The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode Thirty “A Stop At Willoughby”

Original Air Date: May 6, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Robert Parrish

“I’ve never seen such serenity…
it was the way people must have lived a hundred years ago.”

“This is Gart Williams, age thirty-eight, a man protected by a suit of armor all held together by one bolt. Just a moment ago, someone removed the bolt, and Mr. Williams’ protection fell away from him, and left him a naked target. He’s been cannonaded this afternoon by all the enemies of his life. His insecurity has shelled him, his sensitivity has straddled him with humiliation, his deep-rooted disquiet about his own worth has zeroed in on him, landed on target, and blown him apart. Mr. Gart Williams, ad agency exec, who in just a moment, will move into the Twilight Zone—in a desperate search for survival.”
-Rod Serling

Gart Williams (played by James Daly) is a New York advertising executive who has grown listless and exasperated with the burdens of his busy job. Every day his demanding boss, Oliver Misrell (played by Howard Smith) enforces a “push, push, push” work culture. One day, Gart seems especially on the verge of a breakdown when he loses a potential major $3 million automobile account after trying to track down his contact Jake Ross for a planned conference call that was scheduled 2:00pm. He and the other executives grow impatient when half an hour goes by. Gart calls Ross’s secretary Joanie before learning that Ross has resigned and taken his automobile account away with him. Gart is lambasted by his boss for his apparent failure, and when his secretary asks if he wants anything else besides coffee, Gart says he wants a “sharp razor and a chart of the human anatomy showing where all the arteries are.” Later on the snowy train ride home he falls asleep by the window after he hears his boss’s “push, push, push” refrain playing over in his head. But then he is suddenly awoken on an old-fashioned traincar, a seemingly different train than the one he boarded. He notices gas lamps hanging in the train and there a much older porter walking through the aisle. The year is 1888, it is a warm summer day in July (not a snowy evening in November), and things seem to move more slowly and freely. People are friendlier and life seems peaceful. Gart looks out the window where there is a hanging sign for a town called Willoughby –a place that appears carefree and idyllic. He gazes across a park meadow to see as a pair of boys carrying fishing poles, a well-dressed couple idly sitting arm-in-arm, an old-fashioned bicycle lazily riding past a bandstand, and a horse-drawn carriage sitting nearby (the driver offers a friendly wave to Gart). When Gart asks the Porter where he is, the Porter responds: “Willoughby, sir? That’s Willoughby right outside. Willoughby. July, summer, it’s 1818. Really a lovely little village, you ought to try it sometimes. Peaceful, restful, where a man slow down to a walk, and live his life full-measure.” However, before Gart can get off the train at Willoughby, the train jostles and snaps him back to reality. He quickly looks out the window and sees it is snowing again while the contemporary Porter announces the next stop as Westport Saugatuck (he has never heard of a town called Willoughby).

Shaken by this glamorous vision, Gart heads home to his unhappy marriage. His shrew of a wife (played by Patricia Donahue) berates him for having a nervous breakdown at work and she chastises him for behaving like a child. A superficial lady, her primary focus is on her husband’s money. She was actually the one who pushed him to get a top ad executive job. They have an argument over the account debacle at work (Bob Lair’s wife called her about it). She accuses Gart of being “a husband who lives in a kind of permanent self-pity, a husband heart bleeding sensitivity that he unfurls like a flag whenever he decides the competition is a little too rough for him.” It becomes clear he doesn’t relish the fakery of his executive-level job and he rejects his wife’s country club lifestyle. He wants to work a job that makes him feel more like himself and he yearns to escape to a gentler place like Willoughby. But instead of comforting her husband, Janie simply retorts: “You know what the trouble with you is, Gart? You were just born too late. Because, you know, you’re the kind of a guy who could be satisfied with a summer afternoon, or an ice wagon being drawn by a horse. So it’s my mistake, pal, my error. My miserable, tragic error, to get married to a man whose big dream in life is to be Huckleberry Finn.”

The next day, an exhausted Gart falls asleep again on the train and he has the same vision of Willoughby, but once again he is awoken before he can step off the train. He vows the next time it happens, he will stay in Willoughby for good. “Next time… I’m going to get off at Willoughby.” At work the following day, Gart is hounded by phone calls, his secretary, and his boss Mr. Misrell to the point that he suffers a nervous breakdown and smashes the mirror in his office bathroom (one of many such mirror smash sequences in The Twilight Zone). He phones home to his wife Janie begging for help, claiming he cannot do this job for even one more day, but she apparently hangs up on him in disappointment. On the train ride home, he has another dream of Willoughby, and this time he steps off and happily walks toward a group of friendly 19th century citizens of Willoughby who seem to know him well.

