The Twilight Zone Review: The Lateness of the Hour

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By William Kozy

“The Lateness of the Hour” was the first of the six Twilight Zone episodes to be shot in the failed experiment called “Let’s shoot videotape to save money!” The poor visual quality though was very obvious to viewers, and the practice was soon scrapped. In my survey asking writers and TZ fans to vote for their favorite episodes, this one fared poorly, receiving only two votes from the over 3,000 respondents, tying it with 11 other episodes, a few of which deserved better. But not this one.

The opening shot is very promising, a huge Gothic mansion at night being pelted by a rain storm. You relish the feeling of settling in for a good ghostly yarn. Inside, a pretty blonde, Jana, peers out at, searchingly. Offscreen we hear a woman moaning nearly orgasmically. The camera pans to her—it is Jana’s mother receiving a shoulder massage from a maid. Already the personal/personnel dynamics feel odd, but our interest is piqued. The blonde, played by the lovely Inger Stevens, so pretty in “The Hitch Hiker” suffers here from the harsh contrast lighting of the video format. She looks at least ten years older. She has a photo album and asks her father (John Hoyt, seen in “Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?”) about it as he relaxes with a book. He’s no help, so she interrupts her mother’s massage to ask about the snapshot.

Ms. Stevens’ performance has been faulted by some critics, and although she’d never win an Emmy for it, it’s difficult to pinpoint where she goes wrong. In fact, there’s something almost so right about what she’s doing based on how the story ends which you’ll predict easily in a few minutes. There’s one thing she does technically that I actually find quite impressive. Watch her closely, and you’ll notice she very very very rarely…blinks.

So we know that the episode has been compromised by shooting video, but why does the sound also suffer? Anytime an actor in the background speaks, their voice is exceedingly low in the mix. Usually, the fix for that is called dubbing, whereby an actor re-records his lines later, in a sound recording booth while watching his performance onscreen to get the synchronization as close as possible. When shooting film back then, the film and the sound recordist’s tapes were created on two separate elements—35 mm film reels and ¼” magnetic sound tape. It was a simple matter to replace the problematic sound recorded on that sound tape with the newly recorded “dubbed” recording. However, these videotaped TZ episodes were shot on low-band 2″ quadruplex videotape, whereby the sound was recorded onto an audio track along the top of the videotape. That made it difficult to replace the sound recorded on set since it was no longer a separate element. The sound was fused with the picture from the get-go. So now, the sound recordist is forced into a situation where the sound needs to be recorded perfectly while shooting, without the fallback of dubbing being available. Thus, with shots where the performer is way in the background and a boom mic can’t get close enough to pick up his voice well, the sound isn’t very good. And since they didn’t have wireless body mics to help, we’re stuck with sound recorded with a mic several feet above the actor’s head.

Another weird quirk about this episode is the number of times you can catch the actors being aware of the camera, stealing a quick millisecond glance at it. Some of those cameras were fairly imposing due to their size, mounted on huge dollies. I’m imagining they were very hard to ignore.

But it’s the story aspect of this episode that made things very tricky for Ms. Stevens. It’s a risk for an actor to play a robot; the performance can come off as too mannered. But it’s an even bigger risk to play a robot when it’s supposed to be a surprise reveal to the audience at the end, that the character is a robot. If the actor plays the part with a hint of an underlying robotic nature, a totally understandable choice, we the audience might even enjoy that choice if done subtly. But it we don’t know the character is a robot until later, then we may spend a lot of time wondering, “Gee why is so-and-so giving such a stilted performance?” That’s the trap that Inger Stevens has walked into. Hopefully when the not so surprising surprise is revealed, audiences forgave her and they nodded appreciatively, “Ah, so that’s why she never blinked, walked so efficiently, pivoted so sharply, etc.”

Jana’s big complaint seems to be some sort of righteous indignation that her parents are using the entirely robotic house staff to do everything, while they turn her father and mother “into jelly!” One of the robots tells Jana that she sounds jealous, causing Jana to push her down the stairs. The robot, rises up with a smirk. And then Mr. Serling makes his appearance perhaps later than he’s ever appeared before for an opening monologue.

