A Stop at Willoughby

The really sad thing is the comment someone made that A Stop at Willoughby is dull. It may have moments where the victim is simply sitting on the train, with little happening, but I think this is the point. After years apparently dealing with Mr. Misrell, anyone would wish for peace and a slowed down environment. I guess everyone is entitled to their personal opinion. But, certainly, anyone who would truly see the episode for the first time, would be blown away by the ending. Dull, this I don't understand. The idea is extremely relevant today, in our hyper-speed society, where people get mad if a car honks at them for driving bad while text messaging. I think we don't come close to smelling the flowers often enough.

Our protagonist in this Twilight Zone story is James Daly a forty something advertising executive who is really under the pressure from his boss Howard Smith. As Smith is fond of saying it's a 'push push push' business they're in and no room for failure.

On the home front wife Patricia Donahue is tired of being married as she sees it to a failure.

But on that commuter train to their little Eisenhower era palace in Connecticut Daly is suddenly on this 1880s era train coming into a town called Willoughby which he can't recall. It looks like the kind of small town Booth Tarkington might written about with a slower pace of life. Looks ideal.

Daly really makes this episode work with his performance as an every man type character. This could really have worked as a feature film and I could have seen Jack Lemmon in the lead. And Howard Smith is great as the tyrannical boss who loves being a tyrant.

I could just feel for this guy. The fifties ad agency where everyone is expected to spend every waking hour working, trying to come up with some insipid slogan or campaign. The bosses yell, the wives demand, the pressure builds. I have to say that this episode makes me tired. That poor man, doing something for which he is not cut out. And the wife, who in the fifties would have expected to be treated to everything in life. Her price: Marrying him. Anyway, somewhere exists this dreamland, this Willoughby, where things are calm and gentle and there is a band playing. Where stress is not a part of the picture. And we can see that this is still something we long for. But where is it? And why is it always summer. Well, if you're a Twilight Zone fan, you know where Willoughby is.

Along with Rod Serling's choice as writer, A Stop at Willoughby is one of the all time favorite of many fans in the entire Twilight Zone series. Its theme is classic and recalls the never-never Utopias of a human heart desperate to escape the pressures of every day reality.

Shangri-La from James Hilton's Lost Horizon and Brigadoon, the musical by Alan Jay Lerner (based on an old German story, Germelshausen by Freidrich Gerstacker) are just two of these places. Hilton's Shangri-La is based on the concept of Shambhala, a mystical city in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.

In this memorable series show Serling's Willoughby takes its place among the literary Utopias. It was expanded into a TV movie in 2000, entitled, For All Time, starring Mark Harmon with a new teleplay by Vivienne Radkoff.

Many of us have from time to time dreamed of such a place where we could leave all of our cares behind and live an idyllic life. As in the best of The Twilight Zone episodes we are given that moment of revelation in the end and this time with a twist that some might call tragic while others might see it as hopeful.

This is a TZ that might be worth viewing twice. The story can seem a bit lacking in excitement and a little disappointing first time around. Yet the overall experience of Gart Williams (James Daley) and the fineness of details is worth reliving. The subject matter is trademark Serling. A man finding the cut and thrust of the modern working world slightly inhuman was also used, (much more wonderfully) by Serling for the only episode of 'Night Gallery' to reach TZ standard of greatness ('They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar'). Willoughby is the restful place Gart longs for.

Willoughby inadvertently raises the question 'what should life be about?'. Howard Smith is repulsively excellent as the terrible big boss, Misrell (the name fits the character in a Dickensian fashion). He loathsomely barks 'push, push, push' out the corner of his mouth. Patricia Donahue shines as an absolutely heartless wife to Gart, making his state of mind all the more understandable.

Leave now and catch the train. Get a return ticket as this may grow on you.