Writer: Stirling Silliphant
Director: Paul Stanley
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 edition of the series, up to image 40. From 41 they're from Infinity. I'm not sure why I changed discs part way through, but I did. There's no really noticeable difference in quality.
“Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and play’d
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,—then like reeds, not hair,—
Was the first man that leap’d; cried, ‘Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.’”
Shakespeare, The Tempest.
This is the first Route 66 episode I saw, having bought the series primarily to see the episodes that Peter Graves is in. I was hooked by descriptions of the series, but it was Peter Graves that made me seek it out in the first place.
Suffice to say, this episode doesn’t disappoint, although as an introduction to Tod and Buz it fails completely. Buz is absent due to George Maharis’s first bout of hepatitis and Tod doesn’t feature heavily in the story. But everything else you expect from Route 66 is there. Beautiful writing, deep themes, characters with a story to tell.
Peter Graves is Peter Hale, a man with a new wife and with a new animal park to run. Tod’s come to work there alone, while Buz is in hospital. The episode starts with a nightmare, but it’s reality which holds all the problems for Peter, who is grieving for his dead first wife in an obsessive and potentially murderous way. Grief is mixed up with a kind of jealousy – jealousy on Peter’s part for the man that his first wife chose to love instead of him, and jealousy on Peter’s new wife Julie’s part, for his obsession with his dead love. The jealousy is arguable in the first case. Peter protests that he trusted his first wife, Lisa, enough to let her go to the man that she chose, so you could argue that he’s not jealous of that man. But there must be a certain element of jealousy towards the man that she chose over her husband, even if he trusted her choice. I can’t imagine that there wasn’t some motivating jealousy mixed up with the resentment towards the man that he believes caused his wife’s death.
Tod skirts on the fringes of all of this intrigue, sometimes drawing Peter’s wrath, sometimes his friendship. He provides a sounding board for Julie’s worries and fears – a relatively neutral person from outside of the park. His presence is important to the narrative, but more his presence as a neutral outsider than because of his character as Tod.
A warning – this screencapping is likely to be (likely to be? sorry - is) heavy on Peter Graves worship.
Where do I start with this episode? At the start. Three seconds in. Moody music and such a lovely night shot of an arena and a solitary man. An eerie, off-kilter camera that’s moving as if on a boat. You can tell it’s going to be good.
And then, as another man comes running, ‘Oh my!’ you squeal. ‘Oh my god! It’s Peter Graves! Looking devilishly handsome. Who cares if Buz is gone for the episode? It’s Peter Graves!’ (Well, maybe not everyone will do that, but I certainly will. After all, this is the moment that I bought Route 66 for. It’s swooning time!)
Peter Graves, and a tiger. Such a beautiful animal. The tiger, I mean. Really.
If only this were in colour so you could see the blue of those eyes. Graves-gazing aside, there’s a lovely line of up shots – close ups of his face and of the tiger’s face as they have a kind of silent confrontation.
Out of his pocket comes a long pin, and he stabs the tiger in the paw with vicious intensity. At least, it seems he does. We don’t see the stab – only the tiger’s angered reaction. It’s an interesting choice to not show it, in light of what we find out about the pin at the end of the episode.
One understandably pissed off tiger.
Still there’s the solitary man in the tiger cage, with his back to Peter Hale (Graves’ character). A silent enigma who doesn’t react. I can’t help but wonder if there are parent issues in this episode, as in so many of these episodes, since this looks a lot like the father of Peter Hale’s dead wife. Perhaps it’s supposed to be an anonymous, figurative man, but his clothing and bearing just look much more like the father than the man Hale’s wife Lisa fell in love with. Maybe I’m just reading things into it.
Let’s have a highly unnecessary screencap of Peter Graves’ ass. I’m sorry. This kind of thing happens with me. It’s one of the finest things in creation.
Is it really unnecessary? It shows the dynamism of the dream as Peter Hale runs along by the cage, racing the tiger.
I just love these shots. All the darkness, the odd angles, the bright light on him. He has raced the tiger to the end of its run and stands there as it enters the cage with the man, and leaps at him.
There’s a half-smile, half concern on Hale’s face as the tiger leaps for the man... And here we are, ten screencaps and only one and a half minutes in. This is going to be a long one.
But – it’s all a dream!
Hale’s wife Julie (Eva Stern, who only appeared in six roles of which this is her last) has the look of a woman who’s used to being woken up by her husband having nightmares. I know what that’s like. Fun times.
That’s the hurt, scared, apologetic look of a man who’s just had a nightmare. And I really need to slow down my screencap taking.
Outside the window is the same arena and the same cage that he dreamed about. I could cap that, but instead I’ve chosen to cap Peter Graves’ face as he looks out into the night.
Like a good, typical wife Julie’s concerned, telling him she knows he’s had the dream before.
‘What makes you think it’s just a dream?’ he asks her. ‘It’s the only thing I live for.’
There are peacocks calling in the background. Reality is almost as strange as the dream.
And here’s our boy and his beautiful car. I’d like to say boys. I wonder how this episode would have played out had George Maharis been in it? It certainly doesn’t need him. It barely needs Tod. The story is very tightly focussed on Peter Hale and his obsession.
