Director: Arthur Hillier
Director of Photography: Jack A. Marta
(Details from http://www.imdb.com - click on the episode title above for more cast and crew)
Screencaps here are from the Infinity release, unfortunately cropped to give a widescreen appearance. I'd like to go through and get the uncropped equivalents from the Shout Factory set, but I can't quite face the work. They still look pretty, anyway.
I can’t resist pictures of biplanes flying. Especially not with the parallel lines of the fields behind.
Ditto for this one. Makes me think of Biggles :-)
Our boys drive in, listening to the plane. Tod wants to dust crops. Buz thinks he’s crazy.
‘You know what a crop duster makes?’ Tod asks.
‘Yeah, a big hole in the ground,’ Buz laughs.
I do so love it when Buz does his British military type voice.
‘Ah, I can see it all now.’ (and he puts his face on. Forgive me not know exactly what he says.) ‘Sir. You wouldn’t send up a boy like that. Green. Pukka green in a crate like that. Against – against the Kaiser’s deadliest ace, and a Stafford five, would you, sir? … Oh, you would.’
‘Look, maybe Mr Windus won’t even give me a crack at it,’ Tod says in his normal voice.
‘Ah, I don’t know. Anyone that flies that close to the ground. I wouldn’t worry. He’s probably got a spad all warmed up and waiting for you.’
‘A spad, huh?’
‘Oh, it’s a great little fighter if the guns work, you know. We use them on dawn patrol now. You’d like them much better than a spat with camels, you know. Game little beggar – if you like beggars, little and game.’
‘I think I should have written him first,’ Tod worries.
‘Oh, I say.’ (Buz points to the Phoenix sign.) ‘Isn’t that Paris up there?’
‘If you say so, captain,’ Tod humours him.
‘Oh, I say so. Carry on.’
I could watch Buz chuckle all day.
They do these long shots so well. The plane comes down, the farmer runs from his truck.
Mr Summers escapes from his crashed plane, cool as anything. According to Imdb, Michael Rennie, who plays him, trained as a fighter pilot in the RAF in 1941.
‘I always light my own.’ Mr Summers is a complex and screwed up character, who has an interesting . Michael Rennie died in 1971 of emphysema.
When our boys walk in it’s to hear Mrs Windus on the radio, insisting, ‘You know I won’t dust sulphur.’
Mrs Windus is caught up in a shroud of worry. Her husband has been dead a year, but she won’t accept it. She has just heard that Summers has gone down. Her company is struggling to survive, but she won’t dust sulphur because it was sulphur that killed her husband.
‘Right now, Mr Russell,’ she says, ‘all I need is the hand of a merciful god.’
‘I guess you don’t remember me,’ Tod says. I think she’s too caught up in wondering if her best crop duster is dead. His inability to notice her emotional state is almost aspergic.
Christina Summers (Dorothy Malone), estranged wife of the recently downed pilot. She reminds me, visually of Christine Chapel/Majel Barrett Roddenberry.
And Buz, rather inexplicably, is transfixed by her. No, Buz. Don’t be silly. I suppose it’s his mother issues.
Oh, this is pretty. One of those shots again as the pick up drives up with Mr Summers aboard.
Mr Summers insists on getting back up there and carrying on with the crop dusting.
‘Rock of Gibraltar,’ he says to Mrs Windus, showing her his hand. When Mr Summers tells the mechanic working at the airfield to load him up again the mechanic says, ‘Sure thing, Mr Summers,’ in a tone of extreme hero-worship.
Mr Summers is not happy to see Mrs Summers.
‘Why don’t you say something?’ he asks.
‘I’m listening – to what you’re not saying,’ she says.
‘All right, Christina. It isn’t love that makes you so determined. It’s sheer habit. A desperately bad habit. I’d hoped you’d finally broken it.’
(Mr Summers is the type who will distance everyone from him, especially those he loves, in order to protect them. A complex bastard, in other words.)
