The Swan Bed (21 Oct. 1960)
Writer: Stirling Silliphant
Director: Elliot Silverstein
Director of Photography: Jack A. Marta
(Details from
http://www.imdb.com - click on the episode title above for more cast and crew)
Screencaps are from the Shout Factory version of the series. The images are very fuzzy and grainy. The sound isn't too bad.
This whole story is a kind of Cinderella analogy tangled up with bird smugglers and danger. Is that even possible in a story? Apparently it is.
It’s a tricky episode. There are very deep themes in it. Get rid of the adventure storyline with Tod and Buz and the bird fever, and I think they could have gone very deeply into the psychology of Carrie’s mother and her obsession with and hatred of the boat that is moored outside her window and the bed she sleeps in. Carrie is a Cinderella figure who needs a dress to go to the ball, but her wicked stepmother is her actual mother, who plays out a kind of grotesque Sleeping Beauty role, trapped by the bed in which she was seduced by her handsome sham-prince. The episode is a modern fairy tale, but it feels messy at times, I think because the fairytale/psychological tale of Carrie’s mother jars with the action-adventure storyline that Tod and Buz take part in. It’s not meshed together well, and feels very busy, a bit like this episode description I’m writing.
I’m impressed that so much was packed into one episode – those three storylines alone, along with Buz’s childhood friendship rekindled, and the threat of an epidemic – but perhaps with less focus on the fist fights and kidnapping it could have been a more sophisticated outing. It’s hard to choose which is the focus of the episode. Instinctively one feels it is Carrie’s story – but the title of the episode and the strong focus on the bed of the title implies something different. Carrie’s mother gets little air time considering this. Try to fit Tod and Buz’s itinerant adventuring into this too, and it’s just too much. It should have been a feature-length episode to get all of this in smoothly, or some of the storylines should have been cut.
Actor-wise – Betty Field appears in two other Route 66 episodes – in The Mud Nest as Buz’s possible mother, and in Across Walnuts and Wine as Maggie Carter.
Zina Bethune also appears in Kiss The Maiden All Forlorn as Bonnie, a postulant nun.
Elizabeth MacRae is also in Layout At Glen Canyon, as Betsy, Go Read The River, as Jean Cory, and Who In His Right Mind Needs A Nice Girl, as Betty.
Murray Hamilton (Dr Stafford) makes a business of playing doctors – he also plays Dr Anderson in The Thin White Line.
Well, hello, boys. Nice to see you looking so pretty and driving over such an impressive bridge, even if the video quality is so poor.
I have to cap this just because it’s so pretty and carefree. After strange suspicious towns and hurricanes they must be hoping for some peace. I doubt that when they left New York they expected the world of itinerant work to be so eventful.
Buz retunes the radio and then rests his arm languidly on the bar across the dashboard in front of him. I have to assume the cameraman is sitting on the back of the car for these shots, while Milner and Maharis pretend to not notice the extra passenger.
The car radio tells us we’re in New Orleans, and gives the editor the opportunity for a nice segue to a radio in another place…
I like the close-up here. The light flashes over it because they’re going under all those girders that make up the bridge. Attention to detail or location filming even for these close-ups. Nice.
This other radio is a battered old thing that’s seen better days, like the room it’s in and the matriarch of the household.
Carrie (Zina Bethune, who unfortunately died early in 2012 as a victim of a hit and run accident) is a waif-like girl in something that looks like a shack, drawing on her stockings as she listens to the radio. She’s only about fifteen here, according to IMDB.
But as she’s dressing something is thrown at the radio…
The first glimpse of the ‘swan bed’ of the title – a strange, fairytale construction that looks like it should be on a stage.
And this is what the bed contains – her drunk and shambolic mother (Betty Field), who sits up like a marionette coming to life and berates Carrie for the noise. She looks as much as if she should be on the stage as the bed she lies in.
It would seem like a fairytale bed if it weren’t for the grotesque juxtaposition against the shack and the woman in it. It
’s not just the bed, but also the side tables and lamps, and perhaps the chair in the corner, which are far too ornate for this simple dwelling.
Carrie replaces the slipper that her mother threw, gently and silently by the bed. It’s hard to tell whether this act is motivated by love or fear, or perhaps both. She’s at pains to be silent. There’s a strong sense of Cinderella and the ugly sisters with the grotesque mother and the pretty slipper, but the story is twisted out of shape, and perhaps blended with Sleeping Beauty.
Carrie goes outside in her slip to get her dress off the line. There are no fairy godmothers out here – just the docks and the sounds of birds.
As a man wanders out onto the deck of the nearby ship and peers at her dressing, you’re expecting some lewd comment, but apparently this is Mr Gant (Grant according to IMDB, but they say ‘Gant’ all the way through), and he’s friendly, if rather alcoholic.
Back inside, Carrie is still terrified of upsetting her mother. She seems to be surrounded by alcoholics, which is perhaps dangerous this close to the shoreline. She asks her tentatively if she can bring her anything, and gets no response.
Carrie assumes that she is asleep, and quietly gets her purse from the cupboard (which is just a curtained alcove) and leaves.
All the while her mother has been awake and listening, but she settles back to sleep again.
Carrie is just an innocent young girl in the city as she gets off the bus, and the light music reinforces this. Somehow the bad mother has brought up a good child rather than an embittered and rebellious one.
And paths cross, as they always do. She runs across the road to work, while Tod and Buz are driving in with all their luggage, opening up another of the many threads of this episode.
