The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Twenty “Elegy”

Original Air Date: February 19, 1960
Writer: Charles Beaumont
Director: Douglas Heyes

“And while there are men, there can be no peace…”

Based on Charles Beaumont’s 1953 short story of the same name, this was the second of nine episodes directed by Douglas Heyes for The Twilight Zone. It stars Jeff Morrow, Kevin Hagen, Don Dubbins, and British/South African actor Cecil Kellaway –a two time Academy Award nominee for Best Supporting Actor in The Luck of the Irish and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. In “Elegy,” many years in the future, three astronauts make an emergency landing on a remote asteroid only to discover a horrifying secret about the asteroid’s true purpose.

“The time is the day after tomorrow. The place: a far corner of the universe. A cast of characters: three men lost amongst the stars. Three men sharing the common urgency of all men lost. They’re looking for home. And in a moment, they’ll find home; not a home that is a place to be seen, but a strange unexplainable experience to be felt.”
-Rod Serling

Three astronauts: Carl Meyers, James Webber, and Peter Kirby are lost in space with a damaged spacecraft. A meteor shower knocked out their navigation equipment six months prior in September 2185. In search of a place to repair, they land on an asteroid over 655 million miles from earth. It strangely has a breathable atmosphere and appears much like earth did hundreds of years ago but it cannot be earth because it has two suns. They find towns and farmlands with statuesque people and animals stopped as if frozen in time -a mayoral inauguration, and a pageant scene and so on. One of the astronauts suggests perhaps the people are, in fact, moving but just significantly slowed down.

The trio of astronauts split up and each goes slightly mad until one strange little man finally reveals himself: Jeremy Wickwire. The astronauts explain to Mr. Wickwire that they are out of fuel and stopped here to gather themselves. Wickwire asks the men about earth at which point we learn that an “atomic war” took place in 1985 and much of the earth was destroyed. Wickwire then reveals the truth about this unusual asteroid: that it is actually a cemetery, an extension of a mortuary service on earth called “Happy Glades” wherein wealthy people were offered the chance to achieve their dreams in death, forever frozen in time. Everyone on the asteroid is dead and embalmed as if in the midst of their requested activity (the rest of the people are “human imitations” to serve the greater purpose). Mr. Wickwire explains a bit about himself as well, that he is nothing more than a scientific device activated only when needed –and he has not been activated in over 200 years.

Mr. Wickwire proposes a toast to these three travelers, however in reality the German wine (Liebfraumilch) he offers them contains “eternifying fluid” which kills humans. There is no antidote and the astronauts begin to slowly die. Just before their deaths, Mr. Wickwire asks what their greatest wish might be, to which they respond to be on their ship returning home. At the end of the episode we see the three astronauts embalmed and frozen on their ship for all of eternity as Wickwire dusts off their bodies with the backdrop of whimsical music playing. It is a horrifying conclusion indeed.

“Kirby, Webber, and Meyers, three men lost. They shared a common wish—a simple one, really. They wanted to be aboard their ship headed for home. And fate—a laughing fate—a practical jokester with a smile stretched across the stars, saw to it that they got their wish with just one reservation: the wish came true, but only in the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “Elegy”

In Charles Beaumont’s “Elegy,” we are given a grim reminder of mankind’s ability to destroy itself in an atomic war. We watch as George Santayana’s observation -“only the dead have seen the end of war”- is played out in a crude and shocking interstellar cemetery. This asteroid would otherwise serve as a quiet respite where dreams of human peace might be achieved only in death.

Cecil Kellaway steals the show in this episode as the maddeningly cold and inhumane robot Jeremy Wickwire. One can only imagine how long his character has been haunting the ghostly emptiness of space, surrounded by a creepy taxidermy museum of dead humans.

