Episode Analysis - S1 E17 Fly Away Home - Part 2

Fly Away Home: Part 2 (17 Feb. 1961)


Writer: Stirling Silliphant
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)


Part two of a great episode. Screencaps from the Infinity dvds.
Part one here.

Fly Away Home (Part 2) I want it to say part two here, but it doesn’t. But while I’m here – there’s something about this typeface. I’m not sure what it is. It reminds me of things like Northern Exposure. It’s not what I’d pick for Route 66 – but now it’s there it seems to work.

Stirring music (although the first few notes remind me of something to do with ITV in the 80s), and Summers is ready to take off. There’s a lovely, hopeful, morning feel about this.

And so we move onto the most delightful interchange of the whole episode. ‘Just to show there are no hard feelings,’ Buz says, ‘from me to you, ace.’ Aww, he’s been hiding a present under his jacket!

It’s a slim, square box. Ooh, I wonder what’s inside!

‘What is it?’ Tod asks. ‘What is it?’ Buz replies. ‘It’s a silk muffler.’ (he should have added ‘duh’.)

‘Well, I can see that, but what’s it for?’ (suddenly I’m remembering a film I watched once. I can’t even remember the name. But it involved a someone giving a guy sexual gratification by getting a piece of silk and pushing it into – well – I’ll stop there.)

‘What kind of a fly boy are you? You know, all the hot shots wear silk mufflers! It’s like – er – ’ (he struggles for a manly simile) ‘ – jump boots to a paratrooper, or – ’ (remembering Tod is not just brawn) ‘ – a briefcase to one of those Madison Avenue geniuses. It gives you confidence. Status.’ (They say ‘sta-tus’, not ‘stay-tus’. This sounds odd.)

‘How’s my status now?’ Tod asks.

‘Quo, man, quo,’ Buz replies, rearranging Tod’s muffler for him. Only Buz can utter this line without sounding like a complete idiot.

I’m sorry, but the silk muffler scene is too adorable not to over-spam you with it. More muffler coming up.

As Buz rearranges Tod’s muffler it looks like Tod pats him on the ass. It’s actually on the shoulder, but in the screenshot it looks lower … Squeals. I’m sorry. Sometimes the slash part of me is just switched on like a foglight, and this scene does that to me.

The end of the Great Muffler Interlude…

…and Summers watches the homoerotica with a healthy old-school disdain. Actually I think he’s just filled with reluctance to teach Tod to dust.

Yes, the Muffler Interlude is over, but we can still watch Tod rearranging it to perfection and Buz carrying the little gift box it came in.

Buz is gazing at Tod’s ass. No. No he’s not. He’s just walking. Tod looks rather attractive with his silver helmet and his lovely muffler, though :-)

Summers has a last effort to persuade Tod to walk away and forget about it. ‘I just don’t think you’re a jinx,’ Tod says. ‘Of course, I’m a guy that walks under ladders. It’s quicker that way. And black cats? I cross in front of their paths.’

Buz is waiting to pull out the chocks.

Still waiting...

‘No radio and no intercom – just hand signals. That’s the ticket. For this first morning we’ll just stooge about a bit. Bring you out a little. Give you the feel of the ship.’

Summers is so beautifully British that I just want to hug him. I wouldn’t naturally find him attractive, but I can see how he managed to captivate and capture Christina.

As Summers starts the engine, Buz looks amazed that Tod is actually going through with it…

…and Tod looks nervous, but happy.

Buz watches his friend taxi out with the jinx, looking rather nervous…

Mrs Windus watches too. She has a face like a tombstone. Skeats tells her not to worry. She replies, ‘Who’s worried? Mr Windus himself taught that boy to fly.’

Mr Windus is an interesting figure in all of this. He has the biggest part in the whole two episodes. He’s present in almost everything. I wonder what he was like – if Silliphant had a vision of the man?

I love, love, love this sequence. You get the feeling that essentially they put Martin Milner in a plane and stuck a camera on his face and then sat back and had fun trying to make him vomit.

