The Twilight Zone Review: Caesar and Me

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By William Kozy

A plaintive oboe accompanies the sad sight of Jonathan West, a ventriloquist just off the boat from Ireland—he is in a pawn shop, and with poignant reluctance, has just pawned his grandfather’s watch, practically begging the owner not to sell it until Jonathan can buy it back. Stafford Repp by the way plays the pawnbroker, and also gave voice to Caesar, the dummy in this episode. Jackie Cooper plays Mr. West, and his accent is lovely. Throughout the episode, we pine for things to work out for him as he tries to put on an optimistic front, even after failure besets him at every turn. It is one of the more underrated and moving lead actor performances in any of the TZ episodes. The episode itself however, didn’t fare well with most of the over 3,000 voters responding to the question “What is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?” It received only 3 votes, tying it with 6 others for 133rd thru 139th place.

Jonathan has come to America to seek fame and fortune in show business with his act, toting his alter ego dummy, Little Caesar, in a suitcase. As if things weren’t bad enough, he also has to deal with Susan, a precocious girl at his boarding house who, by the end of the episode will turn out to be far more menacing than we thought. She’s played by Morgan Brittany who would grow up to become one of the most beautiful femme fatale actresses working in nighttime soap dramas during the 80s. She taunts Jonathan about his unemployed status, but his strong Irish will doesn’t buckle. Agnes, the kindly landlady apologizes but he gently tells her that “It’s all right. I imagine you have your hands full.”

Inside his apartment he cheerfully addresses his dummy, telling him he’ll make dinner for them. We get our first look at the dummy which is the same one that was used two years before, in the more successful of the two “TZ ventriloquist dummy episodes”, called simply, “The Dummy.” It was by created by Revillo Pettee, an American ventriloquist supplies maker, who modeled it after actor George Murdock, who voiced Willy the dummy in “The Dummy.” Extra trivia tidbit: That dummy is owned by magician David Copperfield, kept in his private collection. There is however, a replica of Little Caesar at Disneyland’s Hollywood Studio off to the side of an elevator in the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride. When the elevator descends and you’re waiting for the doors to open—there is a pile of dusty “junk” sitting in the dark and there you’ll see him.

Getting back to the episode, Jonathan gives Caesar a pep talk while preparing potato soup for him. At the end of his monologue he receives only a snipe from Caesar: “Why don’t you stop kidding yourself, buddy? Face it, you’re finished.” It’s the moment we first hear the dummy talk, and just as importantly, it’s the moment we first see Jonathan see Caesar talk. So Jonathan’s reaction here is a significant one in steering us toward figuring out the answer to the question that people have asked regarding whether Caesar’s sentience is real or imagined by Jonathan. The answer to that becomes very obvious in the end, when we are present for a third party character’s observation of Caesar’s talking and moving. But until that point, we are meant to wonder about it, just as we were meant to wonder about it in “The Dummy.”

So let’s posit the assumption that Caesar and Jonathan have been talking all along, even before we meet up with them. That to me seems the most logical scenario, or else in this scene Jonathan would have had a much more alarmed reaction to this inanimate puppet actually speaking. What’s tricky though here, is that Cooper’s reaction does come perilously close to that, but in an ultra-subdued way. Especially since the music cue also plays it like a shocking moment. But when you look at Jonathan’s face, you can make a case for him perhaps looking more hurt than shocked and of course he would be hurt, because it was a very hurtful thing that Caesar said to him. And indeed, Jonathan’s face does settle into a morose frown, easily the reaction of a man who is faced with the possible truth of the dummy’s criticism as opposed to a WTF!? reaction.

And once again as so often with Serling’s monologues, he pretty much removes the mystery of our wondering “is it this or is it that?” by spelling things out for us when he says, “A wooden tyrant with a mind and a voice of his own, who is about to talk Jonathan West into the Twilight Zone.”

Jonathan is next seen dressing up for an important audition. As in so many TZ episodes, a child comes a knockin’ at the door to enter a scene and either badger or make nice with our lead character. In this episode, the child is a monster as depraved as Caesar. She taunts and teases Jonathan but he is only as sweet as can be back to her. In this scene he gives in to her request and does a bit of the routine for her. Jonathan gives the set-up and we cut to Caesar delivering the punchline, but his mouth doesn’t move because Jonathan isn’t manipulating him on his lap—Jonathan is tying his tie, still getting ready. And Jonathan’s lips across the room don’t budge an inch either. Susan rightly observes that she didn’t see his lips move at all, but in her true bratty fashion she chooses not to be impressed with this, and instead reprimands him, “If you’re so good, then how come you can’t get a job?” Cooper does a terrific little gesture here as he responds, “Well all that’s going to change tonight” as he pats her gently on the cheek—but look again and you can see him gritting his teeth as he pats her, almost as though his subconscious can’t help but poke through, imagining him really slapping her but good.

Susan leaves, and Caesar warns Jonathan to “keep that brat out of this room.” A technical question arises here regarding Caesar’s abilities: His mouth moves when he tells Jonathan that, but why? He didn’t move his mouth when the two of them gave a demonstration for Susan, so why does Caesar bother to move his mouth at all when communicating? And theoretically, when they did their joke for Susan, they were on opposite sides of the room so it would have been very easy for Susan to know where the sound was coming from. The writing gets away with making us not think about the repercussions of that as it quickly moves on to the audition.

Jonathan and Caesar perform an old joke and the two men who own the club are clearly unimpressed. I did appreciate though, that there is a subtle change in the voice that Caesar uses as his onstage character voice compared to his voice in the scenes alone with Jonathan. The other smart aspect of the scene is that Cooper keeps his mouth ever so slightly open for the audition so that even though his ventriloquist proficiency is not bad, it’s not incredible. So we do get a pretty good idea of why he’s not winning many jobs. My question though would be, why doesn’t he go all out and completely close his mouth as he did in the Susan scene. That would surely wow club owners despite his old jokes, wouldn’t it? I suppose we can imagine various reasons—perhaps he wants to protect himself from being discovered as having an actual talking puppet, so he has to make the technique not quite as impossible-looking as he could have.

To cut to the chase, he is persuaded by Caesar to pull off a string of petty burglaries to get by. Cooper does a great job of showing the despair over how he’s lowered himself, but then in a sliver of a moment, a glint in his eye hints that perhaps he is thrilled with it.

There are plenty of giveaways in the episode to indicate that Caesar actually walks and talks on his own. Anytime we see him do something when Jonathan isn’t present would be a giveaway, and he does when watching from the doorway as Jonathan heads off to a job interview, and then closes the door. So really the cat is out of the bag already, and the climax holds no real shock for us despite it being the first time another character holds a conversation in private with Caesar. After Jonathan is taken away by the cops for one of the thefts (Cooper is very moving in that scene as he pleads with Caesar to reveal his true nature), Caesar then pssssts to bratty Susan who then comes over to him. “I knew you talked. I knew it!”

The ending posits a bizarre direction they’re heading in. This little girl and Caesar embarking on a life of crime together after Caesar tells her to poison dart her aunt! And she’s totally up for it! This episode was co-written by Adele T. Strassfield and producer William Froug (she was Froug’s secretary), and although it is the only TZ screenplay credited to a woman, there have been other woman writers who wrote works that were adapted by the show into episodes. “The Hitch Hiker” would be one of those.

I rate this episode a 5, mostly because of Cooper’s performance which doesn’t get enough mention.

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