by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I watched a quite intriguing
episode of a short-lived 1950’s TV anthology series called The Unexpected, produced by Henry Ziv’s enterprising little company
(his biggest hit was Sea Hunt,
the deep-sea diving show starring Lloyd Bridges). The episode was called “Split
Second,” and essentially derived from two 1930’s films: Two Seconds, in which Edward G. Robinson played a proletarian
lured by a no-good woman into a life of crime — the gimmick was that he was
about to be executed when the movie began and the rest of the film was his
flashback as his life flashed before him in the last two seconds before he croaked
— and Buried Loot, the 1935 debut
of the MGM “Crime Does Not Pay” series, in which Robert Taylor plays a criminal
who decides to turn himself in after he’s stashed the money from his latest
robbery so he can serve a short sentence and recover the money after he’s
released and is legally in the clear. This version casts Neville Brand as
Herbert Maley, a messenger for a financial company who’s assigned to deliver
$43,000 in cash to another business — on the New York subways, which makes one
wonder why his boss didn’t assign this task to someone who could drive. Instead
he decides to embezzle the money and lavish it on Georgia (Veda Ann Borg in a
remarkable performance — as an actress she had a good deal more going for her
than just a great name), an entertainer in a small-time nightclub who’s hoping
some well-heeled sugar daddy will notice her, marry her and put her on easy
street for the rest of her life. He turns himself in for the crime but claims
that after he stole the money, someone else on the subway stole it from him —
but what he actually did with it was put it in a safe-deposit box and pay the
rent on the box for 10 years in advance. The only problem was that instead of
signing for the box under his real name, he used the alias “Shackleton” — and
when he gets out and he and Georgia go to the bank where the safe-deposit box
is and try to retrieve the money, he can’t remember the name. (There’s an
ironic touch in the script by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee — no, not that Robert E. Lee, but the highly prestigious
playwrighting team whose best-known work is Inherit the Wind — that when he’s trying to remember the name, one of
the names he and Georgia come up with is “Admiral Byrd,” who like the real
Ernest Shackleton was a South Pole explorer.)
Unable to come up with the right
alias, and dumped by Georgia when it’s clear he isn’t going to be able to get
the money and he’s come close to strangling her (it might have been even more
terrific drama if he had
strangled her and found himself being sent back to prison for murder just as he
remembers the name), he leaps off the Brooklyn Bridge and commits suicide — the
sequence shown at the beginning as an unctuous-voiced narrator (the overall
host was Herbert Marshall but it is definitely not his voice) explains what’s going on and ends up as
commentator for the whole episode. Based on a story by Maurice Level (which
suggests that it might have originally taken place in France and Lawrence and
Lee moved it to the U.S.), and effectively directed for suspense by Eddie
Davis, “Split Second” is an excellent vest-pocket thriller that proved that the
half-hour crime drama was a perfectly legitimate genre of its own and didn’t need the routine padding crime
shows get now that an hour-long running time (albeit with more commercials —
back then a half-hour show ran 26 minutes and now an hour show runs 42, so the
current crime shows aren’t that
much longer than this). Charles was startled at how many envelope-pushing
anthology series there were in the 1950’s — not only the famous ones like Alfred
Hitchcock Presents and The
Twilight Zone but Tales of
Tomorrow, One Step Beyond, The Outer Limits
and even more obscure ones like this (as well as the ones imported from radio
like Lights Out, Inner Sanctum
and Suspense) — and how cynical
they were about the supposedly sacred 1950’s values like hard work and success
(something one also sees in other popular works of the period: novels like The
Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, nonfiction
works like The Organization Man
and The Lonely Crowd, and movies
like Rebel Without a Cause and
the still-audacious Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, whose comments on instant celebrity and the
emptiness of business “success” still ring true today).
