The first drink Al Denton takes in this episode he takes off the ground. He has sung for it, in a voice that keeps sliding off the note, and when the number is over Dan Hotaling breaks the bottle on the boards anyway and the men laugh a second time, harder, because the second laugh is the one they came for. Denton goes down after the wet glass. He gets his mouthful. He also gets a scratch across his cheek that the next scene has quietly healed, a small lapse in continuity nobody in October 1959 was going to run back and check, and one that reads now like accidental tact: the cut closes, the way the town will shortly agree to forget everything it has just stood and watched.
Twenty-five minutes later two men will have their shooting hands blown apart inside the same saloon, and the older of them will call it a blessing. Between the broken glass and the ruined hand lies almost everything Rod Serling wanted out of this half hour, and it has surprisingly little to do with second chances as the phrase is ordinarily used.
Watch what Hotaling actually does, because Martin Landau does not play it as hatred. He plays it as production. Hotaling arranges the crowd, sets the terms, calls for the number, cues the laugh. He invites Denton to pay for his drink in his own inimitable fashion, and the word is worth pausing over, since inimitable is not a bully’s word. It is a word from a playbill. It flatters the performer while stripping him. When the bit is finished, Hotaling gathers his men and proposes they go inside and have some music, which is precisely the phrasing of a man who has enjoyed the opening act and is ready for the headliner. Later, when he wants an encore, he announces to the street that here we go again and calls Denton their little songbird. What is running on that porch is not a beating. Beatings are quick and require no audience. This is a show with a standing booking, and the ease with which the crowd falls into its part — knowing the song, knowing when to whistle — tells us it plays most days.
Landau was thirty-one and three months past the American release of North by Northwest, where he had made Leonard, James Mason’s secretary, into one of the most watchable henchmen in American film: fastidious, jealous, deadly, lit from within by a devotion he cannot name. Hotaling has none of Leonard’s refinement and the same appetite for proximity. He crowds Denton, leans in, keeps his face near enough to read the response, and every so often his mouth does something between a smile and a wince, the look of a man tasting something he likes and is faintly ashamed of liking. Cruelty like this needs a face to work on. It is satisfied by watching damage register.
It also needs the others. Humiliation is a group product. It requires a victim, a director, an audience willing to laugh, and — this is the part the episode is unusually clear-eyed about — at least one decent person who objects and does nothing. That is Charlie the bartender, standing inside the doorway with Liz while the song goes on outside, saying he likes it no less than she does and speaking of the misery they give that fellow out there, third person, passive, the distance of a man watching weather. When Charlie finally does step out and tell Hotaling to lay off, Hotaling kicks the door back into him and sends him sprawling, and that ends Charlie’s intervention for the evening. His decency is real. It is also, in the exact sense, ornamental. It alters nothing except how Charlie feels about himself.
Liz is different, and the difference is easy to overlook, partly because the plot gives her no room and partly because half a century of criticism has trained us to file the saloon woman with the good heart under a single heading and move on. Jeanne Cooper, who was almost thirty-one and had been working steadily in Westerns since 1953, does something more specific than believing in him. When Hotaling calls for the encore, she tells Denton not to do it, and then makes him an offer: she will give him a drink herself, and he will not have to do that for it. The precision is startling. She is not trying to save him from whiskey. She is trying to save him from the price. Faster than anyone else on that street she has grasped that what Hotaling extracts is the right to be a man who is not for sale, and she proposes to cancel the charge. Denton sings anyway, and tells her gently that Hotaling will give him a drink, meaning that Hotaling’s drink comes on terms he has stopped resenting. Kindness offered free has become harder to accept than contempt offered at a rate.
Serling’s opening narration describes a man who has begun his dying early, on a long route through a maze of bottles, one who would trade an arm or a leg or a piece of his soul for another chance. Given how the episode ends, that is an unusually literal setup. Notice how the rest of the narration is arranged. The camera finds the peddler, the fanciful little ...