Buz watches in concern as Summers loops and swoops and dives and flies close to the ground and generally takes Tod on a wild ride. I suppose Summers thinks it’s kill or cure for Tod’s desire to be a crop duster.

We get a little more vomity Tod as Buz watches in abject horror…

…and then Summers sets down, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief – not least Tod, I imagine.

‘Better get a hose and some soap and water, Murdock,’ Summers says as he walks from the plane. 

You’ve got to love friendship. Buz will laugh at Tod – but he will also scrape his vomit from the cockpit. I think there’s a little jealousy at Tod’s ability to fly mixed in, but he still reaches out to help him from the plane if he needs it. For such a heavy episode there are a lot of very pleasing and amusing bits in there.

Tod doesn’t look too happy.

‘Now I know why the fly boys wear these things,’ he slurs as Buz laughs, unwinding the muffler. ‘So they can throttle their buddies who have no sympathy for upside down, inside out stomachs.’

Buz continues to laugh, so…

…Tod throws said muffler at Buz’s head.

Good shot, Tod.

‘Come on, walk around. It’ll do you good,’ Buz chuckles, winding the muffler back round Tod’s neck in a playful way and hauling him to his feet. Tod does not seem appreciative.

In the office, Summers makes tea with his gloves on. I didn’t even realise that they’d invented tea bag with strings on then! I hope that’s Yorkshire tea he’s making!! (Since Michael Rennie is from Yorkshire, and there’s a brand of tea called Yorkshire tea…)

I like the relationship between Summers and Mrs Windus. It’s very well drawn. The whole lot of them at the company are tight-knit and loyal, and it’s nice to see the easy familiarity there is between Mrs Windus and Summers. She asks how Tod is.

‘Game,’ says Summers. ‘Gamer than his stomach. He has good hands. Steady control.’

Mr Russell appears on the scene. You can see from Summer’s reaction that this is not a good thing, but he leaves it up to Mrs Windus. Russell pressures Mrs Windus to dust with sulphur again. He’s heartless and unpleasant, and has no tact.

Mrs Windus has a nice Chevrolet, though. Who sponsors the show, again?

Mrs Windus’s refusal to believe her husband is dead. At first you think she’s confronting Russell because he knows dusting with sulphur killed her husband – but then you realise that she covers her grief with the illusion that he’s alive.

‘He’s not dead. He got out. He managed to get out. He’s alive. Somewhere he’s alive, waiting, healing.’

When Russell starts asking Skeats how long it is since he was paid, Skeats shows his mettle. I don’t like Skeats, but I like the way he sticks by Mrs Windus.

Summers is so British that he reminisces about tea. 

‘I remember the first cup of tea I was served while the ground crews were refuelling our Spits. Just came back from my first scramble. Blitzy(?) morning, white mist everywhere covering the tarmac. But grateful for that – it hid my shaking knees. And this one Waaf came out of the mist with a wonderful little trolley with tea and sausage rolls. She was wearing overalls with flowered print. I remember I was no longer afraid. A country which thinks enough of its pilots to outfit its ground crews with coveralls with flowered print, that’s a country worth dying for.’

I love this. I could just sit and listen to Summers expound about all sorts of things.

Christina comes to find Buz. She looks very stylish in this scene, nervous and uncertain, and reminding me of Dusty Springfield.

Tod is sleeping…

Buz is sleeping…

Buz is awakened by a woman softly calling his name and knocking at the door…

He is addled by sleep, poor thing.

Addled, and half naked :-)

So he staggers sleepily to the door – and then with wonderful early 60s modesty remembers that he’s half naked and can’t possibly open the door to a lady!  (Incidentally, he’s wearing his watch in bed, always with the face on the underside of his wrist.)

Buz is so anxious and excited and sleepy that he can’t get his shirt on…

…because it’s actually a pair of trousers. Aww.

So he tries another, and this time it is a shirt, but he’s not too hot on the buttoning, but he doesn’t care because he’s covered up most of his chest, and Christina is outside trying to tempt him into the night.

Christina tries to entice him with metaphor, greeting him with, ‘If you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance. You mind the rattle of old bones?’ 

I have a feeling the Buz is too sleepy for things like this, but he doesn’t really need persuading with her. 