Meanwhile, back in 1960, several men inspect Gart’s body as it sits lifeless in the snow. Apparently, Gart had shouted something about Willoughby before stepping off the moving train and falling to his death. A funeral home car arrives to whisk Gart’s body away. And the name on the back of the car reads: “Willoughby & Son Funeral Home.” The episode closes with a serene image of Gart walking toward the Willoughby bandstand, finally finding hope and peace at last, albeit in the phantasms of his own mind.

“Willoughby? Maybe it’s wishful thinking nestled in a hidden part of a man’s mind, or maybe it’s the last stop in the vast design of things—or perhaps, for a man like Mr. Gart Williams, who climbed on a world that went by too fast, it’s a place around the bend where he could jump off. Willoughby? Whatever it is, it comes with sunlight and serenity, and is a part of The Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “A Stop At Willoughby”

Gart Williams might as well be anybody trapped in the urban rat race. By all accounts he is living the American Dream, yet he finds himself deeply unsatisfied with his life. He is a victim of the business cycle, a product of failed expectations, and in the end he succumbs to his own particular breed of escapism. “A Stop At Willoughby” is a sentimental yet melancholic episode about an imagined, romantic paradise that has gone by the wayside. Willoughby survives only as fantasy inside one man’s head, but somehow that fantasy seems more real, more appealing, more desirable than anywhere else. In “A Stop At Willoughby,” Rod Serling explores similar themes he often wrote about in other classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, like “Walking Distance” and scripts he wrote for other television shows like “The Time Element.” However, whereas in “Walking Distance” (an episode Rod Serling ironically considered a failure), the plot is bittersweet, hopeful, and optimistic, in “A Stop At Willoughby” the lesson is somewhat more bleak. In it, a fatalistic romantic nostalgia ends in a suicide. In the former episode, there is a lesson about perspective which is reframed as the cure for romantic nostalgia, in the latter, a fantasy is indulged to the point of death. In both cases there are limits to the idea of ‘going back’ to some Arcadian golden age that lives safely and comfortably in the past –both views are dangerous.

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Credits:

• Director: Robert Parrish
  • Robert Parrish (1916-1995) was a former child actor who appeared in classic films like Anna Christie (1930) with Greta Garbo; All Quiet on the Western Front (1930); The Big Trail (1930) with John Wayne; and even Charles Chaplin’s City Lights (1931) (as one of the pea-shooting newsboys who torments Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character). Parrish later started work as an editor, particularly on John Ford films The Informer (1935), Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), among others. He became an Academy Award-winning editor of the film Body and Soul (1947) and he was nominated for another Academy Award alongside Al Clark for All the King’s Men (1949). He directed the western film Saddle the Wind (1958) the second feature film to be based on a Rod Serling script (the first was a theatrical version of Serling’s award-winning teleplay “Patterns”). Parrish directed three episodes of The Twilight Zone (“One for the Angels,” “A Stop at Willoughby,” and “The Mighty Casey“). For the latter episode, he was brought in to replace director Alvin Ganzer after lead actor Paul Douglas died suddenly and many scenes had to be reshot with Jack Warden instead. Parrish was later hired by agent-turned-producer Charles Feldman as one of multiple directors to work on the James Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967). Parrish directed the somewhat notorious scenes featuring Orson Welles and Peter Sellers before Sellers left the project. Parrish published two memoirs about his time in Hollywood. He died on December 4, 1995 in Southampton, New York at the age of 79.
• Written by: Rod Serling
• Music: Nathan Scott
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
• Art Directors: George W. Davis and Merrill Pye
• Film Editor: Joseph Gluck
• Assistant Director: Don Klune
• Set Decorations: Henry Grace and Keogh Gleason
• Sound: Franklin Milton and Philip Mitchell
• Starring:
  • James Daly…..Gart Williams
    • James Firman Daly (1918-1978) is perhaps best known for his role as Paul Lochner in the hospital drama series Medical Center. He served in three branches of the armed forces, including six months as an infantryman in the U.S. Army, two months as a cadet in the Army Air Corps, and more than four years in the Navy as an ensign during World War II. He appeared in television shows like Mission: Impossible, Gunsmoke, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, and he played Mr. Flint in the Star Trek episode “Requiem for Methuselah.” He appeared in the film Planet of the Apes (1968) and won an Emmy for his supporting role in Eagle in a Cage (1965). He was married for about two decades before divorcing his wife; he had four children. Daly served as the paid spokesman for Camel cigarettes for many years. He died of heart failure in 1978 at the age of 59.
  • Howard Smith…..Oliver Misrell, Gart’s cigar-smoking boss
    • Howard Irving Smith (1893-1968) was a character actor with a 50-year career in the mediums of vaudeville, theatre, radio, film, and television. He performed in Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater radio programs, including in his famous broadcast of “The War of the Worlds.” He also served in the 77th Infantry Division during World War I. He appeared in television shows like Perry Mason, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Green Acres, Bewitched, and two Twilight Zone episodes (“A Stop at Willoughby” and “Cavender Is Coming“). He died in 1968 of a heart attack at the age of 74, his wife had predeceased him by about a decade.
  • Patricia Donahue…..Jane “Janie” Williams, Gart’s wife
    • Patricia Donahue (1925-2012) was the daughter of a vaudeville performer and she was married to film producer Euan Lloyd. She appeared in shows like Goodyear Theater, The Thin Man, Perry Mason, General Electric Theater, Bonanza, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, in addition to The Twilight Zone and a 1974 television miniseries for Dial M for Murder. She also appeared in two episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (“The Hand of Borgus Weems” and “The Dear Departed”). She died in 2012 at the age of 87.
  • Jason Wingreen…..1960 train conductor
    • Jason Wingreen (1920-2015) portrayed bartender Harry Snowden on the sitcom All in the Family, a role he reprised on the continuation series Archie Bunker’s Place. He was also the original voice of Star Wars character Boba Fett in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), though English actor Jeremy Bulloch physically portrayed the character in the films. During World War II, he served with the U.S. Army Air Force and was stationed in England and Germany. Following his return home, with the aid of the G.I. Bill, he studied acting at New York’s New School. He appeared in television shows like Matlock, Mission: Impossible, The Outer Limits, Bonanza, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Seinfeld, and many others. He appeared as Dr. Linke in an episode of Star Trek (“The Empath“), in three episodes of The Outer Limits (“O.B.I.T.” “The Special One,” and “Expanding Human”), as well as three episodes of The Twilight Zone (“A Stop at Willoughby,” “The Midnight Sun,” and “The Bard“). He and his wife had one son. Wingreen died in 2015 at the age of 95.
  • Mavis Neal…..Helen, Gart’s secretary
    • Mavis Neal Palmer (1913-1996) appeared in episodes of Studio One, Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Charlie’s Angels, and others. She appeared in the debut episode of The Outer Limits (“The Galaxy Being”) and an episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (“The Ghost of Sorworth Place”). She died in San Diego in 1996.
  • James Maloney…..1888 train conductor
    • James Maloney (1915-1978) appeared in episodes of Perry Mason, Wagon Train, The Thin Man, One Step Beyond, Gunsmoke, Have Gun – Will Travel, Dennis the Menace, My Three Sons, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and many others. He died in New Britain, Connecticut in 1978.
• Extras:
  • Billy Booth…..boy #1 with fishing pole in Willoughby (uncredited)
    • William Allen Booth (1949-2006) was an American child actor best known for playing Dennis Mitchell’s best friend Tommy Anderson on the CBS sitcom Dennis the Menace. Aside from The Twilight Zone, he also appeared in shows like My Three Sons and The Andy Griffith Show. He died in 2006 of liver complications in San Luis Obispo, California.
  • Butch Hengen…..tall boy #2 with fishing pole in Willoughby (uncredited)
    • Robert A. Hengen Jr., also known as Butch Hengen (1948-2006) has five acting credits to his name, per IMDB. His credits include appearances in shows like Wagon Train and Denis the Menace. He died in 2006 in Los Angeles at the age of 58 leaving behind his wife and two stepsons.
  • Max Slaten…..man on wagon in Willoughby (uncredited)
    • Max Slaten (1924-1997) appeared in episodes of Have Gun – Will Travel, Bonanza, the Virginian, and others. Per IMDB, he had 21 acting credits to his name. He died in 1997 in Salt Lake City, Utah.
  • Sally Jane Bruce…..child in Willoughby (uncredited)
    • Sally Jane Bruce (1958-present) is a former child actress and singer, born to country singer Jewell Edwards. She worked in television and radio when she was chosen by Charles Laughton to perform at age five against Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish in the 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter. She later worked as a grade school teacher in Santa Maria, California and apparently currently lives in Arroyo Grande, California.
  • James Gonzalez…..passenger (uncredited)
    • James Gonzalez (1911-1971) was an extra who appeared in numerous films like uncredited appearances Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), North By Northwest (1959), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Escape From The Planet of the Apes (1971), and many others. He appeared in episodes of Perry Mason, Have Gun – Will Travel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, I Dream of Jeannie, The Time Tunnel, Batman, The Monkees, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Gunsmoke, My Three Sons, The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, Get Smart, Bonanza, The Virginian, and others. He died in 1971 in Los Angeles, California.
  • Bernard Sell…..executive (uncredited)
    • Bernard Sell (1908-1993) was born in England. His father was a musician and went to school with Charlie Chaplin. Bernard worked as a seamen where he met Errol Flynn on a voyage to Tasmania. Flynn convinced him to work in motion pictures. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Sell worked as a stand-in at Disney studios and later as a stuntman and extra in Hollywood. He made five uncredited appearances in The Twilight Zone (“And When The Sky Was Opened,” “The Fever,” “A Stop At Willoughby,” “The Trouble With Templeton,” and “Printer’s Devil“). He died in 1993.
  • Ryan Hayes…..engineer (uncredited)
    • Ryan Hayes (1919-2006) has six acting credits to his name, per IMDB. In addition to Westerns like Gunsmoke, he appeared in two episodes of The Twilight Zone (“A Stop At Willoughby” and “Printer’s Devil“). He died in 2006 in Los Angeles, California.
  • Herschel Graham…..executive (uncredited)
  • Perk Lazelle…..executive (uncredited)
  • Clark Ross…..executive (uncredited)
  • Hal Taggert…..executive (uncredited)