‘You only taught me the questions, not the answers,’ she says.
‘There aren’t any, Christina. Nowhere. Never.’
You can see why she loves him, in a self-destructive kind of way. He is a very charismatic man.
Mrs Windus asks them what kind of job they want. I love the background scenery here, the straight lines of the crops.
Mrs Windus is a dark, internalised type. The shots of her in this conversation are against a dark, featureless background. When Tod says he wasn’t sure if she remembered him she simply says, ‘I remember my first hair ribbon. I was four.’ I could imagine her committing a murder.
Tod is slightly bemused by her emotionally crippled attitude. I wonder how different she is from the Mrs Windus he used to know.
As they drive away and the plane taxis, they move in parallel and turn together, then slow together and then the plane pulls apart to take off. This kind of beautiful filming makes the series.
So, Buz, having fallen in love, goes to track down the estranged wife at the club she’s singing at, presumably ignoring the angsty marriage-is-over-but-not-over vibes. Sometimes he’s very naïve.
‘She’s out of your league,’ Tod warns him … ‘I mean, she's older.’
‘Older than what?’
‘Older than you.’
‘I'm not carrying any birth certificate,’ Buz protests. Oh Buz. You will be burned.
We get to hear Tod uttering the marvellous phrase, ‘Oh. Sobersville,’ in reference to Buz’s crush. ‘She really grabbed you, huh?’
‘Yeah, like cotton candy in Madison Square Garden,’ Buz replies defensively.
Heehee.
So inside Christina is singing ‘May to December.’ How’s that for a themed song?
Oh, Buz, you are so, so smitten. To be honest I find her mannerisms annoying, but George Maharis acts that besotted, soppy look very well.
Tod watches him being smitten, probably wondering what the hell he’s going to do with him.
Buz is obsessed enough to have Tod follow her home with him after her set finishes, at almost two a.m. This is stalker territory.
So he follows her into the hotel lobby and tries to chat her up, all starry-eyed and grinning and persistent. Nowadays she would have maced him.
She tells him, ‘The slap fits the face,’ and walks off. Ouch.
Seven the next morning and they turn up for work. Tod looks pleasing against the backdrop of aeroplanes.
Irritating, smug mechanic (Skeats, I believe) tells them there is no job. Mr Summers won’t train Tod.
Buz and Tod listen to Skeats tell them that Summers won’t take Tod on.
‘When he says negative, that’s negative,’ Skeats says.
‘Two negatives make a positive,’ Buz rejoins.
Finally Tod finds out that Mr Windus died last January, and how. The bare, skeletal partial-build of his dream aeroplane is left due to Mrs Windus’ refusal to acknowledge his death.
Tod is insistent on helping Mrs Windus and getting the training as a crop duster from Summers. Summers is at Camelback Rock.
‘He’s out there, waiting,’ Skeats says. ‘He’s all alone. He’s waiting for the wind to die. He’s sitting there with his wings, a half a ton of phosphorant, and four hundred and twenty-five horse power. He’s all alone, and that’s the way he wants it. That’s the way he’s going to keep it.’
Somehow, with Silliphant’s writing, the image of a man waiting for the chance to take off and dust crops sounds meaningful and noble.
Out at Camelback Rock. The Corvette, dusty from the drive, the aeroplane, and the silhouette of Summers there under the wing.
Summers is reading Carlyle. He doesn’t reply to Tod’s hail.
‘Ten minutes,’ Tod says. ‘I bet you’d let me stand here ten minutes before you said a word.’
‘Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better,’ Summers quotes from the book.
I like this. His character is intelligent. He has depth. He sits out in the Arizona dust reading Victorian essayists and waiting for the wind to die.
Mrs Windus’s daughter Vicki turns up. I have to say, despite the sultry music Vicki is not appealing. I suppose she’s messed up by losing her father at 18 or so, but she acts like a spoilt little brat. When Tod last saw her, at 15, she looked like ‘a barber pole’. Supposedly she’s attractive now, all grown up, but I don’t see it.