‘Any port(?) you throw, I’ll cover,’ he says like a puppy. He looks like all his horses came in at once.

So, they go walking through town, past all those impeccably dressed windows, while she talks about the things you get to see by being up in the middle of the night.

Ah. She stops in front of the baby shop. A perfect visual reminder of what she wants and will never have.

She just wants to talk about Summers. Poor Buz. His hand is on the window of the shop. I wonder if this is a subconscious sign that he would like to have those babies with her? Or just that he has his hand on the shop window…

Christina continues with the metaphors. She says she wanted to talk to Buz because ‘you’re a link. Do you understand? You’re a link with him.’

If Buz could see the future he’d say, ‘I’m not Linc! I’m Buz! Just because they thought he looked like me… Jeez…’

But she tells him he’s too young (Tod’s too young to die, Buz is too young to be tied up with Christina). She continues with the chain metaphor, ‘He and I, we’re – we’re bound together, by years of suffering. Link by link, hand in hand like a chain. Rusty, maybe, but unbreakable.’

I wouldn’t be able to stand Christina if they didn’t put such wonderful lines in her mouth.

Christina gazes at the doll baby and the cot in the shop window. Buz tells her warningly, ‘Christina. That’s not penny candy.’ I feel sorry for her. I hope when all this is over she finds someone who can give her that.

Yum. Buz in overalls.

And how dashing Tod looks in his overalls too.

Buz decides to have a word with Summers, and suddenly we realise just how much taller than him Summers is.

Tod watches with apprehension. You get the feeling that he thinks that Buz is kinda crazy.

Buz tries to ask Summers how Christina can ‘bust free’ from him, not for himself, but for her to be happy. Summers defuses Buz’s angst by saying sincerely, ‘Thank you. Thank you for caring.’ Everybody relaxes. I realise that I really like Summers.

Vicki. She really is a little emo bitch. Sorry about that, but she is. I suppose there are circumstances that excuse her, but she needs a good slapping.

I’m not sure what car she drives (except, what do you know, it’s a Chevrolet!) but there’s something about it, especially in contrast with the Corvette, that just makes it look like a clumpy pick-up instead of a sexy soft-top. Ugly car aside, I like the framing of this shot – so much so that I grabbed it after the fact and messed up all my numbers…

Vicki is worried about her mother, but she expresses this by acting like a spoilt princess. Skeats responds to her, ‘I asked you a question,’ with a smug and suggestive, ‘Well, Vicki, the answer is still no.’ So she slaps him. She’s worried because her mother hasn’t been home all night, and he continues his rather sleazy insinuations about how she’s never at home herself.

So she goes to slap him again, and he grabs her hand and says, ‘Slap this side, Vicki. Just slap this Christian boy on his other cheek.’

I don’t know why that line’s so effective, but it is. This is a great confrontation between the two of them, pretty well acted by both – the aggression and the uncertainty on her part and the smooth confidence on his.

Mrs Windus arrives, so immediately Skeats lets go of Vicki’s wrist. There’s some interesting sexual politics going on here between the woman boss and the daughter and the varied males who work under Mrs Windus.

Vicki immediately tackles her mother on where she was last night. Either she’s stupid or so self-absorbed that she doesn’t realise the furthest thing from her mother’s mind is going out and sleeping around.

Mrs Windus wants to know where Summers is. She’s been out all night trying to get contracts to keep the company afloat. Vicki is so teenaged and blinkered that all she’s worried about is that she desperately needs a new dress to go on a date with Tod – it doesn’t matter that her mother has no money and is at her wit’s end.

Vicki hopes her mother will be forced to close the business. She tells her that the whole valley thinks she’s crazy. We find out the odd fact that Vicki had pretended to be interested in Summers to ‘make him talk,’ as she thinks that he is responsible for her father’s death. I think this shows just how naïve she is.

‘He’s dark and evil,’ she says, ‘like – like the shadow of death.’

‘He’s your father’s friend,’ Mrs Windus reminds her. ‘His best friend.’

(He is, I assume, not He was. Mrs Windus still can’t admit that he is dead.)

