Original Air Date: October 7, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: Don Medford
“Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, gentle and infinitely patient people whose lives have been a hope chest with a rusty lock and a lost set of keys. But in just a moment that hope chest will be opened and an improbable phantom will try to bedeck the drabness of these two people’s failure laden lives with the gold and precious stones of fulfillment. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, standing on the outskirts and about to enter the Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling
Influenced by the One Thousand and One Nights and W. W. Jacobs’ short story “The Monkey’s Paw,” this amusing episode of The Twilight Zone explores a hypothetical question: what if a genie granted you four wishes? The episode takes us into an old antique shop owned by Arthur Castle (played by Luther Adler). He and his wife are poor and indebted but one day when an elderly woman enters the shop named Mrs. Gumley (Lisa Golm) their fortunes change. The elderly woman pleads with Arthur for him to buy an odl family “heirloom,” a hand-blown wine bottle she found in a trash can, reluctantly he takes pity and buys the bottle. When she leaves, Arthur and his wife discover that the bottle contains a genie who emerges in a mist and offers them four wishes. The genie takes on the visage of a dapper but shifty 1950s American businessman, played by Joseph Ruskin. He offers the Castles four wishes before he will depart again for “a century and a year.”
To test the genie’s power, they use their first wish to repair a broken glass cabinet in their shop. When it works, Arthur starts to get excited. Next he asks for a million dollars in cash. Suddenly, a mountain of bills appears in the middle of the shop and Arthur starts giving away thousands of dollars to all his friends. However, an IRS agent suddenly shows up and delivers a sizable tax bill to Arthur. In the end, Arthur and his wife are left with a mere $5. His dream of becoming rich is neither glamorous nor easy.
After considering his next wish, Arthur asks to be made into a world leader who cannot be voted out of office. The genie smiles and Arthur is transformed into Adolf Hitler trapped in a bunker during his final moments of life. A Nazi soldier rushes in and hands him a vial of cyanide in which to commit suicide. In terror and desperation, Arthur uses his final wish to be returned to his old life. When he reappears in his shop the bottle falls and breaks upon the floor. His life, despite near impoverishment, does not seem so bad anymore. Armed with a new perspective, Arthur begins cleaning up and he notices the repaired cabinet window but he accidentally breaks again. He dumps the broken shards of the bottle into the trash where it magically transforms into a complete wine bottle again, ready for the next person to come along and unleash the genie. This episode contains some wonderful cinematography by the great George T. Clemens, but as Marc Scott Zicree notes this episode was a “pretty pale affair” and not “terribly interesting.”
“A word to the wise, now, to the garbage collectors of the world, to the curio seekers, to the antique buffs, to everyone who would try to coax out a miracle from unlikely places. Check that bottle you’re taking back for a two-cent deposit. The genie you save might be your own. Case in point, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, fresh from the briefest of trips into The Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling
My Thoughts on “The Man In The Bottle”
A genie story! This is a quirky and somewhat forgettable little episode, and there is something decidedly malicious about watching a pair of good-natured, altruistic people –Arthur and Edna Castle– as they are tormented by a string of failed wishes granted by a devilish genie. I suppose it would be a different case entirely if they were disagreeable people, but at least there is a pleasing moral to this story: the grass isn’t always greener; be careful what you wish for, and so on. Joseph Ruskin’s maniacal portrayal of the genie is somewhat reminiscent of other supernatural malevolent bureaucrats who appear throughout The Twilight Zone –such as Murray Hamilton as Mr. Death in “One For The Angels” or Sebastian Cabot as Mr. Pip in “A Nice Place To Visit.” Joseph Ruskin gives a splendid performance here as a wholly different kind of genie than what we are accustomed to seeing, something entirely unexpected. And in The Twilight Zone you never know what you might find, especially in a little antique shop like the one owned by Arthur and Edna Castle.
Credits:
- Director: Don Medford
- Written by: Rod Serling
- Music: Stock from “What You Need” by Nathan Van Cleave and others (like Bernard Herrmann’s score from “Walking Distance“)
- Associate Producer: Del Reisman
- Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
- Production Manager: Ralph W. Nelson
- Art Directors: George W. Davis and Phil Barber
- Film Editor: Leon Barsha
- Assistant Director: E. Darrell Hallenbeck
- Set Decorations: Henry Grace and H. Web Arrowsmith
- Sound: Franklin Milton and Charles Scheid
- Casting: Ethel Winant
- Starring:
- Luther Adler…..Arthur Castle/Adolf Hitler
- Luther Adler (1903-1984) appeared in various anthology shows like Crossroads, General Electric Theater, Kraft Television Theater, and Robert Montgomery Presents among other shows and films. He was married twice and had one child. Adler died at his Kutztown, Pennsylvania home in 1984 at the age of 81.