There’s a Jungleland truck in the background. Jungleland is Peter Hale’s newly bought venture – but it’s actually the real name of the place they filmed at. Jungleland, Thousand Oaks, California. I’m surprised they allowed them to use the real name, since the story involves someone almost being killed by a tiger – but perhaps they thought the publicity was worth it. It certainly must have made it easier for the Route 66 crew, not having to re-brand everything. In 1966, actress Jayne Mansfield's son was mauled by a lion at the park. The place closed in 1969, and is now the site of a Civic Arts Plaza.
There are some rather sad photos here of the place in 1969, looking very abandoned.
Here's a map of the place, from this site which has a lot of information on the zoo.
An image from around 1959 which must show the park much as Route 66 saw it. The page it's from also has links to posts with more photos and history.
And I think this is the cage where the tiger action occurs, from Flickr -
 |
| Image courtesy of Conejo Through the Lens, Thousand Oaks Library. |
The first thing Tod does is wander in and start being cute with the elephants and feeding the giraffes leaves. It looks like he’s been working here for a while.
There’s no menace to the tiger cage in the daylight. Tod barely pauses as he walks past. How easily sunlight dispels our nightmares.
By daylight Peter Hale is another man, too. We find him talking gently and humorously to the animals, chiding a goat for letting its kid get hurt.
Let’s just get another shot of Peter Graves fondling a goat kid while he talks to Tod about camel wrangling. This is the kind of adorable thing people need in their lives. We also learn a few things about the evolution of camels, courtesy of Tod.
Now, I know this isn’t the best shot of Martin Milner, but Peter Graves’ smile is rather wonderful. Tod tells him how it’s true that camels bite, but so do ants. But the bites are of different sizes, Peter points out wisely. ‘The secret to breaking camels is to get bitten only by ants.’
This is where we hear that Tod has ‘a buddy in the hospital’ - so he needs the $43 dollars a day that Hale is paying him.
So here’s Julie, staring at the tiger that haunts her husband in his dreams.
She tries to talk to ‘Mr Brauner,’ who is feeding the animals. He ignores her completely. There’s a kind of desperate air to her that makes the viewer feel sorry for her. ‘Why does Peter keep that animal here?’ she asks. ‘I don’t understand. How can you bear to look at him? How can you bear to – feed him?’
She seems such a desperately lonely figure. Mr Brauner doesn’t respond to her once. She seems to be living in the nightmare that Peter manages to shrug off.
‘When I awake in the morning, when I look into Peter’s eyes, I see his eyes,’ she says of the tiger. ‘In the dark, in our room. At night, before I go to sleep, I can feel his presence with me. I can feel his presence every minute of the day.’
She is shut out by her husband, she is shut out by Mr Brauner, who we discover is the father of Peter’s last wife. She is as trapped as the tiger.
We see another hideously insensitive gesture on her husband’s part, although we don’t know it yet. He is erecting an exhibition – a shrine, almost – in honour of his dead wife, with a sculpture being made of her. This is something that Julie could never live up to.
The old wife, and the new. She is peeking through a crack in the door, as if she has no place in this realm of the dead. It’s an empty place, though. She wanders through it hesitantly.
She touches these stuffed heads hesitantly too. She so obviously feels apart from all of this.
Her husband seems to have no sense of how this may be awkward for her. In some ways he seems less affected than she is by the memory of his dead wife. He’s happy to find Julie. She is no intrusion in this place.
‘It makes me feel so home grown, like somebody’s strawberry preserves at the state fair,’ she tells him, ‘to see the names on those posters. Copenhagen. What’s Copenhagen like, Peter?’
It makes me... like someone’s. She is being acted on, not initiating herself. She has so little power.
‘Copenhagen, Canoga Park – people are the same,’ Peter tells her.
‘Except, Lisa, Julie,’ Julie points out in a melancholy voice. (She gets to fondle his ear. I am jealous.)
At this point, workmen come in. ‘How’s she look, Mr Hale?’ one of the men ask. She? Was that a deliberate word-choice? The whole memorial is gendered. The man talks about a photo mural of ‘some of the best shots of your wife ever taken in action.’
‘This is my wife, Mr Wasson,’ Peter corrects him. Again, he seems almost more conscious of his new wife than anyone else. It’s hard to tell exactly who is most obsessed at times.
As Peter gets enthusiastic about the project, tellingly he leaves Julie’s side.
When Mr Wasson talks about the memorial being ready for the big summer opening, ‘It’s got to be ready,’ Peter says urgently. Here is the obsession creeping in. Not what, but how soon.
When he looks around from his discussions, Julie is gone, and doesn’t come to his calls.
But Peter has an appointment to get to. His car is not as sexy as Tod’s. The car is not entirely the reason for this screencap.
Meanwhile, in camel-land...
...Tod is running around with a whip. I wonder if he’s thinking how well Buz would get on at the gritty world of camel-wrangling? It’s probably much like the mean streets of New York.
Tod is shouting a lot in Arabic, as Peter taught him to do.
And also getting rather sweaty, it seems.