They don’t even give her a second glance. They’re preoccupied with trying to find the place where they’ll be staying. It seems that they’re looking after someone’s apartment, or perhaps even the whole building, since they have responsibility for all the window boxes.
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| Here is the site of Tod and Buz's apartment in 2011, thanks to Google Street View. Not much changed in some ways, but not as rich or busy, it seems. |
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| As above. Tod and Buz's apartment. Not so many window boxes now, perhaps. |
This screencap is primarily because they look pretty while wondering how they’re going to water all the plants on the balconies. They seem to have struck on a good place. 60 a month and a hamburger place and chop suey place right on the corner.
Meanwhile, Carrie arrives at the greengrocer’s where she works. She’s (almost) late.
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| The view from Carrie's workplace in 2011, just a few buildings down from Tod and Buz's apartment. |
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| And looking back from the same spot, to where the greengrocer's must have been. It looks very sanitised now. |
And outside an ambulance rushes past. All the threads of the story are being set up, all interweaving but not quite touching yet.
Carrie watches it pass in interest or concern, with no idea that at some point this will hold relevance for her.
Inside the ambulance the doctor proclaims, ‘If it’s what I think it is we may be in for an epidemic.’
‘I wonder how it happened?’ the paramedic asked.
‘A parakeet, canary, parrot,’ the doctor shrugs. There should be something witty to say about this. It’s amusing.
And we cut to yet another thread of this web – a parrot on board the boat where Mr Gant lives, the man to whom Carrie was waving that morning.
Mr Gant seems pretty drunk, but he hears a boat approaching.
I really wish this film were cleaner. It would be nice to see shots like this, as the boat approaches, in their original quality.
Something fishy is going on, as Mr Gant yells at the man on the boat that they should know better than to bring the boat around here by daylight. I feel like this scene is here essentially to establish that Mr Gant is up to no good, receiving some kind of cargo for money, that has to be shipped in under the cover of darkness. This show still isn’t as elegant as it will be later.
Meanwhile, Tod is walking the streets of New Orleans, looking for a job. He’s actually not very far from his new home. In fact, he’s just across the street from it.
He gets mobbed (benignly) by a gang of kids who are incomprehensible, but either after money or just the novelty of a stranger.
So he goes into some kind of a tourist shop selling novelties and trinkets (or crap, as I would call it. We have too many of these shops ourselves) and by means of gestures we understand that he’s asking for a job and they’re telling him there’s no room at the inn.
He carries on into what seems like Greengrocer Row. I’m capping this mainly because of the incredible abundance of fruit out on show. What a wonderful place. You don’t get things like this in rural Wales. And, it seems from looking at Google Maps, you don’t get them in that area of New Orleans any more, either.
And the hand of fate directs affairs again, as Tod stops outside the shop where Carrie works, thinks about going in, decides not to, then changes his mind and goes to ask for a job. There’s a lot of mime-type acting on Milner’s part for these scenes as he tries to convey his thought process through his facial expressions.
Alas, the boss with the hideously overripe bananas sizes him up and decides he’s not young enough, pretty enough, or female enough to work under him, and sends him on his way. (Perhaps he judges him on his lack of moustache. Moustaches seem to be a big thing round here, no pun intended.) First, though, he gets Tod’s hopes up by telling him how much work he has, and then dashes them by having a little bitch about how he has to do it all (while glancing pointedly at Carrie.)
Carrie is looking at him with the half-innocent glance of sexual awakening. It’s Jenny Slade all over again. Tod is a magnet for teenage girls.
Tod catches her gaze and looks back with the appraisal of a sexual predator. One almost expects him to follow up with, ‘Well, hello, my dear,’ and an invitation to look at his collection of pressed flowers. If only he were wearing a smoking jacket and a cravat.
This one is too young to be exposed to my power, he thinks, as she looks away shyly. But as he leaves she calls after him, to ask if he’s tried ‘George’s.’
Tod is pleased to have finally found someone willing to help him. She seems terrified at having had the courage to speak to him.
At Hercules George’s Tod is buoyant and has pleasant arms.
Hercules George is moustachioed and looks like he may have been given the moustache as part of the Witness Protection Programme.
When Tod asks for work, Hercules throws fish at
him. Lucky Tod.
Tod looks so happy at this turn of events. The pay is some
unintelligible amount of dollars an hour, and Tod seems content with this,
despite the fish. ‘When can I start?’ he asks.
Since Tod is covered in a substantial amount of fish slime,
and may sue Hercules for dry cleaning, Hercules tells him, ‘You already are.’
Meanwhile, Buz. Not covered in fish. Carrying sacks and
looking manly.
There’s a group of guys standing around watching
something with binoculars. One of them even seems to be eating an ice cream, as
if the usher came round with a tray at the interval.
Buz senses something must be going on that’s to
do with Woman. I wonder if he’s watched Stalag 17? He also has pleasant arms,
not to outdone by Tod’s arms.
He tries to use his special Buz-sight to see
what others can only see with the aid of special lenses, but this time it fails
him.
So he steals the binoculars to have a look
himself. The guy he wrestles them from doesn’t look too pleased. Buz has the
open-mouthed look of someone who’s watching porn and doesn’t realise he’s being
watched watching porn.
And what does Buz see? His woman-sense was right. She seems
to be wearing some sort of goggles, though. She must have a secret identity.
‘Who’s she?!’ Buz asks. He’s possibly drooling at this
point.
