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<\/a>By William Kozy<\/strong><\/p>\nA plaintive oboe accompanies the sad sight of Jonathan West, a ventriloquist just off the boat from Ireland\u2014he is in a pawn shop, and with poignant reluctance, has just pawned his grandfather\u2019s 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\u2019t fare well with most of the over 3,000 voters responding to the question \u201cWhat is your favorite episode of the original Twilight Zone series?\u201d It received only 3 votes, tying it with 6 others for 133rd thru 139th place.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019t buckle. Agnes, the kindly landlady apologizes but he gently tells her that \u201cIt\u2019s all right. I imagine you have your hands full.\u201d<\/p>\n
Inside his apartment he cheerfully addresses his dummy, telling him he\u2019ll 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 \u201cTZ ventriloquist dummy episodes\u201d, called simply, \u201cThe Dummy.\u201d 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 \u201cThe Dummy.\u201d 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\u2019s Hollywood Studio off to the side of an elevator in the Twilight Zone Tower of Terror ride. When the elevator descends and you\u2019re waiting for the doors to open\u2014there is a pile of dusty \u201cjunk\u201d sitting in the dark and there you\u2019ll see him.<\/p>\n
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: \u201cWhy don\u2019t you stop kidding yourself, buddy? Face it, you\u2019re finished.\u201d It\u2019s the moment we first hear the dummy talk, and just as importantly, it\u2019s the moment we first see Jonathan see Caesar talk. So Jonathan\u2019s reaction here is a significant one in steering us toward figuring out the answer to the question that people have asked regarding whether Caesar\u2019s 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\u2019s observation of Caesar\u2019s talking and moving. But until that point, we are meant to wonder about it, just as we were meant to wonder about it in \u201cThe Dummy.\u201d<\/p>\n
So let\u2019s 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\u2019s tricky though here, is that Cooper\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s face does settle into a morose frown, easily the reaction of a man who is faced with the possible truth of the dummy\u2019s criticism as opposed to a WTF!? reaction.<\/p>\n
And once again as so often with Serling\u2019s monologues, he pretty much removes the mystery of our wondering \u201cis it this or is it that?\u201d by spelling things out for us when he says, \u201cA wooden tyrant with a mind and a voice of his own, who is about to talk Jonathan West into the Twilight Zone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jonathan is next seen dressing up for an important audition. As in so many TZ episodes, a child comes a knockin\u2019 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\u2019t move because Jonathan isn\u2019t manipulating him on his lap\u2014Jonathan is tying his tie, still getting ready. And Jonathan\u2019s lips across the room don\u2019t budge an inch either. Susan rightly observes that she didn\u2019t see his lips move at all, but in her true bratty fashion she chooses not to be impressed with this, and instead reprimands him, \u201cIf you\u2019re so good, then how come you can\u2019t get a job?\u201d Cooper does a terrific little gesture here as he responds, \u201cWell all that\u2019s going to change tonight\u201d as he pats her gently on the cheek\u2014but look again and you can see him gritting his teeth as he pats her, almost as though his subconscious can\u2019t help but poke through, imagining him really slapping her but good.<\/p>\n
Susan leaves, and Caesar warns Jonathan to \u201ckeep that brat out of this room.\u201d A technical question arises here regarding Caesar\u2019s abilities: His mouth moves when he tells Jonathan that, but why? He didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s not incredible. So we do get a pretty good idea of why he\u2019s not winning many jobs. My question though would be, why doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t it? I suppose we can imagine various reasons\u2014perhaps 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.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s lowered himself, but then in a sliver of a moment, a glint in his eye hints that perhaps he is thrilled with it.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t 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. \u201cI knew you talked. I knew it!\u201d<\/p>\n
The ending posits a bizarre direction they\u2019re 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\u2019s totally up for it! This episode was co-written by Adele T. Strassfield and producer William Froug (she was Froug\u2019s 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. \u201cThe Hitch Hiker\u201d would be one of those.<\/p>\n
I rate this episode a 5, mostly because of Cooper\u2019s performance which doesn\u2019t get enough mention.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n [si-contact-form form=’2′]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [AdSense-A] By William Kozy A plaintive oboe accompanies the sad sight of Jonathan West, a ventriloquist just off the boat from Ireland\u2014he is in a pawn shop, and with poignant reluctance, has just pawned his grandfather\u2019s watch, practically begging the owner not to sell it until Jonathan can buy it back. Stafford Repp by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[24440],"class_list":["post-96887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boxing-news","tag-the-twilight-zone-review-caesar-and-me"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96887"}],"version-history":[{"count":-2,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96887\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}