Wow, look at this place. This huge shed for circus wagons. Tod’s on his way to lunch, but he can hear sobbing...
Tod, caught by the sound of crying, looking around in this beautifully lit arena.
Of course, he finds Julie weeping by one of the cages. Caught outside, not inside by the bars. Lisa, of course, was always on the other side of the bars. It seems to mean something that she chooses to hide in this huge, open place rather than in a small, closed in place. She feels small and insignificant against all of this backdrop.
I’d be weeping too if I were married to Peter Graves and he could only think about his last wife.
‘I have a hungry troop of camels outside just dying to take a bite out of somebody,’ Tod offers. ‘Any suggestions?’
Camel bites, of course, are not so different to ant bites...
Julie is all snotty and wet and smiling through the tears.
‘If you want to hit your head against a wall, isn’t it a good idea to find a wall first?’ she asks in a very Silliphantian way.
‘Well, the smart money wears crash helmets,’ Tod points out.
A cigarette will make it all better. It’s a shame they’re not British. Then he could have offered her tea, and it really would all have felt better. At this point Tod says he’s been working here ‘since this morning.’ Really? It seemed when he started talking to Peter about camels that he’d been here longer. Maybe they had a nice chat at interview? But should he really have started wandering in with the animals and feeding them on his first day, before he even met the boss? (See the elephants and giraffes of earlier.)
They start discussing her wedding ring.
‘It was hers,’ Julie says in a wet kind of way. But she has a lovely Silliphant speech coming up.
‘All of a sudden I know how an insect feels. How helpless when it’s caught by a cruel child. A blank face bigger than the sky, smiling down at you from somewhere beyond your own tiny world. Smiling down and taking its time, letting its icy fingers pull off your legs and your wings.’
I think we could characterise Julie as emo. But then, her husband is obsessed with his dead first wife, and her wedding ring is his first wife’s wedding ring. A little insensitive of Mr Hale, perhaps. And Julie seems close to a nervous breakdown.
But the writing is sublime – and the mis en scene of the huge space which is open and trapping all at once, the bars on the many animal cages and Julie caught in the dark, outside and inside at the same time, trapped by the bars despite not being in a cage – perfect.
Tod is dismayed. He’s all right dealing with weepy women if he can charm them with his acerbic wit. When they’re teetering on the edge of a breakdown he doesn’t quite know what to do.
Luckily for him she obviously realises that this is all a bit much for a new employee, and she walks out of the shed, leaving Tod disconcerted and smoking.
Meanwhile, Peter gets dropped off at a rather luxurious place, with resident dwarves, it seems. Dropped off? He left alone, driving himself. Maybe he picked someone up on the way out? You don’t usually come up against these kind of inconsistencies in Route 66 – this, and Tod’s job which is new but which he seems to have been in for a while. Is it a reflection of having to mess around with the scripts because of George Maharis’s absence, or are they just inconsistencies?
He broods before he knocks. One could sum up this episode as ‘brooding,’ I think. Excellent, but brooding.
Wherever this is, it’s obviously connected with the world of the circus, since the first thing he sees is a pirouetting poodle and a man in a beret (not that berets only belong in circuses, but you know what I mean.)
He’s come to meet this man, Philip Tager (Michael Pate). Hmm. Tager. One vowel away from Tiger... Apparently Peter had performed a marvellous disappearing act, and the two have been out of touch for two years.
‘Hell is empty, Phil. All the devils are here, in this world,’ Peter says as he gets himself a (second) drink. He’s brooding severely now. He’s come to ask Phil ‘a favour.’
Peter is using the drink as a prop, it seems. Phil wants to catch up. Peter tells him that he’s remarried, and asks Phil, ‘How about you?’
Phil immediately asks for more whiskey. Both of them using the whiskey as a blind. This conversation has more loaded meaning if you know the end of the episode. Phil hasn’t met the right girl yet.
‘Is there such a thing, Phil? For you, I mean?’ Peter asks. Knowing the end of the episode, this is a very loaded question.
Phil reminds Peter of a party in London where Peter drank a lot and talked a lot.
‘You said, ‘The image of the inherited enemy is already sleeping in the nervous system. A chick just out of its egg will dart for cover if a hawk flies over. Not a pigeon and not a duck. A hawk.’ You remember?’
What a beautiful passage. But Peter doesn’t remember. He’s thinking a lot, and remembering different things, it seems.
‘Well, here’s to wives – the inherited enemy,’ Phil jokes.
Never joke with a man who’s brooding that hard, Phil. Not with a man whose old wife is dead, and has just got himself a new one.
So, Peter cuts to the chase. He tells Phil about the zoo, and asks him to come to dedicate the memorial to Lisa. ‘What’s a dedication without a guest of honour?’ he asks.
It’s Phil’s turn to brood a little. He starts saying, ‘Pete, I know how you felt about Lisa. It’s – er – something nobody could ever forget. I – I mean, the way it happened. Maybe this sounds kinda selfish, as close as I was to you, but I’ve never stopped being glad I didn’t see her.’
There’s a wonderful little flicker in Peter’s eyes as Phil says, ‘As close as I was to you.’
