On the 30th October, 1959, Rod Serling introduced us to Martin Sloan.
ROD SERLING - NARRATOR: [Opening narration] Martin Sloan, age thirty-six. Occupation: vice-president, ad agency, in charge of media. This is not just a Sunday drive for Martin Sloan. He perhaps doesn't know it at the time - but it's an exodus. Somewhere up the road, he's looking for sanity. And somewhere up the road, he'll find something else.
And so began one of the most formative pieces of media in my life.
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The plot is relatively simple, as was the case with most episodes of a show that often strived in its simplicity, dissecting one concentrated idea over 25 minutes rather than making jam-packed plots. This ultimately led to the show’s detriment in its fourth season where it was demanded that the shows were extended to 45 minutes. Our plot in Walking Distance follows Martin Sloan whose car runs out of gas about a mile and half outside his home town, walking distance from a journey into memory that he eagerly takes. Martin Sloan is played by Gig Young, a much celebrated actor of his time who starred in many of the episodic television series of the day (Climax!, Studio One and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour to name but a few). The episode was written by the show’s narrator, head-writer and creator Rod Serling and as Serling often would with his episodes, we are brought headfirst into the reality of the piece. However, as is naturally the case with The Twilight Zone; our reality is fantasy. Martin finds himself around 20 years in the past, walking into his hometown as if nothing has ever changed. Nobody recognises him naturally and as Sloan grows to realise the truth of his current situation he becomes obsessed with taking advantage of it and relaying to his younger self all that he has always wished he could have the chance to say. Young is playing 36 here, but was actually 46 in real life. I have always wondered why Serling didn’t simply change the number, for I’ve always thought that having Sloan be older would enrich the pathos of the piece further. However I think that Serling was more clearly using Young and Sloan as a conduit for himself, who would have been 35 at the time of airing, a few months off his 36th birthday on Christmas day of 1959.
The episode was directed by Robert
Stevens, another classic director of the time, working on multiple episodes of Suspense and Alfred Hitchcock Presents, winning an Emmy for his directing of the
episode, The Glass Eye for Presents. Steven actually directed the
first ever episode of Twilight Zone with
the classic Where Is Everybody? But
this would be Steven’s second and last ever Twilight Zone as he did go over budget and over schedule shooting this one, which was
the cardinal sin of this era of television where episodes were being cranked
out weekly, with the usual shooting schedule for the show being around 3 days maximum. What I’ve always seen as special about Twilight Zone actually is how in this system they still managed to
make every piece feel like a small film in spite of the struggling demands of
filming it under such restraints. Walking Distance is no exception and Steven’s work on the episode is simply
sublime.
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The rest of cast are also marvellous, with Michael Montgomery as young Marty highlighting the perfect amount of blissful naivety in the face of seeing what he will become. Also great are Frank Overton as Robert Sloan and Irene Treadow as Mrs Sloan, Martin’s mother and father offerring the right amount of familial love and care all the while imbued by the naturally understandable confusion and fear that comes from a grown man telling you that he’s your son, when your ten year old is out playing at the carousel. The show even features a very young Ron Howard in his first screen appearance as the first child that Martin comes across. I bring it up as a novelty piece of trivia, but Howard does deliver his lines with great worry and childlike excitement, all perfectly fitting the scene. The episode is bookended by scenes in the same soda shop, with the older Byron Foulger giving us heart and wit as the first person Martin encounters on his journey. With Joey Corey playing the present day counterpart, with the almost the same level of confusion that Sloan has in the first half of the episode.
ROD SERLING - NARRATOR: [Middle narration] A man can think a lot of thoughts and walk a lot of pavement between afternoon and night. And to a man like Martin Sloan, to whom a memory has suddenly become reality, a resolve can come just as clearly and inexorably as stars in a summer night. Martin Sloan is now back in town. And his resolve is to put in a claim to the past.