‘Randy Spring,’ says a guy. (That’s a porn name if ever I
heard one.) ‘Has a bird routine at Jack’s. Four shows a night.’
There’s a little tussle over the binoculars. Buz wins, of course. The guy on the right looks as if sexual frustration was his middle name.
And we transition smoothly from Buz viewing the pretty lady with the bird routine to the doctor looking at the evidence of parrot fever under his microscope. Nice.
Oh dear. It’s Parrot Fever – which sounds like a dodgy 80s band.
‘Last epidemic back in ’40 we lost twenty-seven people,’ the doctor says grimly. ‘Would you call the local public health office, please? Tell them to wire the communicable disease centre in Atlanta. I’ll call in as soon as I’ve talked to Andre Beauchamp’s widow.’
Oh dear again. It looks like the fever has claimed its first victim. Who will be next? The woman who works with birds? The man who has a parrot on his boat?
Meanwhile, at New Orleans’ Most Famous Coffee Drinking Place…
It took me a while to track this place down. It’s the
Morning Call, originally (and in this episode) at 1000 Decatur Street, where Decatur and St Peters Street merge, now located in Jefferson. It’s just down the road from where Tod and Buz are living.
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| The site of the Morning Call, still a cafe. |
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| The Morning Call in 1960, found on Pinterest. |
Meanwhile, as I said… Tod and Buz are having coffee and doughnuts together, despite Tod smelling like the hold of a North Atlantic fishing trawler.
Buz suggests politely that Tod sit at another counter. Tod asks him gleefully, ‘You don’t like ‘Canal number five’? How about a little eau de lake trout?’
Buz is annoyed because Tod didn’t wait until Buz had got him his union card. So all that time poor forlorn Tod was wandering and looking for work, he could have been at home watering the windowboxes.
‘I didn’t expect you to start wrestling with – fish.’ (Some lovely disdainful sniffing action going on there. It doesn’t look good on a freeze frame, though.)
‘Why not? Look, I only had
three years at Yale,’ Tod says, thereby opening up the whole unsolvable debate of
Did Tod graduate Yale? Apparently Yale degrees are four years. But You Never Had It So Good establishes that he graduated ‘magna cum laude.’ So who knows?
Buz shares a little silent moment with the café worker to establish that he does not approve of Tod’s scent.
And who should be sitting at the counter but Carrie? New Orleans is a big place, but perhaps this is the best and closest coffee drinking place around? (Having studied Google Maps, yes, it probably is.) It’s the most famous, so you’d hope it would be good. Carrie doesn’t seem to notice that Tod smells like a bucket of fish.
Tod and Buz have a little light-hearted domestic argument over Tod’s ill-advised job, with Carrie in the middle, which must make her feel just great, being a nervous fifteen year old and the one who is responsible for Tod’s new career in fish management.
They move on from the argument. Tod introduces himself and Buz to Carrie and then they start lusting over doughnuts and all the good food they’ll eat later.
Carrie doesn’t seem to know quite what to do with these two men who are ten years older than her (technically more like twenty – they could be her father) and probably giving her the first attention she has ever had. Tod asks her, ‘I guess we sound like a couple of tourists, huh?’ and when she nervously says, ‘Oh, no!’ he replies, ‘Well, we are,’ and starts asking her for hints and tips about the place.
Carrie seems rather awkward about this. When Tod asks her to show them the places she looks even more doubtful.
‘I just couldn’t,’ Carrie protests at the proposition that she go out for dinner with two strangers ten years older than her.
Tod knows that in all girls no means yes, and continues, ‘Look, no big deal. Just dinner. About eight. Now where do we pick you up?’
But as
TopHatBlue has noted, Tod is a gentleman, and stands when she stands. Can he be that bad? Carrie agrees to meet them here. Good idea. Stay safe. Meet in a public place, don’t start swapping addresses.
‘What was
that all about?’ Buz asks, presumably askance at Tod picking up jailbait on their first night in the town. He’s dubious that she’ll know all the good places, and points out that Tod doesn’t even know her name.
Maybe he’s afraid that
Tod will be taken advantage of?
Meanwhile, at the cemetery (and what an impressive cemetery. Very continental looking) the doctor (Dr Stafford, we learn) can find no better place to tackle Mr Beauchamp’s widow than as she is leaving from his funeral. Nice timing.
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| This is the St Roch Cemetery in 2011, thanks to Google Street View. Very impressive looking, and quite beautiful in colour. There are lots of photos of the cemetery here. |
The doctor wants to know if anyone in her family owns a parrot or parakeet. He asks her about the kind of places her husband might have visited in the last few weeks. With the prescience of having watched this before, suddenly I realise that not only has he turned up to tell her her entire family may be at risk from the same disease, but the implication is that he may have been frequenting risqué late night shows involving strippers and parrots.
The sinister shadow of the bird looms large in Carrie’s mother’s shack where she appears overlooked and trapped by the carved swans. She’s staring at the old showboat on the river.
‘I swear they oughta drag that old showboat out and sink it,’ she slurs when Carrie comes in. ‘Shoulda burnt it myself long time ago – set a torch to it. It’s an abomination sitting out there in the mud. It’s an affront to decent people.’
Carrie tries to calm her down, and reminds her how when a few years ago there were plans to do it up and sail it up and down the river ‘you almost went out of your mind.’
We see that the showboat exerts as much of a hold on her as the stagey bed. Carrie thinks her mother keeps them there in the shack so she can watch the boat.