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• Producer Buck Houghton identified this episode as among Rod Serling’s finest teleplays of the first season in a memo he drafted (his memo is quoted in Martin Gram Jr.’s guidebook Unlocking The Key).
• “A Stop at Willoughby” was informed by Rod Serling’s own personal interactions with advertising executives and their demanding schedules. Much like Gart Williams, Rod Serling also moved his family from Ohio to Westport, Connecticut. Apparently, Serling was living in in Westport, Connecticut at the time he wrote this script and he regularly commuted on the train to and from New York City.
• The skyline backdrop used in the corporate conference room scene later reappeared in the episode “Mr. Bevis.”
• Rod Serling originally intended for “A Stop at Willoughby” to be the pilot episode of The Twilight Zone but scheduling conflicts caused Serling to shelve the script for a period. In fact, it was originally intended to be a pilot film for the show. After the holiday season in 1959, he shortened the episode from 60 minutes to 30 minutes.
• James Daly was Serling’s first choice to play the lead role of Gart Williams in this episode.
• There is a brief nod to Ray Bradbury in this episode when Gart Williams mentions a problem with “the Bradbury account” to Helen, his secretary, in his office (he says: “What film outfit did the commercials on the Bradbury account? The negatives are all scratched, they’re screaming bloody murder”). This scene actually features a minor blooper in which the speakerphone is in use, though the phone is off the hook. This error was brought to Rod Serling’s attention by Barbara J. Compton of the New York Telephone Company in a letter.
• The character Gart Williams compares Willoughby to a Currier & Ives painting. Currier & Ives was a New York City-based printmaking business that operated from 1835 to 1907, a partnership of Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives.
• Gart’s boss is named Mr. Misrell, whose last name might be a play on the word “miserable.”
• The time on the clock when Gart Williams finally gets off the train at Willoughby appears to be about 10 minutes to 10 o’clock.
• The train stations called out by the conductor on the 1960 train were real stops at the time of the filming, such as “Stamford” and “Westport & Saugatuck” which were stations on the New Haven Railroad. Today there is no station called Saugatuck anymore.
• The number of the old-fashioned train car in which Gart’s rides is #19.
• Three of the songs played by the band in Willoughby (“Oh! Susanna,” “Camptown Races,” and “Beautiful Dreamer”) are by Stephen Foster, arranged for The Twilight Zone by composer Nathan Scott. Another is “Listen to the Mockingbird” by Foster’s colleague Septimus Winner. Stephen Foster (1826-1864) was a foundational American composer sometimes known as “the father of American music.”
• The outdoor train station and town square sets used for Willoughby are the same ones used for the opening and closing scenes of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
• Martin Grams Jr.’s Unlocking The Key guidebook includes a quotation from actor Jason Wingreen suggesting this episode was perhaps an effort by Rod Serling to get revenge on the CBS executives by so ruthlessly caricaturing Gart’s boss Oliver Misrell. In Steven Jay Rubin’s Twilight Zone Encyclopedia, he suggests Rod Serling may have also been influenced by the Lerner and Loewe musical Brigadoon which is about a magical town in the Scottish highlands that only materializes once every hundred years.
• Producer Buck Houghton noted in an interview with Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, that the Willoughby sets for the episode were reused from the MGM backlot constructed for the Judy Garland musical Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), as was the case with many other episodes.
• This episode was the first episode in the series to include the title in its opening narration.
• No one knows really how Serling came up with the name Willoughby. The two most likely cases are either Option #1: it was the name of a town in Ohio (Serling was familiar with the area from when he attended Antioch College and he likely commuted through Willoughby back when he was scripting teleplays for his literary agent, Blanche Gaines, from Ohio to New York City); or Option #2: it was the name of a street in Hollywood, Los Angeles located about a block north of Homewood Avenue (an allusion to the town of Homewood as featured in “Walking Distance“).
• Joseph Dougherty writes in his book Serling At 100: One Writer’s Acknowledgement that the episodes “Walking Distance” and “A Stop At Willoughby” can be read as “warped mirrors of each other.”

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

Click here to read my reflections on Rod Serling’s short story “A Stop at Willoughby.”