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Credits

• Director: Douglas Heyes
• 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 Budd S. Friend
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Jean Valentino
• Casting Director: Mildred Gusse
• Starring:
  • Cecil Kellaway…..Jeremy Wickwire
    • Cecil Kellaway (1890-1973) was a South African-British character actor who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor twice – for The Luck of the Irish (1948) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). He appeared in many films from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but he only appeared in a small handful of television roles – Perry Mason, Rawhide, Bewitched, and two episodes of The Twilight Zone – “Elegy” and “Passage on the Lady Anne” (another Charles Beaumont story). He died in 1973 and had two children.
  • Jeff Morrow…..Kurt Meyers
    • Leslie Irving “Jeff” Morrow (1907-1993) appeared in shows like The Rifleman, Bonanza, Wagon Train, Perry Mason and others. His last television role was in 1986 on The Twilight Zone reboot series episode “A Day in Beaumont.” He died in 1993 and had one daughter.
  • Kevin Hagen…..Captain James Webber
    • Kevin Hagen (1928-2005) was best known for his role as Dr. Hiram Baker on NBC’s Little House on the Prairie. He also appeared in Have Gun – Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Perry Mason, The Rifelman, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Mission: Impossible, The Virginian, and Lost In Space among others. He appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone – “Elegy” and “You Drive.” He died in 2005 of esophageal cancer. He was survived by his wife and son.
  • Don Dubbins…..Peter Kirby
    • Don Dubbins (1928-1991) was an American film, stage and television actor. He made an uncredited appearance in the film From Here to Eternity and other films like The Caine Mutiny. He appeared in television shows like Gunsmoke, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Perry Mason, Peyton Place, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and others. He died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 63.

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• A distance of 655 million miles away would actually place the asteroid within our solar system, likely in between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.
• Captain James Webber, Professor Kurt Meyers, and Peter Kirby apparently left Earth in September 2185. And Happy Glades would have been established in 1973.
• Inside the spaceship, “equipment” originally constructed for the film Forbidden Planet was reused for this episode, and it shows up in a number of other Twilight Zone episodes. The sound effects heard inside the spaceship will be used again six years later as some of the sounds on the bridge of the starship USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek television series. They were previously heard in the final scene of “Third from the Sun.”
• The set of the room of the frozen mayor addressing the crowd had been used in the previous episodes “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine” as part of Barbara Trenton’s home, as well as in “The Purple Testament” as the lobby of an Army hospital. It would be used again as a hallway of a college campus in “Long Live Walter Jameson.”
• The hotel in this episode is called “The Royal Crest.”
• The spacesuits worn by the astronauts are the same ones worn by the crew in the film Destination Moon (1950).
• In the original short story, the caretaker is named Mr. Greypoole and the astronauts have escaped the “Last War” on earth with the detonation of the X-Bomb. But Greypoole leads them back to their ship and slips them the “Eternifier” wine so they will be frozen on their ship forever.
• For director Douglas Heys’s next “still life” episode (“The After Hours“), he would use mannequins instead of real actors.
• The character “Jeremy Wickwire” is named after Charles Wickwire, a once-prominent magnate from Cortland, New York whose company once sold one-fourth of all the wire in the U.S. The character name is yet another Rod Serling reference to his old stomping grounds around New York. The Wickwire mansion, “The 1890 House,” still stands today in Cortland, New York as a museum and it is allegedly haunted.
• Many of the dozens of background actors in this episode were extras from the film Around The World In Eighty Days (1956). They were paid $22.05 for their appearance in this episode.
• The uncredited silent parts are played by: Sally Arnell, Walter Bacon, Frank Baker, Bonnie Barlow, Shelby Benson, Jack Bonigul, George Boyce, Barbara Chrysler, Walter Clinton, Robert Dayo, Alfonso Dubois, Doris Edwards, Joseph Glick, David Greene, Paul Gustine, Carol Holleck, Chester Hayes (a former professional wrestler and Hollywood stuntman from the 1940s), James W. Horan, Paul Kruger, Jack Lee, Paul Louis, Charles Lunard, Jack Mattis, June McCall, William Meada, Walter O’Donnell, Patilu Palmer, Luke Saucier (an alligator and reptile handler who also appeared in “Mirror Image“), Jerry Schumacher, Stephen Soldi, Jack Stoney, Martin Strader, Dennis Sullivan, George Tatar, and Walter Walker.
• For filming this episode, director Douglas Heyes requested that the cameras pan slowly and for the trio of main actors to be continuously moving so as to offset the appearance of any movements by the frozen extras who are supposed to be deceased.
• Charles Beaumont’s original short story called for a motionless car-race, but director Douglas Heyes decided to replace it with a beauty pageant, much to the chagrin of Charles Beaumont (though many fans regard the pageant as the most memorable part of the episode).
• The “St. Louis Street” scene in this episode was filmed on MGM Lot 3 (named for the film Meet Me in St. Louis).
• The indoor staircase scene was also featured in Barbara’s home in “The Sixteen Millimeter Shrine” and the military hospital in “The Purple Testament.” The same set can also be glimpsed through the door of Walter Jameson’s classroom in “Long Live Walter Jameson.”

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