When Carrie tells her mother that she’s been invited out by two nice boys and needs something to wear her mother tells her she can’t go. We’re verging into Cinderella territory again. But Carrie is determined this time to stand up for herself.
It emerges that her mother has never let her go out before. Her mother starts slapping her repeatedly as she argues.
When Carrie falls onto the bed it seems to galvanise something in her mother.
‘Get off that bed!’ she yells furiously. ‘Get off that bed!’
The bed is a sanctified symbol of her cherished past, but also a symbol of lost virginity, of the girl becoming the woman, something that she is desperate for Carrie to be protected from. Carrie touching the bed during an argument about her first date is just too symbolic.
And Carrie rolls over the bed and runs out of the shack, her mother chasing after her.
‘I knew you’d end up like this – I knew it – it’s in your blood,’ her mother rants.
At first I thought she said, ‘I knew it, you slut’ rather than ‘in your blood’ which I didn’t expect to hear in a programme of this era. But anyway, this gives us more information about the mother’s character than the daughter’s. She is judging Carrie by her own slate, it seems.
Carrie is a fairytale figure balancing precariously on a plank with her shoes in her hand as she climbs onto Mr Gant’s boat. In a shot of her running up the stairs she has authentically muddy legs, which is typical of this programme. She is very ‘15’ in her guiltless expectation that
someone will help her in her predicament.
But Mr Gant is deep in a drunken stupor with his scraggy parrot perched above him. Carrie asks to borrow some of his money but it’s evident that he’s not taking it in.
So, typical teenager that she is, she goes looking for his money bag, and finds it in his desk. I love her expression of joy here. She doesn’t look very young naturally, but her youth shines through at moments like these. She asks the parrot, Sam, to be her witness – another naïve, fairytale element. She is going to borrow ‘exactly eighty dollars’ – but before she can take it out of the bag she hears footsteps on the boat, and frightened, she runs.
These two look like they mean business. Carrie, hiding behind some ironwork, watches them coming up onto the ship. Then she skips over the iron barrier and runs away.
Later, in a dress shop, a very uninterested looking model is displaying a dress with gauzy sleeves for Carrie. To be honest I’m amazed they didn’t just look at her and ask her to leave. I wonder if any shops still offer this kind of service of live models to show the dress?
This must (probably) be in a real shop. Somewhere in the background you can hear a baby crying.
Carrie nervously tells the lady that she ‘didn’t want to spend quite that much.’
The lady bitchily tells her, ‘This is the
better dress salon. Now, we do have a young-married’s department. Smart casuals, you know, to fit the – average – pocket book. Third floor.’
When Carrie gets up to leave she tells her, ‘We also have an economy department in the basement.’
Well, we can see the social strata going on there…
Then Carrie opens the purse to see exactly how much money she has – and pulls out a roll of notes. She is astounded, but the lady’s attitude suddenly turns around.
‘Well, it’s none of my business, but you have enough right there to buy out the entire better dress salon!’
And a nice fat commission for me, she’s thinking.
Carrie doesn’t know what to think or to do.
That evening, out on the town, Tod, Carrie, and Buz walk past the sign for ‘Randy Spring and her Daring Dance of the Birds.’ My, that sounds sexy…
Buz is agog. He recognises Randy Spring as ‘Jeannie Barstow, PS22.’ PS22 is seems is shorthand for Public School 22, which is a wonderfully Orwellian way of naming one’s schools. It must instil real pride in one’s educational establishment.
Buz proposes going in, and poor Carrie is too timid to say, ‘No, I’m fifteen and I’d rather not go and see a female strip show on my first date with two twenty-five year old strangers.’
Even Tod is too blinded, either by the promise of sexy ladies or the weird coincidence that it’s one of Buz’s old classmates, to chivalrously decide to go elsewhere.
Bongos! Buz must be thrilled! He’s probably standing there, digging them like crazy! The world must just be a paradise for him. He can walk into a club pretty much anywhere and hear jazz music (and dig bongos).
Something else for Buz to dig like crazy. Randy Spring and her randy bird dance. Now, I know Americans don’t use the word randy as we do in the UK, or they would not look at their darling new born babies and say, ‘Darling, why don’t we call the little angel Randy?’ But you have to permit me my own amusement.
Okay, Buz is not entirely focussed on the bongos. He’s enraptured by his old school friend who is very much not fourteen any more. Tod is enraptured by Buz’s old school friend who is very much not fourteen any more, and needs a cigarette to cope with the excitement. Carrie is looking at her in disgust, and probably regretting this whole thing. She hadn’t expected her first date ever to include strippers.
You never see Jeannie below the neck or much above the knees in this dance, which I assume means she is supposed to be more naked than early 60s censors would like. She has an annoying dimple in her chin, but she’s cute.
Tod is also agog. He looks like he’s never seen a woman before. Poor Carrie is still less than impressed.
Am I the only one who finds Buz watching his old school friend strip a little awkward?
Tod, still agog.
Finally, though, he realises that this is really not fun for Carrie and (we can’t hear him over the music) presumably offers to take her out.
When Tod tells Buz, Buz shoots Carrie a look that could roughly be translated as ‘What a square!’ – but with a shrug he acknowledges her point, and swiftly turns back to his in depth analysis of Jeannie’s assets, shooting her a quick wink as he does.
The guy on bongos looks like he’s digging
Jeannie too.
Finally, the dreaded birds of evil, including the parrot of doom sitting blithely in the background.