- Vivi Janiss…..Edna Castle
- Vivi Janiss (1911-1988) was known for appearing in such films as The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues (1955), Man on the Prowl (1957), and First, You Cry (1978). She voiced Daisy Duck for Disney, and appeared in two Twilight Zone episodes: “The Fever” and “The Man in the Bottle.” Her first husband was actor and comedian Bob Cummings (they met while performing for Ziegfeld Follies) and her second husband was John Larch, who played the police chief in 1971 in the first of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry films.
- Lisa Golm…..Mrs. Gumley
- Luise Schmertzler, known as Lisa Golm (1891-1964) was a German actress who emigrated to America and appeared in a number of Hollywood films as a character actress who appeared in shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Third Man, as well as this episode of The Twilight Zone.
- Joseph Ruskin…..Genie
- Joseph Richard Schlafman, known as Joseph Ruskin (1924-2013) appeared in episodes of Mission: Impossible, Hogan’s Heroes, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Gunsmoke, Get Smart, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, and episodes of Star Trek –he played Galt in “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” he played the Klingon Tumek in two episodes of Star Trek DS9 “The House of Quark” and “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places,” as well as a Cardassian informant in the episode “Improbable Cause,” a Son’a officer in Star Trek: Insurrection, and in a Voyager episode entitled “Gravity,” as well as a Suliban doctor in the pilot episode of Enterprise entitled “Broken Bow.” He appeared in an episode of The Outer Limits entitled “Production and Decay of Strange Particles” and two episodes of The Twilight Zone: “The Man in the Bottle” and “To Serve Man.” He later appeared in Rod Serling’s Night Gallery in an episode entitled “The Messiah on Mott Street.” He was married twice and had one child. He died in 2013 at the age of 89 in Santa Monica, California.
- Olan Soule…..IRS agent
- Olan Soule (1909-1994) began his career in radio before moving to television and films. He was the only actor who performed on both the Captain Midnight radio and television shows. He played Mr. Krull, a boarding house resident in The Day The Earth Stood Still. He also appeared in shows like The Andy Griffith Show, I Love Lucy, Perry Mason, Have Gun – Will Travel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Jack Benny Program, Dennis the Menace, The Real McCoys, The Beverly Hillbillies, My Favorite Martian, The Untouchables, Bewitched, The Addams Family, The Munsters, Johnny Ringo, Rawhide, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Laramie, The Monkees, Mission: Impossible, The Six Million Dollar Man, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Little House on the Prairie. he voiced Batman in several animated series. He and his wife had two children. He died of lung cancer in 1994 at the age of 84.
- Peter Coe…..German Officer (uncredited)
- Albert Szabo…..German Officer (uncredited)
- Luther Adler…..Arthur Castle/Adolf Hitler
The Twilight Zone Trivia:
- In a letter dated August 19, 1960 Buck Houghton noted that this episode was intended to have a savings of about $3,900 but it actually saved about $2,400.
- Rod Serling wrote an alternate ending to this episode in which a street bum happens upon the genie bottle in a trash can (the bottle has magically repaired itself). He stashes the bottle in his shirt and walks away as Serling’s voice ends the episode with: “And perhaps this man too will realize that there’s economics to magic too… rather a high cost of wishing. He may learn this fact just as he’ll soon realize that in a very strange way, all roads lead to… The Twilight Zone.”
- Luther Adler, who was Jewish, previously had portrayed Hitler in two 1951 feature films: The Magic Face (1951) and The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel (1951).
- Actor Joseph Ruskin (who played the Genie) later recalled that this episode was the first and last time he experienced a rehearsal before shooting a TV show in Hollywood.
- Vivi Janiss had once been married to Robert Cummings, who starred in the previous week’s episode, “King Nine Will Not Return.”
- In an amusing blooper, the Nazi swastika symbol on the flag hanging on the wall is accidentally reversed (it appears it was used in Hindu and Buddhist traditions). However, the Nazi symbol on Arthur Castle’s sleeve is displayed correctly as Adolf Hitler would have worn it, as in “SS.”
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