The centrepiece of the episode follows Martin at night hurrying over to the carousel where he hears young Marty playing. He is struck by some odd sense of worry and is led by the sound of a calliope to the park where he boards the carousel. It is in this moment where we find the best editing of the episode, by Joseph Gluck, who builds the momentum of the carousel before retreating off it seems to the let the rest of the scene play out in takes longer than we’ve seen so far. Purposefully allowing us to stand back and view every moment of Young’s expression as it fades. The scene ultimately comes to a head when young Marty falls from the carousel, after being chased by Martin and damages his leg severely. In that exact moment Martin falls to the floor of the ride experiencing a sudden shock of the same pain. This is where one might say the ‘twist’ in the tale comes. But what makes this so outstanding as an episode of The Twilight Zone is its insistence to not have such a climatic twist and sting. The twist here is not a comeuppance as so many of the twists were, here it is instead a beautiful metaphor for the pain that can be caused if one were to attempt to regain the past that they have lost. Martin’s father Robert surmises this in this the final scene they share...
ROBERT SLOAN: [to his son] You’ve been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead.
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Whereas it is with most episodes of the show that the twist is the final chord, I find that in some of the best episodes the twist comes around five minutes before the end and we do spend some time after, remaining in it, instead of cutting straight to Serling’s final narration. Eye of the Beholder remains after the bandages are revealed for instance. Walking Distance is another prime example, allowing us to then move into a scene between Martin and his father and a return to the present. The carousel scene itself concludes with a haunting short montage of close-ups on the faces of the horses upon the carousel, evoking a feeling of ghostly nostalgia – all the warmth of the daytime scenes of the first part of the show seemingly vanished. It is just prior to this montage that we are met with some of the finest words that Serling ever put into an episode, delivered by Young as Sloan addressing his recently wounded younger self.
MARTIN SLOAN: [To his younger self] Martin, I only wanted to tell you that this is a wonderful time of life for you. Don't let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won't be any more merry-go-rounds, no more cotton candy, no more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you that this is a wonderful time for you. Now. Here. That's all, Martin. That's all I wanted to tell you. God help me. That's all I wanted to tell you.
The episode is littered with other very specific choices in its set design and cinematography; from the initial extended camera move pushing into the mirror as Martin heads into town, offering us a distinct Carrol-esque through the looking glass view of the fantastical events that are about to occur in the piece. Another that stands out for me is the choice of how we are introduced to Martin’s parents, through a screen covering the door, adding a ghostly shadow to the couple from Martin’s point of view. Ultimately very fitting as at this point in Martin’s life his parents are very much dead and so seeing them once more would be a very haunting experience. But perhaps the most haunting image of the episode is the slow spotlight that appears upon Martin following the carousel sequence, as a swarm of children slowly pass him by – his past quite literally walking straight past him, with him immobile and unable to stop the fleeting speed of time. The spotlight zones us into Martin’s psyche in this moment and is the sort of fantasy based flourish in the cinematography that reminds us that we are in The Twilight Zone, for there are now aliens or horrors in this episode, just the pitiful terrors and bitter loneliness's of real life.
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The final piece of the puzzle of how truly excellent this episode is, is Bernard Hermann’s score specifically written for the episode. A whole new collection of music solely written for the story presented, and whereas Hermann (who contributed music to the show often) would often lift from a vast assortment of cues and the like, he found the story and script so intriguing that he couldn’t resist giving it its own musical voice. Hermann’s music here is haunting and elegiac and beautiful in its sweeping melodies and its calming refrains, with moments of rattling suspense and caution amidst a powerful and overwhelming sense of dread and pain. Such was the power of one of our truly great composers for the screen. There is an overall melancholic quality to the episode, where nostalgia becomes something less so dangerous, but certainly something harmful. This perversion of one of the great ideals in life is delivered with as much poetic prose and warmth however as if it were a piece about the joys and bliss of the thing. Serling’s closing narration for the episode still reads as one of the finest pieces of prose that the man ever wrote and certainly one of the greatest sections of writing that was ever put upon a TV screen. So precise and delicate in its imagery and its prophetic nature, that it can’t help but lead to reflection and introspection for the viewer. For everybody has been Martin Sloan and albeit not all of us are 36 years old, nor the vice president in charge of media at some ad agency (although us Mad Men fans might wish we were) – Everybody has longed to return to the past from time to time. From fleeting glimpses backwards to long nights of the soul, ultimately devastating in their effect, for after all none of us can ever go back, we can only go forward.