Vicki urges Mr Summers not to teach Tod. Tod asks why.
‘Because of him, my father’s dead,’ she says.
Summers’ reaction is lovely. Silent, haunted, disconcerted, he starts up his engine and prepares to take off.
The group get out of the way of the plane. Summers would probably taxi straight over them.
Christina is in her dressing room waiting to go on to sing when Summers turns up and knocks on the door. You can see the hope start up in her as she sees him opening the door.
Summers is drunk. Poor, desperate Christina believes, like the poor lost puppy she is, that he has come back to her. ‘I’m not here – ’ he begins, but she throws herself on her estranged husband and kisses him, and of course he kisses her back. He is drunk, and he presumably still loves her, deep down behind his shell of bitterness and guilt.
It’s hard not to feel sorry for her. He’s begging her to get out of his life.
‘I’ll follow you till I die,’ she says, ‘on my knees if I have to, or crawling. I’ll never leave you alone, or stop loving you, no matter how hard you make me try.’
Her love for him vacillates between pathetic and psychotic. There’s something tragic in the way she is stalking Mr Summers and Buz is stalking her.
‘I look alive, don’t I?’ Summers starts off on a long, marvellous speech. ‘But I’ve been dead for years, Christina. Admit it. … This arm. That’s Jamie’s arm, shot off by cannon fire from an ME-109, meant for me. This hand. That’s a Belgian squadron leader who saved me over Dunkirk. My ribs, my stomach, my legs, my guts, Christina. They all belong to dead men, one after another, shot and burned. But not me. That first crash. The mail and the passengers. Do you remember, Christina? When I worked. That first crash. Who walked away from it? Who walked away on the legs of the dead? … Oh, it’s never my fault. Wherever I am, whatever I do, whatever I touch – dies, rots, burns, decays. And I keep climbing a ladder, higher and higher, bone by bone and skull by skull.’ (this speech may not be entirely accurate – he’s not always clear.)
Survivor guilt. Shellshock. Summers needs help that wasn’t available in the 1960s.
‘I can tell you where the North Star will be a thousand years from tonight, but I can’t tell you where any one of us will be tomorrow morning,’ he tells Christina. ‘Don’t ever try to see me again, Christina.’
Christina goes back on stage and sings a pertinent song about being alone after her love has left her. In dark of the audience Buz watches, smitten still, and worried as he notices her tears sparkling in the spotlight.
Buz is waiting for her by her car.
‘Oh no. Not again. Not tonight,’ she pleads tiredly.
He offers her help and nothing more. ‘There’s a worn out line. It’s none of my business. But the more I kick around, the more I see that everything is everybody’s business. You can’t stand in the background. You don’t help that way. Everything passes you by.’
He offers to be ‘her boy’, to offer pep talks and break up sugar in her coffee. Aww, Buz…
Meanwhile… Tod is romancing Vicki, dancing shoeless to records. We see no more than their feet and legs, and the record player, giving this shot a lovely feeling of intimacy.
Then we see the stack of records and two cast down and burned out cigarettes, giving us the story of the evening in one smooth shot.
Buz barges in, and quickly and tactfully retreats again. Tod would do the same for him – although I wouldn’t approve of Tod making out with that annoying child. I know Tod’s supposed to be 24, but he doesn’t look it. He’s far too mature for that girl and her irritating ways.
‘Just the tide coming in,’ Tod says to Vicki. ‘But it went right back out again.’
Buz, the force of nature…
Outside, nowhere to go and nothing to do, Buz makes to light a cigarette. Of course he doesn’t get to smoke it. You hardly ever see him smoking. In fact, he has to feel about a bit for his cigarette packet before he finds it.
He looks very young here, a bit like a naughty school boy.
Ooops. Mrs Windus turns up. Buz tries to stall her with cigarettes. She demands the key from him and he throws away his unlit cigarette and lets her in. Well, at least he got away without having to smoke the thing.