Everyone’s brooding together. Peter cuts him off mid sentence. All he seems to want is Phil at that dedication.
Peter’s downed a good few glasses of whiskey. Maybe that’s why he had someone drop him off?
So poor Julie is working in the office when Wasson (Henry Beckman) comes in needing some copy checked for it to go up on the east wall.
Julie isn’t too keen on checking it over. It would probably be best if Julie could go on a holiday until all this is over.
What we need here is Tod, who is capable and educated, and could do a crack up job at proof reading. Poor Julie has the indignity of reading through a poem that she thinks her husband wrote about his late wife, while all the while animals whoops and make strange calls in the background.
I met a lady in the meadow,
Full beautiful, a faery's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
Tod points out that it was written by Keats, and it should be ‘meads’ not ‘meadow.’ That’s where a Yale education gets you.
That’s an interesting poem if you read it all. Julie, who doesn’t know the wording is wrong, presumably doesn’t know it. It’s titled La Belle Dame Sans Merci, which says a lot, and it seems to suggest that Peter is suffering from more than just grief at his wife’s death. She enchanted him, and left him ‘alone and palely loitering.’ Suddenly Lisa doesn’t seem the perfect, innocent, dead lover after all.
Aww, he’s calling Buz at the hospital. ‘Like a B, with one ‘zee’.’ Americans and their inability to pronounce ‘zed.’ But anyway, it’s confirmation of how the name is spelt, as if we needed it.
While Tod is waiting to be put through to Buz, Julie has another minor meltdown, suddenly declaring that she won’t approve the copy and storming out of the office.
Tod has the ‘oh, God, she’s off on one again,’ look and as he gets through to Buz instantly tells him he’ll call him back. Poor Buz.
The contractor has a little rant at Tod about how he thinks Julie’s jealous. It’s just another frustrating day at work for him.
Tod is brooding over the copy as the contractor starts talking about how all you hear morning, noon and night is about Lisa Hale, and how he thinks they’re trying to wring every last dollar out of her.
‘Why don’t you shut up?’ he tells the contractor. Good for you, Tod. Tod goes out after Julie, so the contractor has a little rant on his own.
This has to be one of the most hideous pieces of sculpture I’ve ever seen. I wonder if the unpleasantness, the blind eyes, the downward gaze, is intended? Lisa is a restless ghost.
That’s surely no accident – the way the sculpture looms over Julie, dark and ill-formed.
This is where Tod finds her. Tod does have a vital role in this episode. Just as he and Buz are in most episodes, he’s a facilitator, a mover, a counsellor. He allows this week’s characters to speak their feelings and move on to resolutions.
‘I’m sorry,’ Julie tells him. ‘I hate to be so emotional. You must think I’m either crying all the time, or screaming at people. Naturally, I’m very happy.’
She doesn’t sound happy. But perhaps without the shadow of Lisa over them all, she could be.
‘This morning, I saw the way he held a baby goat that was hurt. He’s a man who feels,’ Tod tells her. ‘And then just a minute ago I read all the stuff in that folder about how she was killed. Try and put yourself in his place. The arena in New York, just outside the ring, separated from her by the bars, watching the tiger crouched, ready to spring on her from behind, not being able to stop it, not being able to help. Think how he must feel. So, if the statue or the memorial hall makes him feel any better, then let him have his statue and his memorial hall.’
I agree, but this is a shade of an idea that comes up more than once in Route 66 – the idea that the woman should allow the man to have his feelings and not be damaged by them herself. Perhaps it works in reverse too, but I have Poor Little Kangaroo Rat in my mind here.
‘Nobody can feel that guilty,’ she insists.
‘Julie, is there a limit to guilt, or to any other feeling?’ Tod asks.
‘Nobody can feel that guilty unless they have reason,’ Julie tells him.
So there we have it. It’s not all jealousy. It’s fear, too.
Meanwhile, Lisa’s father is in the cage, about to do some training with the tiger...
Such a beautiful tiger, too, and he’s goading it with the whip and stick, making it do tricks as it growls and snarls at him.
Tod is watching with concern on his face.
Julie’s watching from behind a window, also with concern on her face.
Peter’s watching with a kind of grim approval.
There’s a wonderful intensity on Brauner’s face.
That’s a pissed off looking tiger.
But so beautiful. Imagine actually working with these animals. Brauner, though, is goading it to the point that it seems to want to kill him.
It’s obvious there’s something between Peter and Brauner as Brauner comes out of the cage. Peter asks, ‘Are you all right?’ but has no concern for the way that Brauner was treating the animal.
(Brauner is played by Charles H. Radilak, who will later act again with Peter Graves in the Mission: Impossible episode The Phoenix.)
Peter notices that Tod is standing there staring. ‘Camels, Stiles, not lions,’ he yells aggressively. Rarr.
Chastened, Tod walks away, looking like a poster child for Levis.
The intrigue builds. ‘He’sa ready, Peter,’ Brauner says (he has an accent of some kind The actor is Czechoslovakian).
‘Are you sure?’ Peter asks eagerly.
‘I couldn’t have stand with him another ten seconds to come out alive. Peter, he’sa ready.’