Buz is even more impressed by this than he is by her scantily clad dance. Obviously for Buz, magic really tops off nudity.
Later, Jeannie and Buz are walking, looking like a very sweet and innocent couple. (I wonder what Tod and Carrie are doing at this time?) It’s nice that they don’t feel a need to show her as a coarse woman of ill repute or anything. No moral judgements on her. She’s a real person who has entered a certain field of work, and that is that.
I like the way this is shot, as Buz and Jeannie talk – as if they are small and close to each other and the whole world is wide around them. Buz reminisces about how Jeannie’s father had a standing bet, ‘Five to one, anybody that wanted any action, I’d get the electric chair before I was eighteen.’
‘Seventeen,’ Jeannie corrects him playfully.
‘And I always figured I should have taken that bet, but – but I figured if nobody else would, why should I? See. No confidence.’
Jeannie tells him how much he’s changed.
Buz gets starry eyed and starts telling Jeannie about Tod’s father.
‘When I went to work for him, he said something to me. Like, some guys can hear a sermon on Sunday and knock over a bank on Monday, but once in a while, you really listen, cause you need to. And if the right guy says the right thing at the right time – bam, it’s like somebody pushed the button at Cape Canaveral.’ (I feel like he’s going to burst into song at any moment here.) ‘He said, Buz, the true measure of a man – what he really is – is what he’d do if he knew he’d never be found out. Never – never be rewarded, never be punished…’
And then he bangs himself on the side of the head. ‘Who wants to be serious?’
It’s too late, Buz. You’ve given us all a glimpse of what you really are. A Good Guy who will Do The Right Thing. And we love you for it. Jeannie has seen this too, and the only way he can break the seriousness of the moment is to kiss her passionately. But she doesn’t need to fear being out with him on a dark night, because she knows he’s a Good Guy.
He has a real look of hero worship as he talks of Tod’s father. So many Route 66 episodes touch in varying degrees on Buz’s search for a mother or father figure, or his past searches for this. You get the feeling that he really did hit on it with Tod’s father, and is possibly as bereaved as Tod.
While Buz is romancing, Carrie is running like a ghost in the darkness, like Cinderella returned late from the ball. I hope Tod dropped her at her door first. But she needs to return to her fairy godmother (Gant) to explain about the money.
While Carrie was out, Mr Gant has been beaten up – but he passes it off as an accident, and when she tries to return his money ($4,500) he denies it is his. She had been worrying about it all evening.
When he denies it she goes to his desk to look – and finds an identical purse. She must feel like she’s slipped into a fairy tale. He chases her off the boat in a kind of drunken terror and tells her to take the money and never come back.
We see the reason for his panic. It’s Hercules George – with a gun. Gant is desperately trying to protect Carrie – but George tells his henchman to go after her.
At first Carrie thinks she’s just fleeing from Gant, but then she sees the man chasing her, and we have night shots of running and running feet which are hard to screencap.
Hercules George is suave and dangerous. Gant is nothing but a pawn. Gant has at least proven that he wasn’t holding out on the money – but he’s in trouble for being drunk so that she could come in and take it. George’s plan was for Gant to deny the money was his so that Carrie can’t tell the town about it, and George’s friend Eddie can grab the money back. ‘And that’s the end of it,’ he says, ‘Unless she gives us more grief…’
The money is still featuring large as Carrie bangs on Tod’s door.
Tod answers the door in some very nifty pyjamas, and Carrie runs into his arms, crying out that someone’s after her – but he can’t see anyone in the stairwell outside.
She thinks there’s a curse on the money she has. It must seem so, after living a life of poverty. Finally she has unimaginable amounts of money and it’s led to nothing but trouble.
Tod seems pretty lively considering how hard it usually is to get him to wake up. Maybe he was waiting up for Buz?
And speak of the devil… Tod opens the door as if it’s a masked hoodlum outside – but no, it’s just Buz, rather surprised at his welcome.
‘A doorman at five o’clock in the morning?’ he asks Tod. When he turns and sees Carrie he’s even more surprised. There’s a look of, ‘Tod, you old dog,’ on his face.
Carrie knows exactly what he’s thinking, and is ashamed.
There’s no end of insinuation in Buz’s looks. Raised eyebrows, glances between Tod and Carrie. All he says is, ‘How about some – er – scrambled eggs?’ But it is obvious in these early episodes that Buz may be a Good Guy, but he’s No Gentleman. He’s thinking the business of the night is over and it’s time to get to breakfast.
Good on you, Tod, and all that jazz.
I have to say, I rather like Buz in this scene. You get the sense he’s a little tipsy. When Tod asks if he saw anyone outside he replies, ‘This is the witching hour. The night people have dug in and the day people are waiting for the message – six o’clock alarm.’ (I suppose that makes Buz an anomaly) ‘How do you like ’em?’ he asks Carrie glibly. ‘Hard, or runny?’
Obviously the glib mention of eggs was too much for Carrie. Finding herself holding four thousand dollars, being scared off the boat by Gant, chased by a stranger, and then suspected to be of loose morals by Buz – she starts to sob and rushes to Tod. Buz probably seems like something of a bastard to her right now. You get the feeling Tod isn’t sure what to do with an underage girl in a flimsy dress hugging him in his nightclothes.
Buz is still wondering what’s going on.
Tod gives Buz a look. Perhaps one day they’ll park up in that Corvette for a few minutes and Tod will teach Buz some tact. Buz offers Carrie waffles, instead, but I don’t imagine that goes down any better.
