The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Nine “Perchance To Dream”

Original Air Date: November 27, 1959
Writer: Charles Beaumont
Director: Robert Florey

“Twelve o’clock noon. An ordinary scene, an ordinary city. Lunchtime for thousands of ordinary people. To most of them, this hour will be a rest, a pleasant break in the day’s routine. To most, but not all. To Edward Hall, time is an enemy, and the hour to come is a matter of life and death.”
-Rod Serling

Was it all just a dream? In “Perchance To Dream” we meet Edward Hall (played by Richard Conte who famously played the elder Don Barzini in The Godfather), a psychiatric patient who is visiting his doctor, Dr. Eliot Rathmann (played by John Larch). During his appointment, Mr. Hall explains a series of recurring vivid dreams he has experienced in chapters, growing ever closer to a fateful conclusion. In his dreams, he is visited by a seductive temptress named Maya (played by Suzanne Lloyd). At a carnival, she continually lures him into a frightening madhouse or onto a roller coaster, all while cackling maniacally –she is seemingly trying to kill him with a heart attack. He believes that if he falls asleep again he will experience heart failure and die. In a moment of panic, Edward Hall tries to leave the doctor’s office but he spots the office receptionist who is shockingly a dead ringer for Maya in his dreams. Mr. Hall dashes back into the doctor’s office and leaps out the high-rise window to his death.

The twist is that Edward Hall has been asleep the whole time. He initially fell asleep at the beginning of the episode and was then carried into Dr. Rathmann’s office where he promptly died. The whole misadventure with Maya was merely a phantasm, a strange product of an exasperated mind, but we are still left to wonder what is true when reviewing The Twilight Zone Series. The key to the episode lies in the fact that dreams have significance –art and reality are difficult delineate. “For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil…”

“They say a dream takes only a second or so, and yet in that second a man can live a lifetime. He can suffer and die, and who’s to say which is the greater reality: the one we know are the one in the dreams, between heaven, the sky, the earth . . . in the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “Perchance to Dream”

“Perchance to Dream” obscures the line between dreams and reality. George T. Clemens’s extraordinary cinematography stands out in this episode as we see towering skyscrapers, oblong carnival angles, and haunting scenes from inside a funhouse reminiscent of the German Expressionist style of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). This episode is based on a short story by Charles Beaumont originally published in Playboy in 1958.

The psychology of cinema as showcased in “Perchance to Dream” allows us to gain a unique perspective into the mind of a man who is quite clearly on the edge of sanity. The playful vacillation between sleep and wakefulness is well-crafted in this episode as is the unsettling sense of dread we experience in Edward Hall’s recurring nightmares. Whereas most stories that end with “…and then I woke up” would elicit groans and eye-rolls from an audience, “Perchance To Dream” manages to instill both fear and wonder in audiences from its short but complex narrative.

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Credits

• Director: Robert Florey
• Written by: Charles Beaumont
• Music: Nathan Van Cleave
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
• Art Directors: George W. Davis and William Ferrari
• Film Editor: Joseph Gluck
• Assistant Director: Edward Denault
• Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Rudy Butler
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino
• Casting Director: Mildred Gusse
• Cast:
  • Richard Conte…..Edward Hall
    • Nicholas Peter “Richard” Conte (1910-1975) was known for his starring roles in films noir and crime dramas during the 1940s and 1950s, such as Call Northside 777, Cry of the City, House of Strangers, Whirlpool, The Blue Gardenia, and The Big Combo. He co-starred in three films opposite Frank Sinatra: the original Ocean’s 11, Tony Rome, and Lady in Cement and of course he famously portrayed Don Emilio Barzini, the mob boss rival to Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972). He was a Catholic Eisenhower Republican. He and his wife adopted one son, Mark Comte, who later became a film editor.
  • John Larch…..Dr. Eliot Rathmann
    • John Larch (1914-2005) was the son of immigrants who emigrated to the U.S. from Russian-occupied Poland. He served in the U.S. military during World War II, an experience which deeply troubled him. He then became a radio, television, and film actor appearing in such television shows as Gunsmoke, Johnny Ringo, The Virginian, Bonanza, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Hawaii Five-0, Mission Impossible, Rawhide, The Rifleman, and others. “Perchance to Dream” was the first of three Twilight Zone episodes he appeared in (the others were “Dust” and “It’s A Good Life“). He was married to fellow actress Vivi Janiss, they had no children. He also appeared in classic big-screen Westerns like How The West Was Won (1962) and Clint Eastwood’s 1971 classic Dirty Harry.
  • Suzanne Lloyd…..Maya The Cat Girl/Miss Thomas
    • Suzanne Lloyd (1932/1933-present) is a Canadian-American actress. She had a recurring role as Raquel Toledano in the classic Zorro television series. She also appeared in shows like Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Perry Mason, Have Gun – Will Travel, and others. She retired from acting in 1974 and as far as I can tell, she is still alive as of the time of this writing.
  • Eddie Marr…..the sideshow/girlie barker
    • Eddie Marr (1900-1987) appeared in a variety of television shows such as Land of the Giants, The Bob Hope Show, The Munsters, The Addams Family, The Real McCoys, Dennis the Menace, Leave It To Beaver, Perry Mason and others. He appeared in minor roles for two Twilight Zone episodes (“Perchance to Dream” and “Static“).
  • Ted Stanhope…..stranger on the street
    • Ted Stanhope (1902-1977) was a character actor who appeared in many television shows like The Rifleman, My Three Sons, Green Acres, Perry Mason, Rawhide, and others. He also appeared in films like Leave It to the Irish (1944) and Jungle Hell (1956).
  • Russell Trent….rifle range barker
    • Russell Trent (1902-1972) also appeared in The Jack Benny Program, Rawhide, Perry Mason, The Lone Ranger, and other television shows.