Vicki finally states that her behaviour is because of her mother’s denial of her father’s death. She won’t be a daughter until her mother resumes her own proper position. Interesting questions about gender and a woman’s place here. Mrs Windus is acting in the place of her husband even while she denies that he is dead.

Back at the club. Buz has been here so much that he knows the maitre d’s name, and the maitre d knows Buz’s.

The waitress know him too. ‘Let me have what I usually have,’ he tells her.

I’m not sure what Tod sees in Vicki apart from a heady sense of nostalgia. I feel that he’s always reaching for the life that he lost when his father died.

Again, Christina’s song is appropriate for poor Buz. ‘Never lovers, ever friends…’

Buz watches, smitten, never realising that the scriptwriters are practically screaming at him that it won’t work out.

Outside the club, waiting by Christina’s car, Buz gets out a cigarette. A hand reaches in to light it, reminding us of that moment in the field at the start of Part 1 where Summers insists he always lights his own cigarettes. He strives always for control. He knows Buz loves Christina, and if Buz is going to have her, it’s because Summers will let him. The lighting of the cigarette is the start of this control.

And we actually see Buz smoking for once. I don’t feel that it suits him. He doesn’t look easy with it.

‘It purifies, you know, flame,’ Summers says. 

This seems meaningful on two levels – the intended one, that Summers’ guilt and depression will be purified by flame, but also the irony that Michael Rennie will die in ten years time at the age of 61, of emphysema. This isn’t the place for an anti-smoking rant, but having watched my granddad die slowly of emphysema, I hate it. I’d hate it anyway, even without that.

Summers waxes poetical and reflective. He asks Buz to tell him about himself. In the end, Summers goes first. I love this conversation between them, with Summers’ sense of soft regret and Buz’s suspicion and almost-aggression.

‘I can sum myself up quite precisely,’ Summers says. ‘I’m a gaunt fellow, full of the sounds of the past, hearing nothing of the present. I’m aware of time’s despair – not despairing. A lean, thoughtful fellow who gets about in the clouds to gain a temporary detachment. A fellow who wants to stop hurting, being hurt. Simple as that.’

Wow. I wouldn’t call that precise. But they are wonderful lines. It doesn’t matter that you can’t imagine a real person ever talking like that. It’s like listening to Shakespeare or some other dramatist who has to put their prose into the mouths of men.

Buz is rather more simple.

‘I mean I’m – just a guy, moving around, still looking, still wondering, still deciding – about myself, that is. Not about Christina. I know about her.’

I'm not sure that he does know about Christina. Summers probably knows he doesn't really know about Christina. There's a lot of testosterone and youthful hope behind his words.

Buz looks rather askance at Summers gives him a class in how to catch a woman. His tale of how he swept Christina off her feet is marvellous.

‘Yes, I took her, the way a woman dreams of being taken. Not clinically, but romantically. On impulse. Before she has time to think or analyse, before she decides you’re too considerate, too understanding. Before she discovers that you’re really in awe of her, already her slave. A woman has to be swept off her feet, Murdock, literally. Taken out of herself, her senses drowned. Has to be pursued, captured. This is her nature. This is her destiny. And the man who acts, not talks, is the man who rules her.’

Summers seduced Christina by hiring a helicopter, landing on stage mid-song, and taking her away. They don’t make men like that any more – or at least, when they do they’re called chauvinists. I’m made uneasy and attracted by this in equal measure. It’s unusual for Buz to come across as the sensitive new-age man, but he does in comparison to Summers.

‘Why did you stop loving her?’ Buz asks, sounding curiously as if he’s asking why the man is selling his last car.

‘Did I say I stopped?’ Summers answers.

So. Buz decides to be masterful. Now, I’m not saying that Buz can’t be masterful, but I think it would come better from him doing it because he wanted to, not because he’s been told to by another man. When he sits in Christina’s car’s driving seat and says in a hard voice, ‘I’m driving,’ I feel very uneasy. Somehow this makes him seem very young.

When he kisses Christina, at first it’s against her will. She succumbs, of course, but again it makes me uneasy. This isn’t Buz. He will never be what Christina wants.