Tod is now dressed – although if you screencap it right it looks like Tod and Buz as coming out of the police station getting dressed after – something. It seems that the police couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything about the man who chased Carrie or the purse with $4000 in it.
‘Why don’t they make Mr Gant come down here and admit it’s his money?’ she asks in rather a wailing voice.
Buz sounds a little impatient (hangover kicking in, perhaps? Can you get a hangover without going to sleep? Or did they catch a few hours before they came out?) He insinuates that the police would never believe that Gant had
given her the money. (Who am I kidding? This picture is mostly here because it’s gorgeous.)
Poor Carrie. Now she thinks Buz thinks she’s a thief or a liar too. Buz says he doesn’t know anyone who’d ‘turn his back on that kind of money.’
‘Unless he’s trying to hide something,’ Tod insists, much more predisposed to believe Carrie than Mr Gant.
Poor Carrie is also terrified about her mother finding out she was out all night. What a lot of trouble she’s landed herself in…
Buz seems to have reached his limit.
‘Let’s go,’ he says tiredly.
I think he’s wondering why Tod ever tied them up with a 15 year old girl in the first place. He spent a perfectly innocent night with a bird-producing stripper, and Tod has to go and get them mixed up in possibly stolen money, an under aged girl, and the looming threat of ‘mama.’
Tod offers to go with Carrie to speak to her mother – but not until the banks open and the money is safe. He starts to get into the passenger side of the car, but Buz takes his arm.
‘You’re the guy who wants to do the driving all the time,’ Buz says.
‘Remind me to change all that,’ Tod says tartly.
There’s some interesting politics going on in their relationship still. Does Buz want to cosy up with Carrie now? Or is it just he’s knackered and doesn’t want to drive? He’s not exactly acting nicely towards Carrie, but now he wants to sit with her while Tod drives?
And off they go. I’m sure Carrie’s mama would be thrilled to see Carrie in a sports car with two men. And look at the rear end on that police car!!
They live above an Italian and Spanish food mart. I bet that’s fun shopping. Sounds like that haven’t had breakfast yet, either. No wonder Buz is tetchy.
They climb the rather grotty stairs to the apartment, Buz opens the door, and – wham! Looks like breakfast is going to be delayed again.
Go, Action-Tod!!
Action-Tod is still in action! But when another guy comes out of the woodwork he realises he can’t do without Super-Buz!
Luckily, Super-Buz is just coming around!
One up, one down. This time Tod gets the bad end of the kosh. Ouch, poor Tod.
And Super-Buz kicks the nasty man down the stairs.
Like all fair fairy tale maidens, Carrie is at the top of the stairs, standing helpless behind the railings. She could be a princess on a balcony.
One of the men grabs the purse. She screams. Buz rushes to the top of the stairs and puts out his arm like Superman, preparing to catch his quarry. Buz Away!
And onto the rooftops they go! The only thing Buz is missing is the power of flight!
Buz is floored! Oh, Buz! Now where have I seen you in a pose like that before?
`
But like the dirty back-alley fighter he is, he throws dirt in the man’s eyes, knocks the purse out of his hand, and punches him soundly.
Wham! Bam! Whack! And Buz knocks the bad man off the roof and onto the ground beneath.
Because Buz is a real man, he shows vulnerability. Ow, his shoulder hurts.
 |
| I'm pretty certain this sequence was shot on the actual roof of the building they were meant to be staying in. It fits with the aerial view. |
Buz does not hurt as much as this guy, though. Good thing none of those pipes were sticking up, or Buz could find himself on a manslaughter charge.
Tod is looking more worse for wear than Buz, and Buz assiduously helps him to a chair.
Buz is just checking out Tod’s injuries when Dr Parrot-Death arrives. I wonder if this guy ever brings good news?
‘Murdock?’ the doctor asks. ‘Buz Murdock? You know a girl called
Randy Spring?’ (He really does put the emphasis on the ‘randy.’)
Buz isn’t in any mood for uninvited strangers, but I think he’s all out of punch, luckily for the doctor. The doctor tells him Randy has been taken to the hospital.
So, now Buz needs to go with the Public Health Service guy. He checks that Tod is all right. (The erstwhile doctor doesn’t seem at all concerned that he’s walked in on two panting and obviously hurt guys. Parrot Fever is all he can think of.)
‘Call Pier 63 and tell them I’ll be a little late, huh?’ Buz asks Tod.
Now, that’s hardcore. Up until 5 with a stripper, out to the police before breakfast, back to his place where he gets beaten up, twice, called out by the Public Health Service official, and he’s still planning on work today. And that’s without any breakfast.
Randy/Jeannie doesn’t look so good any more… Poor girl.
Buz has the grace to look concerned rather than horrified/terrified as she’s wheeled into isolation. Once she’s in the room, Buz and the doctor walk off in the other direction. Obviously the doctor wanted to make sure that Buz was properly exposed before he gave him his shot.
‘Parrot Fever?’ Buz asks with some incredulity.
‘We’ve even found it in petrels from Iceland, birds of paradise from New Guinea, doves from Central Park.’
He tells Buz to take off his jacket and shirt. Unfortunately (but in a good piece of continuity) he notices before Buz strips that his shirt is short sleeved, and lets him keep it on.
Jeannie could die, he tells Buz.
So, Buz gets a shot. He doesn’t even flinch. I suppose after all the koshing and punching and running and missing out on breakfast, a little needle is nothing.
