-sucking institutions) was about to debut his play The Entertainer, starring Lawrence Olivier as a washed-up music-hall performer/comedian. It’s also a pretty nasty character. Yet Osborne gives his bitter star some shred of pathetic integrity Serling’s bitter comedian lacks. Here’s a scene near the end of the 1960 film version:

(Feel free to stop it once Olivier leaves the stage… or go back to watch the whole thing, if you like. It's pretty good! The subtitles are there because that was the only way I could show this scene… and it's a great scene.)

Serling could also put his personal experience to good use; he does in Requiem for a Heavyweight. Serling had boxed a little in the military, and no doubt heard stories about the sad fates of boxers past their prime. And that’s part of what gives this program real feeling.

The other part of that is the actors; and, especially, Jack Palance. Jack Palance? That guy? Who always played the menacing baddie? Yeah, him.

Palance had actually done some professional boxing, then thought “‘You must be nuts to get your head beat in for $200.” The theater seemed a lot more appealing.’” He’d been in a bad plane crash while serving in WWII, and reconstructive surgery added to his stark appearance.

There’s a little more “nasty face” makeup slapped on him here, and it’s not great, but that’s alright. What’s nice is how basically sweet he’s allowed to be here. And how sad. He’s a trusting lummox of a boxer whose career has reached its limit; the fight doctors won’t clear him to box anymore. He’s already had too many blows to the head. And Palance utterly trusts his longtime manager (Keenan Wynn), who’s mostly planning to toss him out with the trash. Although he does feel a little pang of guilt about it… guilt compounded by his longtime trainer (Ed Wynn, normally a comedian, and Keenan’s real-life dad).

There’s a sweet scene where Palance goes to an employment agency, and the kind, competent social worker tries brainstorming to help him out. It’s Kim Hunter, poorly used in Patterns, very warm and lovely in A Matter of Life and Death. She’s warm and lovely again here, too. I think Serling goofs by having her fall for Palance, instead of just being compassionate towards him. But hey, it’s 1956, everything has to have a love story. And the two of them are very good together.

What was most striking about Heavyweight, for me, wasn’t the nice acting, but the extreme realism about what repeated head trauma can do. In 1956. It’s now 2025, and the NFL is still behind this TV show on the subject.

Incidentally, there’s a 1960 television program, The Man in the Funny Suit, which stars Keenan Wynn and Ed Wynn as themselves preparing to perform Heavyweight live. It’s on YouTube. And… it’s pretty bad. The gist is, Keenan’s worried that fading comedian Ed is going to embarrass himself in a serious role. The script is by Heavyweight director Ralph Nelson, and it’s awful — maudlin and completely unbelievable, in a way the original show wasn’t. Whoever did the sappy music was intentionally trying to hurt me.

Although, I’d probably rather watch that again than the 1962 movie version of Heavyweight, which was also directed by Ralph Nelson. It’s said to have largely the same Serling script, but the Keenan Wynn part is played by… Mickey Rooney. NO! NOOOOOOOOOO!

1. That quote’s from the essay “About Writing For Television.” It’s worth reading in full to learn about what things were like at the very start of the medium. And Serling is a skilled essay writer.

2. The bald/shaved head guy in that video, Tim Eriksen, taught at the University of Minnesota for awhile, and one day did a thing on the street outside my apartment teaching people how to sing, 19th-century-style. It was odd but terrific.