Peter is pensive...
Pensive and thoughtful and perhaps a little eager... And in a misty kind of focus, which is nice.
Meanwhile, like a good boy, Tod is looking after the camels, and looks rather like he’s feeling put-upon, what with emotionally shambolic women and messed up bosses who shout at him, and having to lead great big hairy camels around.
Peter comes up to talk to him with a slightly conciliatory air, asking, ‘Who’s your friend?’
‘Number twelve,’ Tod says tartly.
‘That’s not bad, for the first week,’ Peter says. So how much time has passed here? A week? A day? A few days?
Peter apologises for yelling at Tod. Tod does a typically male non-acceptance of, ‘Oh. I didn’t notice.’
‘You noticed,’ Peter tells him.
These two caps are really just to show the expressions of men who are trying to exchange apologies and feel awkward about it.
‘Why don’t you let some of it out? You’ve been watching me all week. Must have a lot of questions,’ Peter tells him.
Tod quotes a Bedouin proverb at him. Something else he picked up at Yale, maybe. ‘The viper that doesn’t bite me – may he live a thousand years.’
Peter is astute enough to understand this as an enquiry as to why he doesn’t kill the tiger that killed his wife.
You can almost feel the testosterone lingering in the air in this exchange, as they speak about the tiger and Peter reveals that Mr Brauner was Lisa’s father. It’s a half-friendly, half-distrustful exchange.
That makes Tod uncomfortable enough to want to get away, but Peter walks with him and starts telling him about his time in Africa.
This is because I like the way Tod’s looking at the camel.
Peter gives one of those wonderful Silliphant soliloquies about why he stopped hunting in Africa. Dana, in ‘Go Read The River’ gives a similar soliloquy, not so much in subject matter but in the sense of it being a slightly wistful, loaded memory. I’d like to see if there are other nostalgic references to Africa in this series.
‘You know, when I was younger I lived in Africa. I used to hunt. One day I stopped. I stopped because I couldn’t miss any more. Ten bullets, ten kills. It had become a surgical thing. The rifle swinging up, the same sound of gunfire. The cough, like the passing cough of a sleeping man… And in the near distance a living thing who had no knowledge of me, staggered. And if he had brothers or offspring or a mate, they might interrupt their feeding long enough to bolt away as he fell. But soon enough, in the sun, in the long silence, unafraid, they’d return to graze quietly alongside the body, and the tragedy had no meaning, either for them or for me. Unless a man gives – gives meaning to tragedy – there’s nothing.’
I could take a hundred screencaps of this soliloquy and they’d all be beautiful and all look almost the same as each other, with that slight romantic haze over the camera. But that might bore people who haven’t had their eyes opened to the glorious beauty of Peter Graves.
Sometimes you hear the opinion that Peter Graves isn’t a good actor. When Peter Graves has good material to work with, and/or a good director, he is a sublime actor. When he’s in low budget, hastily shot B-movies, he’s not great. Very few people are. But I’d like people to see him in Stalag 17 and Night of the Hunter, and get out of the Aiplane/Mission: Impossible/B-movie cliches, and then still tell me he’s a bad actor. And then I’ll slap them. (Of course, he’s very good in Mission: Impossible too, but people seem to think that that character is the only character he’s ever done.)
Tod is made thoughtful by this speech.
Enough of all that heartfelt and poetic talking. ‘Don’t let me keep you,’ Peter says, opening the gate. He’s still deeply preoccupied, caught up in past and present tragedy.
Tod looks like he’s been given a lot to think about, but he’s not sure if he’s ready to sympathise with Peter yet. I’m not sure quite why it feels like there’s so much testosterone in this scene, but it really does.
Peter’s gone to gaze at that hideous statue of Lisa. He’s much prettier to screencap than the statue. ‘We’re almost ready, Lisa,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry it took so long.’
Oh, the intrigue. It’s obvious that Julie thinks his guilt is because he killed her. But in this private moment between Peter and the effigy of his dead wife, that’s not so certain.
In the house, Julie is trying to break into a strongbox. Look how beautifully this is shot. Peter had his private moment with the statue. Julie is having her own private moment trying to get to the bottom of Peter’s guilt. We’re spying on her, looking past the divide on the left, as she stands there, a small figure with her back turned to us, desperately trying to get into the box.
She’s spooked for a moment when she hears Brauner hailing her husband outside, but she gets into the box. The hat pin she pulls out echoes the screwdriver she used to prise her way into the box. There’s something very child-like in the way she looks in this scene. She’s very helpless in many ways.
And then, a list, with Philip Tager’s name at the bottom. Written by Peter Graves? I don’t think so, looking at the slant of the letters. It doesn’t look like his writing in Mission: Impossible. But I could be talking through my hat, here. Comparing it with something he's written in Mission: Impossible it does look similar. Who knows? Who cares? (Except for me. I like it when a character's supposed to have written something, and they really have written it.)
And then, in comes Peter. They use that same feeling of spying with the lamp blocking the left of the screen and the divide on the right and across the bottom between the two. Very nicely done, the way she’s blocked off in her own compartment and he’s behind her in another, smaller one. They’re both simultaneously trapped by this moment as she, as she thinks, discovers his guilty secret, and he discovers her betrayal.