Summers watches from the shadows like some kind of ghost. I can’t imagine the pain he must be feeling.

Wheehee! We get to see Buz dressed as a ‘swamper’. More fun than watching Buz forcing himself into the dom half of a sub-dom relationship.

Both Buz and Tod are in overalls as they fill the plane’s hopper with pesticide. I find them very attractive in overalls. I’ve suddenly realised I find Spock attractive in overalls too. Is there some kind of ‘Uptown Girl’ syndrome in me, where I like to ogle men dressed like mechanics?

Buz, distracted and brooding over Christina, almost wipes his bare face with his gloved hand.

‘Hey, don’t touch your face!’ Tod yells.

‘I keep forgetting this stuff is poisonous,’ Buz says broodingly.

‘Well, you might forget, but your blood cells won’t if you get any on your skin,’ Tod reminds him.

This makes me feel so reassured about 1950s/60s food production. A pesticide so deadly that you mustn’t let it touch your skin, being spread from an aircraft into the air for anyone to breathe if the wind’s right, landing on the food that’s going to go into your stomach…

Tod notices that Buz is more than a little distracted.

‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like the outfit?’ Buz asks in a dull voice. ‘Very chique. All the swampers dress to the teeth. Like you say, if you don’t – no teeth.’

I wonder if Buz is impossible to stand when he’s depressed. I imagine he might be. I got the feeling in Even Stones Have Eyes that Tod was rather at the end of his tether with him.

‘This isn’t just another girl, is it?’ Tod asks.

Oh, Buz, you are so lost…

‘Cheer up,’ Tod says. ‘Look, it’s a big thing. It should happen to me. Buz, sooner or later it was bound to happen, the way we’ve been kicking around. One day you’ll walk around a corner and, bingo, there she is, size 10, the look in her eye, and all the chemistry going, and in one big flash you see your future.’

Buz seems so troubled by it all. Is it her, is it the thought of settling down? Poor guy. He’s fallen in love with a millstone.

‘Well, we’ve got twelve hundred bucks in the Denver account. Half of that is yours. Whatever we make here, we split fifty-fifty,’ Tod says cheerily. Then he adds with intense feeling, ‘I’d fly a grapefruit crate from one end of this valley to the other ten hours a day if it would help you get started, and if it would get Christina smiling again.’

Now, that’s friendship. In Even Stones Have Eyes Tod offers Buz one of his eyes – if he could, that is. Dammit, Buz, you can’t give up friendship like that for a worn out chanteuse who’s never going to be happy with you. ‘And if anything bugs you,’ Tod tells him, ‘well, you call me. I’ll spray it down with tep.’

NO BUZ, DON’T GO WITH CHRISTINA!!

Meanwhile, inside… Summers is ignoring the fact the doctor says he shouldn’t fly because his blood count is ‘forty percent of normal.’ Summers makes tea with his gloves on and tells Mrs Windus a tale about the war. Presumably the plan is to charm her with so much Britishness that she forgets about his blood count.

Mrs Windus tells him she’ll shut the field down. ‘How do you think Jack will feel about that?’ Summers asks. Interesting use of tense there… But to stop her closing the business, Summers determines to dust with sulphur. (I’m sorry. I can’t spell it ‘sulfur.’ It’s just wrong.)

Mrs Windus tries to stop him, but there’s nothing she can do. Who is it who runs this airfield after all? Her or Summers?

Skeats obeys Summers rather than Mrs Windus. Buz’s reaction shot reminds us of the seriousness of all this. Suddenly I’m wondering who Skeats and Summers are working for – Mrs Windus or her husband’s ghost?

Buz tries to speak to Summers but Summers tells him, ‘No words, Murdock.’ There’s a sense that he’s passing the baton on to Buz. They don’t need to speak because he’s hoping that Buz will take his place.

Preparing for take-off. The whole feel of this is of preparing the planes on a aerodrome somewhere in Sussex, ready to fly a sortie over France. Summers is facing his most important push into enemy territory.

Tod and Skeats watch with their goggles and overalls like ground crew come to bid a farewell to the pilots, hoping to see them again but knowing they might not.