Lots of detective questions ensue about where Jeannie’s birds come from. Apparently her parrot is a new one. This is Buz’s ‘You mean, this is an epidemic?’ face. He looks a little worried and a little sad about the idea of an epidemic.
There follows a long public information film about the parrot smuggling business. The doctor already knows where Jeannie bought the parrot from, but they need confirmation from Jeannie. The pet shop owner won’t say where he got the birds. Buz looks thoughtful and concerned as the doctor tells him about the ins and outs of smuggling parrots from Mexico.
The moustachioed face of evil. Hercules George is on the boat, looking out…
And down below Tod and Carrie are tripping across the mud like innocent children, on their way to the boat. No, Tod! The moustachioed face of evil is watching! Don’t come on board!
‘I bet you Mr Gant is watching us right now,’ Carrie says at they take their shoes off.
‘Good,’ Tod says firmly. Mr Gant might get a sight of Tod’s ankles. That’ll teach the old reprobate.
‘Carrie won’t say nothing,’ George taunts Mr Gant. ‘Get below,’ he tells him. ‘Open it up. I’m keeping them both
down there until tonight,’ he says.
I don’t know why he puts the curious emphasis on ‘down there,’ as if it’s a sexual euphemism or something.
Poor Mr Gant has the decency to plead for Carrie and Tod, but George has a gun, and Gant does as he’s told.
A little Tod-calf as the pair innocently pick their way over the plank… I wonder if they’ve had breakfast yet? I hope so, because something tells me it’s going to be a while until their next meal.
Tod tells Gant that Carrie wants him to come into town and ‘explain a few things to the police.’
Gant looks pathetic and can’t speak.
And then they hear a telltale clatter…
Oh dear. It’s Mr George with his gun and his menacing moustache.
‘In,’ George motions at the hatch with his gun. They don’t look keen.
It’s like a scene from The Birds that got left on the cutting room floor.
I doubt it was deliberate that Tod manoeuvred Carrie so she would have to go in first. He was probably trying to protect her from the gun. But nevertheless, our hero does edge Carrie around so she’s on the edge of the hatch, not him…
Down they go, into the bird-filled hold, Carrie first in her lovely new dress and bare feet…
Actually, looking at Tod’s face, maybe he did want her to go first… As they stand there in the hold Hercules George tells Gant to shut and lock the door. He has to repeat everything. ‘In,’ to Tod and Carrie. ‘Ah said in!’ Then to poor reluctant Gant, ‘Shut it. Ah said shut it,’ and, ‘Lock it. Ah said lock it.’
Poor Tod. He does look very young here. I’m not sure why this is so terrifying, though. I mean, they’re birds, not venomous snakes. Or bees…
Go, Super-Buz! Sensing something is wrong with Tod, Buz springs into action. Has he had breakfast yet?
Despite the urgency of the situation, he can still bend down and talk nicely to the little children.
He can bend nicely to talk to the old folks, too.
Thataway! say the old folk, and then the man holds up four fingers. Four what? Miles? Minutes? Four punnets of fish laid end to end? Whatever, Buz seems to understand. (Incidentally, my spell checker doesn’t have the word ‘punnet’. Obviously not built by a greengrocer…)
Run, Buz, run! Tod’s depending on you! It’s four – somethings – in that direction!
Mrs Carrie (Mrs Purcell according to IMDB) is looking wasted and tending to her bed, the only thing she cares for, when Buz comes a-knocking.
Is Buz a symbol of the outside world crashing in on her? It looks like she barely leaves the bed, let alone her shack, at this point. It’s just the bed and the room and the window that looks out over the boat that goes nowhere. Buz, the young adventurer (handsome prince?) from the outside world will force her to confront reality.
Buz doesn’t look too impressed with the shack – but to be honest, the state he’s in, he fits in quite well. He’s looking for Carrie.
He tries to be polite and nice.
‘Excuse me, Mrs Purcell. I’m Buz Murdock,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry if I seem a little short on manners, but I’m missing a buddy – like – he disappeared, you know. He’s not at Hercules George and your daughter’s not at work either.’
‘So you’re one of the two,’ she says judgementally. One of those two flash young men who turned her daughter’s head, she’s thinking.
Buz is befuddled and out of breath. ‘One of the two what?’
‘One of the two trash that kept my daughter out all night.’
‘Look, Mrs Purcell, I have a real thin veneer. Don’t scratch it,’ Buz says, using ‘real’ as an adjective rather than an adverb. I find his manly language of the street highly arousing.
‘Men,’ Mrs Purcell says. ‘You’re good for barnyards.’
She’s obviously disgusted by his grammar too. Seriously, there is so much of her psychology packed into the short scenes we see her in. Her view on men and why she has kept Carrie in such a sheltered but messed up life.
‘Let me hear ya crawl, boy. Let me hear ya,’ she says.
Buz crawls for no one. He gives her a relatively restrained piece of his mind after she judges him when she doesn’t know him. He tells her how he’d asked Tod ‘who needs it?’ when Tod asked Carrie out. But seeing her mother, he has realised, ‘Carrie needs it.’ Buz is really being established in these early episodes as the bad boy with a heart of gold.
Buz leaves, having given Mrs Purcell something to think about. You can see her moment of pause as the camera lingers. It seems that this is the first time in a long time that she has been seen and judged by anyone but her own daughter.