He has a rather hurt look on his face, rather than the anger or horror of a murderer who has been discovered.
He breaches the divide.
‘I hoped you loved me enough to trust me,’ he tells her. ‘Now, let me have those, Julie.’
‘Well, where do we go from here?’ he asks her.
Again she looks like a little girl. She seems very small in the face of this tall, big man. Now she gets another of those beautiful Route 66 speeches.
‘I’ve asked you so many times, ‘What do you see there, at the window when you stand there?’ And you say, ‘Go back to sleep, Julie.’ That’s all you ever say to me. I remember, you told me that you refused that insurance cheque. ‘Blood money,’ you called it. But finally you did take it, didn’t you? And you bought this place, and you married me.’
It’s almost as if he bought her too. New place, new wife.
Peter listens to her in silence as she speaks...
‘I remember everything you told me about her, how she’d done the same act dozens of times all over the world, and nothing had ever gone wrong,’ Julie continues. ‘And how she would let the tiger get behind her, and how the audience would hold its breath, and the drums rolled, and then how the tiger pounced on her, and then how the crowd screamed as she fell down and she and the tiger rolled over and over in the sawdust.’
As she talks you can see Peter remembering. The sound of the ring, the drum roll and people talking and screams and the tiger roaring are heard in the background. There’s a look of pain on his face that he gives no words to.
‘And then how she suddenly would be back up on her feet and the tiger would be stretched out on its back with its paws folded, like a kitten, lying there, conquered,’ Julie says. ‘And then she would place one foot on its chest and raise one arm in triumph, and the crowd cheered and the drums pounded. I remember something else you told me, about a lion you had to shoot in Africa because he’d killed twelve people. An old lion, you said, who never had killed a human being before. And you found a thorn in its front paw. That’s why he’d gone mad. A thorn, Peter? Or a hat pin. It could be the same, couldn’t it? I know why you killed her. Because of those men. The men on the list.’
At her accusation that he killed Lisa, Peter looks stricken.
Julie seems stricken too. ‘What can I do now?’ she asks.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asks her, neither admitting nor denying the accusation. He sounds like a guilty, tired man.
He has something of his answer when she hugs him. Good girl, Julie.
‘What can I do now?’ she asks in a weepy voice.
He looks as miserable as she sounds.
So, it’s the night of the opening.
‘First Pete, then you, Brauny,’ Phil says as Brauner escorts him to the car. ‘This sure has been a week for surprises.’
The surprises aren’t over for Phil yet...
Phil asks Brauner to explain things to him. For the first time we get a little context or explanation for the amazing speeches of at least one Route 66 character.
‘Ok, be mysterious. Pete’ll tell me this story after a few drinks,’ Phil says. ‘Give him enough, he starts sounding like Alfred Tennyson or Lord Byron.’ (Now, that I’d like to see.) ‘Ah, come on, Brauny, why hold out on me? I worried about both of you. I’m still worried. It just isn’t curiosity. You both act like it was just last night. You gotta live, Brauny, you gotta forget.’
‘Why?’ Brauner asks. He doesn’t look like he’s intending to ever forget anything. I love the shadows cast on their faces in both these shots from the animal cage across the car behind them. They’re both in a dark place, both caged in, although Phil doesn’t know it yet.
Peter introduces Phil, saying, ‘You’d have to look far and wide to find a more deserving guest of honour than Philip Tager, possibly the greatest of all agents. Lisa’s father and I have selected him from among all others to be here with us tonight as we dedicate this memorial hall to Lisa Hale.’
What a lovely speech, full of double meanings that become evident as the plot unfolds. Phil has, indeed, been specially selected for this night, and was very definitely an agent in the story.
There’s Tod, blurry in the background. Even those he’s out of focus you can see that he’s worried.
As Peter mentions his dead wife’s name, Julie looks cut, and still worried by all she thinks she’s found out.
So Phil starts waxing about Lisa, about how hypnotic she was with everyone she met.
There’s a knowing pain on Peter’s face as he listens to this speech, and a similar kind of pain on Julie’s face.
So the statue is revealed, in all of its glory – if we can call it glory.
Phil looks quite disconcerted. I’m not sure why, putting aside the fact that the statue’s hideous. I don’t think it’s meant to be hideous. Is he unsettled at seeing the likeness of the woman who died because of him?
Peter’s watching him all the while, and so is Mr Brauner.
I think Julie’s expression is very telling here, as photographers take pictures of the unveiling. There’s an intensity on her face that is far different from anyone else’s expression.
Tod, too, is not one with the crowd. I love the way everyone else is focussed to the left of the screen, while he is looking almost directly out towards the camera.
While everyone else is flocking towards the statue, and towards Peter and Phil, Julie heads alone for the wine bar. Back to the camera, she is the picture of loneliness.
But Tod comes after her. He’s an outsider here, too. He tries to reassure her that soon everyone will have forgotten about this, but that doesn’t seem to be her main concern now. She pleads with Tod to stay, at least until after Phil has gone home. Tod is the only person she can reach out to, but she can’t explain her concerns.