ROD SERLING - NARRATOR: [Closing Narration] Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice-president in charge of media. Successful in most things, but not in the one effort that all men try at some time in their lives - trying to go home again. And also like all men, perhaps there'll be an occasion - maybe a summer night sometime - when he'll look up from what he's doing and listen to the distant music of a calliope, and hear the voices and the laughter of the people and the places of his past. And perhaps across his mind, there'll flit a little errant wish, that a man might not have to become old, never outgrow the parks and the merry-go-rounds of his youth. And he'll smile then, too, because he'll know that it is just an errant wish, some wisp of memory, not too important really, some laughing ghosts that would cross a man's mind - that are a part of The Twilight Zone.
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Serling’s inspiration for the episode was his own home town of Binghamton, New York. The episode was written during a stretch of his life where his workloads were extensive and he was knocking out scripts for the show, along with other television scripts, aswell as writing for novels, and so for one to correlate Martin Sloan’s weariness to Serling would not be too inappropriate. It was around this time in his script process that Serling would dictate the scripts into a tape recorder by his pool, before a secretary would transcribe them and he would then make notes and additions based on those pages. Serling wrote 92 of the show’s 156 episodes and so a natural weariness could have been very much accepted, especially with the show’s moderate ratings and its’ three cancellations over its run. And although the town of Homewood where the film is set is wholly fictitious, all of the other locations that are referred to are real places from Serling’s home state of New York. The park from the episode is in fact directly inspired by Recreation Park in Binghamton, which has a similar Carousel and bandstand. There is even now a plaque upon the Recreation Park bandstand in honour of the episode. It is this bleeding of real life-elements into a fantasy world that lead to the personal nature of the episode to Serling being so clear. It is this personal aspect that bleeds into the film’s script and leads it to be as immensely powerful and transcendent as it is.
Young did go on to win an Oscar for
best supporting actor for his role in the 1969 film They Shoot Horses Don’t They? But Young’s reputation nowadays is more
or less solely based around his performance here in Walking Distance and the rather tragic end to his life, with him murdering his new wife of three weeks (German actress Kim Schmidt) before
turning the gun on himself and taking his own life, with a motivation for the
sad and grisly murder still remaining unclear. Young’s later life was also
ravaged by a desperate alcoholism that led to costing him multiple acting jobs
later in his life. One could very easily correlate the weariness and tragedy of
Young to his character in the show, but I feel that such a correlation would be
in bad taste. I would rather point to it in regard to Serling’s writing once
more, that in just 25 minutes Serling could approximate the complete loss and
pain of a man’s life. He wrote for Sloan, but yes, one could say he wrote for
Young too. But ultimately Serling as writing for any man who has ever been consumed whole by loneliness and disillusion.
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The episode has garnered a rather high reputation amongst the critical body regarding The Twilight Zone, but often is an outlier on many rankings and ‘best of’ lists. I feel this is chiefly down to the fact that it’s perhaps not as famous as the others, nor does it have any of the sci-fi or horror elements so culturally related to the show, embedded to no end in its mythos and iconography. People know Beemus breaking his glass, people know the bandages being removed, people know “it’s a cookbook”. But it is the unfortunate rarity that people know of Martin Sloan as his return to Homewood. I hope that those who don’t soon do and those who do return to this glorious episode, for as I found in re-watching it for the umpteenth time; there is an elegiac and profound beauty that never grows old, nor weary as we might, or as Sloan might. The episode lives on and shall forever and is now submitted for your approval as the greatest Twilight Zone episode of all time.
- Thomas Carruthers
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