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• This was the first episode to air that was not written by Rod Serling, it was instead written by frequent collaborator Charles Beaumont based on a short story of the same name he he published in Playboy in 1958.
• Charles Beaumont’s title for this episode was derived from Shakespeare’s “To Be Or Not To Be” soliloquy in Hamlet. The very next line, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” was later used by fellow The Twilight Zone writer Richard Matheson as the title of his novel What Dreams May Come, which was later adapted into a 1998 film.
• This episode was somewhat autobiographical as writer Charles Beaumont often experienced strong, vivid dreams.
• Charles Beaumont visited the set for filming of this episode and he later said “it was filmed exactly as written.” Some notable differences in the original short story include: the protagonists name is Philip Hall not Edward Hall, he has been awake for 72 hours, not 87, and the dream sequence where Eddie and Maya walk through the funhouse is absent in the short story. Also in the short story, there is a greater sense that Philip/Edward can imagine things into life (this is alluded to in the episode when Edward ponders if he can make a painting in Dr. Rathmann’s office come to life.
• Robert Florey also directed the first Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts, co-directed Charlie Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, and co-scripted Frankenstein.
• Since director Robert Florey was initially slated to direct Frankenstein (1931), a dummy monster was brought onto the set and placed as a gag inside the house of horrors but Buck Houghton was concerned about a potential legal issue with Universal Studios so the monster dummy was removed for the final cut.
• “Throughout the TV filming, Florey strove for quality. It might have been the most expensive MGM feature. He rooted out the meanings of certain lines, frequently surprising me with symbols and shadings I’d neither planned nor suspected. The set was truly impressionistic, recalling the days of Caligari and Liliom. The costumes were generally perfect. And in the starring role, Richard Conte gave a performance which displays both intensity and subtlety.” -Charles Beaumont in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, December 1959
• It has been speculated that this episode, and the short story which spawned it, served as Wes Craven’s inspiration for the Nightmare on Elm Street series, particularly since both Craven (who himself directed several episodes of the reboot Twilight Zone series during the 1980s) and Beaumont deal with common themes in both of their respective works: fear of sleep and nightmares which can literally kill you. Craven, however, insisted that his work was never inspired by Beaumont’s.
• The opening skyscraper scene appears to be taken from an earlier MGM classic The Crowd (1928).
• The mysterious dream-woman in this episode is named Maya –a name which comes from the Hindi word for supernatural powers by gods and demons to produce illusions.
• Dr. Rathmann’s office is located inside The Goodman Building. The interiors were filmed at MGM’s Stage 10 as were the scenes of the girlie show and the fortune teller’s window. The rest of the scenes, such as the roller coaster, the fun house, canyon road, and so on were filmed on Stage 9.
• Dr. Rathmann says that Edward is a 35 year old man even though actor Richard Conte was 49 at the time of filming.
• The roller coaster cars used in this episode were rented at a cost of $150.
• Suzanne Lloyd told an amusing story about a date with a gentleman (a “friend of a friend”) on the evening this episode was set to air. After they watched it together, he said, “I had no idea you were that kind of woman” and he obliged to cancel the date. She recounts other interesting anecdotes in the Blu-Ray special features of The Twilight Zone.
• The circus scenes were shot right in front of CBS on Beverly Boulevard.
• at the climax, Edward Hall jumps out the window of room 1410, though since most buildings do not have a 13th floor, he technically jumped from the 13th floor.
• Composer Nathan van Cleave composed two musical scores for this episode, the first was scrapped for unknown reasons.

Click here to return to my survey of The Twilight Zone series.

Click here to read my review of Charles Beaumont’s original short story “Perchance to Dream.”