Then she tells him he doesn’t have to stay, and she walks away, leaving Tod with the bewildered-at-women expression.
So Peter comes to fetch drinks for himself and Phil, and there’s a chance for a brief shot of him and Tod together.
Phil has his eye on ‘the new Mrs Hale.’ Peter must be so happy.
‘Tonight we drink to the old,’ he reminds Phil.
So Peter offers to show Phil around the zoo – but before going he grabs a bottle from the table.
‘Take along a little something to light the way,’ he says.
He already has that slightly drunk air that Peter Graves does so well. Phil is probably looking forward to Byron and Tennyson being conjured on the dark walk.
As they walk out, Brauner follows at a discreet distance, which has Tod concerned...
So Phil and Peter are wandering through the darkness at the zoo. Phil is obviously more drunk than Peter, and Peter keeps topping up Phil’s glass as he speaks about Lisa and her childhood in the Ardennes.
Isn’t Route 66 wonderful for this? We want a night scene, so we’ll shoot it at night, not at midday under the Californian sun, pretending it’s just a really bright moon.
‘Well, as a child Lisa would always rise exactly a half hour before sunrise in the morning,’ Peter tells Phil. ‘Can you imagine that? I suppose you could say that farm life starts early in the Ardennes, but to her, well she always told me she felt that the sun was her sun, that it was born inside her, and that if she overslept the day would be late. So she’d rise and run down the path from her father’s house and stand on a hill to make the morning come – a hill just like that one. And as the light started, she’d watch the trees being born out of the darkness, she’d watch the countryside reach for life against a new sky, and she felt that it was her life. You see, Phil, she didn’t – she didn’t just see things. She was the things she saw. She didn’t hear sounds. She was those sounds.’
Lisa Hale was probably either incredible or really, really annoying, depending on your point of view, I imagine.
Phil is getting very obviously very drunk. He’s staggering, and he slurs as he speaks. He can’t follow what Peter’s saying.
‘I suppose that’s why she was so magnificent with animals,’ Peter continues. ‘When she was with tigers, she was a tiger. All of her cats believed she was one of them.’
But Phil is completely out of it now.
What a contrast. Peter seems stone cold sober.
‘What about Australia, Phil?’ he asks in a hard voice. ‘Is that another place you missed? When murder is done in Australia, at least among some of the more primitive tribes, they bury the corpse and then they smooth the earth around the grave, and the first ant that runs over it shows them the direction in which to look for the murderer.’
I suppose he would know that, having just come back from a year long stint in Australia, filming Whiplash.
As Phil collapses Brauner approaches. Peter tells him to take the glasses and the bottle and wash them thoroughly and then smash them into powder and scatter the powder. It seems that Phil has been drugged.
‘Can you carry him by yourself?’ Brauner asks.
‘When you carry a cross, the last few steps are the easiest,’ Peter says in deadly earnest.
And, yes, he can carry him by himself...
Peter carries him to the tiger cage, where he’s met by Brauner. Phil is lolling about, obviously out of it.
‘I want you to be conscious,’ Peter says roughly. ‘I want every nerve in your body to be alive. I want you to know the pain.’
Brauner pulls Phil up to the tiger cage and pushes him in through the door.
There’s more pain on Peter’s face than anger now. At times he seems to be doing this out of grief for Lisa more than anger towards Phil.
Phil has no idea what’s going on. He’s lolling around the cage, laughing. Peter starts to tell Phil where he and Brauner have been for the last two years, ‘wading through filth, Phil, yours and all the low tides of seven other men. There were eight of them. At least, I thought there were – but it turned out there was only you.’
Suddenly Phil seems to come back to himself a little more. He’s recognising that it’s not funny any more.
And here’s where it all comes out. It was in New York, ‘Lisa came to me. She told me there was another man. She said she loved him. She was the world, Lisa was, but I loved her enough, trusted her enough, to know that if she had found another man he had to be better than I was, better for her. So I told her, All right. Go to him, Lisa, marry him. I won’t stop you. Well, that was the morning of the day she died.’
Lisa must have been an idiot. I mean, you have the choice of living the rest of your life with Peter Graves, or with some guy who looks like he’s wandered in from playing the part of a New York mafia thug, and you choose the thug?
Brauner seems overcome with pain now too, as Peter continues.
‘She was gone all afternoon, and that night, just before she went into the ring, I found her crying. She didn’t say much. Just – just enough so that I understood. This man had rejected her. Oh, not as a woman, but as a wife. He didn’t want anything permanently, Phil, not even a thing of beauty, a thing as rare as Lisa.’
Peter looks consumed by pain and grief. He’s barely looking at Phil now. He seems to be looking into his memory instead. Phil starts to protest about how he didn’t encourage her, how he didn’t mean it to happen, how he didn’t expect it to get serious.
As Phil is trying to protest his innocence, Julie comes out of the darkness, a dark figure with a pale face.
Suddenly the anger is back in all of its fullness. ‘Don’t you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Phil? She killed herself deliberately. She committed suicide.’