And Mrs Windus walks in. Oh dear. I’m guessing this is pretty late at night/early in the morning, since Buz has just got home from watching Christina. No Brownie points for Tod here…
Mrs Windus is stone-faced, Buz is apologetic. Tod looks like a rabbit caught in the headlights. Vicki looks half-cut. ‘Dora,’ she says, ‘you broke up the magic.’ That just makes her sound so mature (sarcasm alert).
Mrs Windus asks where Summers is. She needs him for a thousand dollar contract.
‘How would I know?’ Vicki asks.
‘You seem to know all the back alleys, Vicky,’ Mrs Windus tells her bitterly. ‘Which one did you leave him lying in?’
There’s something going on here… Of course, it ends up in insults and the mother slapping the daughter.
Tod looks disapproving of the slap, but he’s not about to step between the two and stop it.
Before she leaves, Mrs Windus tells Tod he can have the crop dusting job if he can find Summers. A bar trawl ensues where they try to find him. Tod gets tired of going into bars and sends Buz in for a bit. I like the way Buz looks in the bars in his coat and loosened tie.
Finally they’ve searched every bar in town and not found him. Buz settles in backwards into the car. Is this comfortable? He makes it look comfortable. The possibility for multiple positions in this car is pleasing.
Buz phones Christina to try to find out where Summers might go.
‘He’s never been drunk before,’ she says, but when he’s feeling troubled he likes to ‘go out and jump.’
I think Buz momentarily wonders if she’s talking about suicide, but she clarifies she’s talking about parachute jumping.
So our boys move on from bar trawling to phoning all the likely parachute people, in the middle of the night.
Poor guy on the other end of the phone. He’s tired of maniacs. He wants his sleep. I don’t blame him. He tells Tod that Summers is probably over the Brecon Ridge Foothills. Or Brackenridge? I’d like to think that Summers has made it all the way to Brecon and Buz and Tod are going to turn up in Wales to please me, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.
The silhouette of a plane in the dark of night, and Summers jumps out into the void. I can see how this would help with his demons. It must be a heady mix of strange nostalgia and complete liberation from people, from the solidity of what’s real, from time and place. The only life on his hands is his own and he can choose whether to live or die.
Tod and Buz watch from the ground. This programme is often pretty realistic, but I’m impressed that out of all that land they drive to within a few hundred feet of where Summers touches down!
Summers approaches the car.
‘I have a feeling I could stand here for ten minutes and neither of you would say a word,’ he paraphrases Tod from earlier.
Nice mirroring here – day/night, the quote turned around, landing/taking off, unfriendliness/reconciliation.
‘Didn’t he have a quote for that?’ Buz laughs.
‘Thomas Carlyle,’ Tod confirms.
It’s smiles all round. Jumping really does seem to have cleared Summers’ head.
‘We figured the parachute might not open and we wanted to be on hand, to celebrate,’ Buz tells him when Summers asks why they’re there.
‘Well, honesty clears the air – just like a 10,000 foot freefall clears the head,’ Summers responds.
Tod tells Summers about the job, and that Summers has to train him.
‘How old are you?’ Summers asks.
‘Twenty-four,’ Tod replies. (twenty-four? Really Tod?)
‘Well, you’re too young,’ Summers tells him.
‘For what?’ Buz asks, astonished that anyone could consider that young.
‘To die,’ Summers says prosaically.
Summers agrees in the end, but he warns them that he’s a jinx.
‘Destiny comes in all sizes, doesn’t it?’ he says. ‘A small car in the middle of an empty field.’
That’s how they managed to find each other. Destiny, the most romantic of flukes.
No matter what positions one could assume in the Corvette, Buz doesn’t look entirely comfortable sandwiched between two men. Hmm…
Come back next week, folks, for Part 2, where we get to see Buz practising for The Satan Bug and Tod losing his lunch in an aeroplane.
No comments:
Post a Comment