Summers is all ready. Good luck, old chap. Show the Hun what we’re made of.

There’s even the brave but damp-eyed woman at the edge of the tarmac, praying her boys will come home.

Such lovely framing. I feel that they should salute Summers as he passes.

Personally I think Skeats gets some kind of sexual pleasure from watching Summers do manly things in the air.

So Summers starts spraying the crops. My god, this is some ballsy flying.

Almost inevitably, he hits a power cable. You wonder if it was deliberate. After all, what has he to live for? He’s passed on Christina to another man. He has nothing left but hollow guilt.

Fire starts up in the cockpit.

This time, he won’t walk from the wreck and light a cigarette as the plane goes up. It’s too late for that.

Mrs Windus’s pose says it all.

Summers’ death is the catalyst for everything. Perhaps he was a jinx, in the sense that no one can move on from the first death, Mr Windus’s death, until Summers dies too. Vicki rushes in and for the first time there seems to be a connection between mother and daughter.

For the first time, Mrs Windus admits that her husband is dead.

‘I couldn’t cry for your father, Vicki, because I couldn’t live without him. And if I had cried for him, if I’d admitted I’d lost him, I’d have died too.’

I feel like there’s something deep about the connection between Mr Windus and Summers but I just don’t know what it is yet…

Mrs Windus has a new determination to succeed, and Vicki wants to help. I just hope it works. She doesn’t have any pilots any more. But perhaps the money from the failed sulphur dusting will help…

I like the way Tod and Buz and Skeats are standing together again as they did when Summers took off, as if they are all part of the company, as Russell turns up having learnt of Summers’ death.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Russell starts blustering. The three men’s wall of silence is condemnation enough.

‘Anybody say anything?’ Buz asks.

‘I didn’t hear anything,’ Tod replies.

‘I don’t even see nothing,’ Skeats adds.

Russell is totally blanked. He gives them ‘payment for the whole job, even though he only got three-quarters of the way – ’ And he stops before someone hits him. Skeats snatches the cheque and Russell scuttles away.

Christina arrives, just as she did at the start of the episode when Summers was downed the first time. It has come full circle. She walks past Buz without speaking, barely acknowledging him.

Christina wants Summers’ flight boots. Poor Buz.

‘How many times has he told me, when you die like that the boots always come off the feet,’ she says. ‘They’re always left behind. Now, I want his boots.’

I can see where she’s coming from, but it also seems slightly creepy. So Buz fetches the boots. Sure enough, they’re unharmed.

Christina goes to find what else is left. His goggles are a haunting image of what happened to him.

Christina’s face as she looks at the goggles and drops them back to the workbench. It is as if she hadn’t fully realised quite how awfully he had died until then.

Oh, poor Buz. He barely even figures in her radar now. He’s just the guy who gave her her dead husband’s boots.

He does what he can to comfort Christina as she slumps on the car, crying.

He’s still hopeful. He offers to drive her back to town, but she tells him no. She’s not going back to town. She was going to leave without saying goodbye. She doesn’t want to burden him with a woman with such a past. She’d leave him sooner or later.

‘Christina, I love you,’ he says as she gets into her car. He says it not so much as a plea, but just as a fact, as if he’s giving her a parting gift.

‘Goodbye, Buz,’ she replies. That is all.

‘I’ll find you,’ he says as she starts the engine. He sounds rather stalkery with this. I hope he doesn’t find her. He doesn’t need her. Their relationship was founded on far too much bad psychology.

‘Bitch. You hurt my Buz. I was going to fly grapefruit crates for him,’ Tod thinks as Christina leaves. ‘I’m going to make a voodoo doll of you and stick pins in its throat so you can never sing again. But. But. I have Buz back!'

She drives off, and you can barely see her for the dust. That’s it. Buz is left behind, and we can listen to Nelson Riddle’s beautiful theme music and sigh with a strange, sweet melancholy. And wait until next week, when Buz will have got over Christina and will be boarding with Tod in that lovely Japanese all-male dorm and setting off all kinds of slash fantasies in my mind.