What a relief that must be for Julie, in a way. I mean, her husband has another man trapped in a tiger cage and is planning to murder him, but at least he didn’t kill his first wife.
This is where the hat pin comes in, where the dream at the start of the episode resolves itself in a real memory and a coming event.
‘Just before she went into the ring, she jabbed this pin into the fore paw of the tiger. She knew he’d kill her the minute she turned her back. I ran in, I tried to save her, but I couldn’t. And then I saw the pin. Nobody ever knew. Only Lisa’s father and I.’
What a way to choose to die, to allow the animals you live with to cause your death. It seems like the completion of a cycle. It smacks of obsession.
You can see Phil’s anguish and desperation now – not for Lisa, I think, but for the very real fear that Peter is going to cause his death.
Anger and hatred are burning in Brauner’s eyes after this exposition of how Lisa met her death. ?He’s a very silent character, but he says a lot in his eyes.
Phil starts to rave and plead as Peter walks and then jogs away. He’s terrified.
The tiger looks hungry.
So, Peter prepares to enact the dream that has been haunting him for so long.
This is the point when Tod wanders onto the scene, looking concerned, as well he may.
Julie is grimacing as Peter gets ready to stab the tiger’s paw. I’m not sure why neither she nor Tod are doing anything. Maybe they’re hypnotised by the moment, or afraid of confronting him.
He does it. He stabs the tiger, and now it’s really pissed off. He must be consumed with memories and imagined memories of Lisa doing the same thing.
It’s the stabbing of the tiger’s paw that spurs Julie into action. Perhaps now she can really believe that he will do it. She races to him, pleading him not to do it.
Peter’s face is hard and closed in as she runs to him. She’s almost babbling, ‘It’s my fault, because I didn’t make you love me so much that you could forget how much you hated. It’s my fault that I failed you.’
Oh dear. This doesn’t seem healthy. She really can’t blame herself for his obsessive hatred for Phil and his obsessive love for Lisa. It does seem very Route 66, though. The wife’s duty is to be the husband’s prop and stay.
Tod runs up too, and Peter growls at him, ‘Stay back, Stiles. Don’t take another step.’
This is where all that testosterone seems to come to a head between the two of them. He’s not even responding to his wife’s pleas and her irrational guilt. Instead it’s just him and Tod in a battle of wills.
‘Don’t let him out,’ Julie pleads. ‘We might as well get into the cage with that man, because we’ll be just as dead as he is.’
Even if Peter is only responding to Tod, it’s up to Julie to be the voice of rationality, the peace-maker.
Brauner is waiting anxiously to let the tiger through. Because he speaks so little and emotes so little his own obsession seems even more ingrained than Peter’s.
Phil can see his fate approaching...
Lots of reaction shots of all of the main protagonists. What’s Tod’s role here? Peter is responding to his presence more than Julie’s, but it is Julie who’s trying to talk him down. Somehow Tod’s presence creates a huge, silent ball of masculine power between him and Peter. Peter is the owner of this whole place, Tod’s boss, the one in control of the tiger and the cages and the man inside the cage. But he’s lost control. He lost his first wife to another man. He lost her living body. He’s lost control over his ability to rationalise her betrayal and death and to act like a normal member of society. He’s subsumed his new wife into a tiny and insignificant shadow against his drive for revenge. What has he got, when Tod walks in and tries to tell him he can’t do the one thing he has been planning for for two years? In some ways Tod seems ancillary to this episode, but he is needed as a kind of mirror of the character that Peter should be, as an example of a man who is not consumed with guilt and anger. He’s needed to make the testosterone-filled figure of Peter fight back against the emotions that are threatening to ruin his life.
Peter’s hands are hesitating on the cord, his fingers entwined with it. He looks like a man who’s having to rethink his entire life.
He’s coming to a decision. It looks like it hurts him more than anything else ever has.
So, he takes hold of what’s important – of his alive, loving wife. She’s come to him at emotional crises all through the episode, and here she is at the final one.
Tod is so relieved he looks a little bug eyed.
‘Stiles, go let the man out,’ Peter tells Tod.
So Tod goes to let Phil out, but he has a kind of, ‘I expect women to be irrational, but did you have to come over all psychotic too?’ expression on his face as he looks at Peter. I suppose it’s for this kind of reason that he and Buz move on so often. It’s awkward working for people when you’ve seen them through all kinds of emotional breaking points.
Brauner is disappointed. I wouldn’t put it past him to creep up behind Phil at some point and stab him to death.
‘You know what we always said, Brauny,’ Peter tells him. ‘Hell is empty, all the devils are here. We’ve kept this one too long. Let’s let go of him now.’
I don’t think Brauner has any intention of letting go of any devils, really. He looks terribly disappointed. I wonder if Peter would have gone down this road at all without Brauner there? Perhaps Brauner was the devil whispering into his ear?
So Tod gets to rescue Phil, whose fingers were clawed so hard onto the cage in a kind of cataleptic grip that Tod has to prise them off.
And in a beautiful bit of synchrony, Tod walks off supporting the stumbling Phil in the foreground, while Peter walks off holding Julie in the background, separated by the arena seats. The end.