Buz can’t get through the locked gate (as
TopHatBlue noted). It’s probably because he’s been up all night and hasn’t had breakfast. I can’t imagine a hash brown and omelette filled Buz being stymied by a flimsy wooden gate.
Up above, Inspector Clouseau – ahem, sorry, Hercules ‘moustache of evil’ George – watches.
Finally Gant comes and lets him through. Buz is all over-excited in his gallant search for his buddy. And Carrie. He just about remembers Carrie.
This is Buz’s Face of Realisation. If I could I would draw a cartoon light bulb above his head. He hears parrots… Gant has a parrot. He rambles beautifully about his parrot while the following happens in Buz’s head – ‘OMG! Parrots! Parrot Fever!! Gant! Carrie! Tod! Hercules George! It all fits!’
And yet another light bulb moment. Buz spies Tod and Carrie’s shoes on the deck. (Nice shoes, Tod.)
Buz points the Finger of Accusation. There’s nothing Gant can say to that but, ‘Hold on, son!’ as Buz starts to move. But nothing, nothing, can keep Buz from his buddy!
Buz is striding through the boat being berated by Gant when he comes upon Hercules George and his little gun. Buz is cool (probably reassured by the No Smoking sign, that this is a safety conscious ship). He thinks George won’t fire because of the noise. George tells him that’s not true – no one would listen.
They walk off with George jabbing his gun repeatedly into Buz’s back, which probably annoys him no end. Then, because Buz is cool and streetwise, he grabs a chair and flings it at George. He does this wonderful – no looking back, no signs, just grab and throw.
A chase ensues… A shot is fired… Buz slips away. And then – how wonderful. Hercules George is creeping along a lower deck. Buz is aloft, mirroring him. George has no idea he is there… I wonder how often Buz did things of this type in the gangs of New York?
Bam! Hercules George gets Buzzed!
Buz’s second fist fight in one day, and his hair can’t take it…
Gant is no problem. When Buz has downed George, Gant hands him the gun and starts reminiscing about how he used to watch birds from the boat with Carrie, and how Carrie was ‘flying away straight along with them, flying right up to heaven.’
It’s a lovely glimpse of Carrie’s childhood and aspirations, and perhaps of a time when Gant was less damaged. Gant loves birds. He has no respect for Hercules George because George has no respect for birds. Buz is a little impatient, but he listens.
I wish I could have seen Tod’s face when he was let out of the hold, but no such luck.
What a change. For the first time, Mrs Purcell is outside. She has been reconnected to the outside world by the events around her. The doctor has said that they’re going to tow the boat away and burn it.
‘I shoulda burned it myself long time ago,’ she says. ‘Flames and fire, they purify.’
‘They also make ashes, Mama,’ Carrie says sadly. She’s still picture perfect, after spending all night out, being chased by thieves, being locked into a hold with panicking birds. What hairspray does she use?
‘That’s all to the good,’ Mrs Purcell says. ‘Then you see what comes out of it. Either it stays ashes, or something better rises.’
She confesses what a bad mother she’s been to Carrie. ‘I’ve been a worse abomination than that old boat.’
Somehow all of these years her soul has been tied in with that boat.
Mrs Purcell wistfully tells Carrie of the boat’s past. ‘There was a time when that boat used to ride up and down the river just shining with lights. Music you could hear all the way to Baton Rogue. I met a man there. From out of town, he was. I wasn’t even your age, Carrie, but I loved him. And there was a bridal suite on the boat in those days. Fanciest thing you ever saw, like the near corner of heaven. And there was this bed on it, had swans on the headboard. It was as big as a field of clover. He said to me,
Mary, I’m gonna buy you that bed and everything else there is from Maine to Minnesota. He used to like to rhythm his words like that. He bought me a lot of things, cause he was free with his money, like he was free with his love. But he already had himself another wife, and a family, up north in a city called Racine. All this time, Carrie. All this time I’ve been taking out my hatred on the only decent thing he ever did give me. You, child.’
It’s all too much for Carrie, and she starts to sob, falling into her mother’s arms.
‘I’ve been wallowing in my hatred, sleeping in that same bed, looking at that same boat. Carrie, tell me child. Can I stop now? Can I look away? Can I make you smile?’
So Tod and Buz get to carry the swan headboard out of Carrie’s shack. Look at the concentration on Tod’s face!
Buz looks happier about the job, despite being on the bottom. The doctor has popped round to tell him that Jeannie is getting better, but she wants Buz to think of some way to do her act that doesn’t involve birds. Buz thinks this will take a lot of research. Maybe he’ll suggest ping-pong balls?
Everyone is happy at the thought of Buz engaging in research with Jeannie.
Tod is happy because he’s no longer trapped in a lightless hold with a flock of disease carrying birds.
Buz is happy as he gazes into middle distance and thinks about intensive studies in stripping.
Carrie is happy because she’s spent about twenty-four hours in the same outfit and still looks like she just walked out of the shop – plus she didn’t lose her virginity to a man from out of town, like her mother did. Also she’s found out that she may have half-siblings in Racine.
The doctor is happy because everything worked out, the mystery was solved, and he doesn’t have to carry a really heavy headboard.
Even the swan is happy, because – well – it’s going to be reduced to ashes on the boat it began on, and perhaps free the bitter ghosts of the past into the air at the same time.
What of Mr Gant, who is losing his home, and Mrs Purcell, who is possibly not even thirty, if she had Carrie when she was younger than Carrie is now? We don’t know. I hope they lived happily ever after.