We pick back up with Jana blaming her parents for turning her into “an unsocial, unworldly, insulated freak.” Her father counters that he’s protected her from the outside world’s war, poverty, disease, etc. She accuses his protectionism as being imprisonment, making her become as vegetative as they are making themselves. Frankly I don’t know what the Hell she thinks they should be doing. They’re old! Does she want them heading out clubbing? They deserve to sit around reading, pipe smoking, and having a doting staff. Jana comes off as more of a brat then a crusading protagonist. Like an idiot, she grabs a glass from a maid and pours out the water and smashes the glass on the ground proving….what? She tells her parents that instead of being the ones in control, they are being controlled. And the evidence of this is….zero. Nonexistent. At no point does a robot dictate any sort of imposition on the parents.

Arguing against her pleas that her father destroy these creations, he asks her if she has any idea of the scientific precision and hours of work that went into making them. He explains the complexity of their minds as well, the implanted childhood memories, their wills, their distinct personalities. Jana demands that he destroy the robots or else she’ll leave, but I fail to see how getting rid of the robots helps with what she truly wants for herself: To be out in the world with normal people. “People who live and work and then die. But do it properly, the way God intended. That’s where I want to be, out there! I want my freedom!” So the script is very confused about its characters’ spines. Freedom is what she wants; the robots are essentially a non-factor with that character throughline, so all her blathering about them is a red herring.

The robots converge and tell her she is misbehaving, and she runs upstairs throwing a tantrum. She proclaims to everyone that they’re jokes, and before running to her room to pack, she warns her father that the robots may be indestructible, but he is not. The scene closes with an ominous shot of the robots crowding about him and his wife a little too closely. This bit amounts to nothing. Just another cheap trick with no basis in any truth set up by the story. Father goes to Jana’s room to have a talk—she’s not really going to leave is she? Here’s the stupid thing about the very crux of the plot. She threatens to leave if he doesn’t destroy the robots. So by implication she would stay? But that contrasts very sharply with what she said she wanted—to go out into the world!

He begs her to say, but she refuses. He pauses, reviewing the situation and tells her he’ll do as she says. But he has a look that tells me he’s got something up his sleeve. He heads downstairs, and summons the staff, ordering them to head into his basement work room. There is some pushback, but they end up obeying the order. When they have all left, Jana glides down the stairs with a smirky look of triumph that does not endear her to us.

Next thing we know, it’s just the three of them. The robots are gone. Jana is overjoyed saying that they’ll live normal lives. She then lists a bunch of things that they’ll now be able to do, but not one of them is something they couldn’t do with the robots around. But then she says she’s going to find a young man and have children. “Oh father,” she says hugging him, “Grandchildren!” But her parents look worried. Jana asks what’s wrong, and her father improvises an excuse. But Jana is on to him: “Something’s not right!”

Jana immediately grabs a photo album, and starts asking why there aren’t any photos of her as a young girl anywhere. They’re speechless. The truth dawns on Jana, “Oh no! It couldn’t be true!” Father tries to reassure that she’s still their daughter and they love her despite anything. But she knows the full truth, that she too has been manufactured. Jana runs out distraught and once again takes her place at the top of the stairs to declare things: “I’m a machine!” she yells, splaying her arms out too theatrically. And then she starts banging her arms against the banister yelling, “No pain! No pain at all!” So in the short time she’s been “alive” she’s never noticed that she feels no pain? I’m not buying that. She then says, “No love. I can’t even feel love” and she breaks down sobbing hysterically. Now why would she not feel love? It just doesn’t make sense—if she can be angry as she’s demonstrated, if she can feel remorse as she’s demonstrated, if she can feel utter sadness as she’s demonstrating now, why can’t she also feel love?

The parents agree that they just couldn’t stand not having her around anymore. So what does father do? We cut to the last scene—it’s sometime later, but alas it’s raining again—and the camera pans slowly settling on a close-up of Mother moaning again, as she receives a massage from a maid’s hands. She says “Just a little to the left, Nelda. Not quite so hard.” The camera tilts up and it’s Jana. Cue the scary musical chord! Jana though has a far off look as she says, “Of course Mrs. Loren, of course.

I rate this episode a 3.

Hey, here’s a game you can play: “Count the boom and camera shadows!” I stopped after four in the first few minutes.

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