The Twilight Zone: Season 2, Episode Four “A Thing About Machines”

Original Air Date: October 28, 1960
Writer: Rod Serling
Director: David Orrick McDearmon

“Mr. Finchley, in this conspiracy you speak of, this mortal combat between you and the appliances, I hope you lose.”

“A Thing About Machines” is a brilliant little episode that reintroduces a familiar theme that recurs throughout The Twilight Zone: a growing cultural fear of, and anxiety regarding, newfangled 20th century technology, particularly the household appliances which transformed daily life in the 1950s and 1960s. Do we own our devices, or do they own us? The tale of Mr. Bartlett Finchley in “A Thing About Machines” would suggest the latter.

“This is Mr. Bartlett Finchley, age forty-eight, a practicing sophisticate who writes very special and very precious things for gourmet magazines and the like. He’s a bachelor and a recluse with few friends, only devotees and adherents to the cause of tart sophistry. He has no interests save whatever current annoyances he can put his mind to. He has no purpose to his life except the formulation of day-to-day opportunities to vent his wrath on mechanical contrivances of an age he abhors. In short, Mr. Bartlett Finchley is a malcontent, born either too late or too early in the century, and who, in just a moment, will enter a realm where muscles and the will to fight back are not limited to human beings. Next stop for Mr. Bartlett Finchley – The Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

Bartlett Finchley (played by classic Hollywood actor Richard Haydn) is a wealthy, aging, misanthropic, curmudgeonly magazine critic who despises machines –and it seems the feeling is mutual. For months odd things have been happening to Mr. Finchley: his television, radio, and clock have all been awakening him in the middle of the night. When a repairman arrives at his home, Finchley berates the poor man after he says the job requires two hours of labor, repairing a broken set of tubes, a new oscillator, and a new filter. And when his secretary abruptly quits, Mr. Finchley is left alone with his devices which he believes are conspiring against him. He starts drinking.

His typewriter begins to spell out the words “GET OUT OF HERE, FINCHLEY” and shortly thereafter his television and telephone follow suit. In an iconic Twilight Zone moment, Mr. Finchley is chased down the hallway by his serpent-like electric razor. Outside, Mr. Finchley’s car chases him straight into a pool, killing him. When the police arrive, an officer and a doctor wonder why his body has remained at the bottom of the pool, rather than floating to the top –it was as if something had been holding him down there.

“Yes, it could just be. It could just be that Mr. Bartlett Finchley succumbed from a heart attack and a set of delusions. It could just be that he was tormented by an imagination as sharp as his wit and as pointed as his dislikes. But as perceived by those attending, this is one explanation that has left the premises with the deceased. Look for it filed under ‘M’ for Machines – in The Twilight Zone.”
-Rod Serling

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My Thoughts on “A Thing About Machines”

In “A Thing About Machines,” Richard Haydn delivers a charmingly patrician performance as the aging bachelor, pseudo-aristocrat, and hyper-technophobe, Bartlett Finchley. He is a stridently irritable, mean-spirited little man; so there is something particularly satisfying when Mr. Finchley faces his comeuppance at the hands of his dreaded devices. Still, “A Thing About Machines” is more silly than terrifying, but I wouldn’t rate it as harshly Rod Serling. I have long appreciated The Twilight Zone’s skepticism toward modern machinery.

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Credits:

• Director: David Orrick McDearmon
• Written by: Rod Serling
• Music: Stock Music (the musical cues entitled “Shooting Lessons” were borrowed from Hotel de Paree for this episode).
• Associate Producer: Del Reisman
• Director of Photography: George T. Clemens
• Production Manager: Sidney Van Keuran
• 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:
  • Richard Haydn…..Bartlett Finchley
    • Richard Haydn (1905-1985) was a British comedian and character actor who often played eccentric characters. He played the manservant Thomas Rogers in the 1945 film adaption of Agatha Christie’s novel And Then There Were None (1945), the voice of the Caterpillar in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951), William Brown in Mutiny on the Bounty (1962). Perhaps most famously, he played the Von Trapps’ family friend Max Detweiler in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1965 film musical The Sound of Music. He appeared in television shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bewitched, and Bonanza. Haydn’s last film role was as Gerhard Falkstein in Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). He died in 1985 of a heart attack in his home in Pacific Palisades, California, at the age of 80. His body was donated to UCLA. He never married and had no children, though he was once engaged to Maria Riva, daughter of actress Marlene Dietrich.
  • Barbara Stuart…..Edith Rogers, Mr. Finchley’s Secretary
    • Born Barbara Ann McNeese, Barbara Stuart (1930-2011) had a recurring role as Sgt. Carter’s girlfriend “Bunny” on Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. She played Lily, the waittress in the coffee shop on The George Burns Show. She was a casting director for a film-commercial company which she used to secure supporting roles in television shows and films. She was a showgirl during the 1960s and appeared in the films Marines, Let’s Go (1961), Hellfighters (1968), Airplane! (1980), Bachelor Party (1984), and Pterodactyl Woman from Beverly Hills (1997). Stuart married actor Dick Gautier in 1967, however their honeymoon was canceled when she was hospitalized for eight months due to a blood clot in her leg which migrated to her lung and led to pneumonia. She died in 2011 in St. George, Utah at the age of 81.
  • Barney Phillips…..TV Repairman
    • Bernard Philip Ofner (1913-1982) appeared on shows like Dragnet, I Love Lucy, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, and four episodes of The Twilight Zone (“The Purple Testament,” “A Thing About Machines,” “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?” and “Miniature“). Phillips died of cancer in 1982 at the age of 68 in Los Angeles, California.
  • Henry Beckman…..policeman (uncredited)
  • Margarita Cordova…..dancing lady on television (uncredited)
  • Jay Overholts…..intern standing beside ambulance at the end (uncredited)

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The Twilight Zone Trivia:

• Rod Serling came up with the name Bartlett Finchley by combining names from two prior teleplays –Bartlett was the name of a character from an unsold script “The Beloved Outcast” and the name Finchley came from a science fiction script entitled “Mr. Finchley Versus The Bomb.”
• Serling was inspired to write this script when he was shaving with a razor one morning and three household appliances gave out. He realized how vulnerable we all are to our gadgets. But he felt that this episode did not live up to its potential.
• On standard high-resolution screens today, the fish line attached to the serpent-like electric razor can clearly be seen holding the razor upright and pulling it down the stairs.
• The car featured in this episode is a 1939 Lagonda V12 Drophead coupé.
• To make the possessed car scenes work, the stunt drivers used various practical methods of disguise to conceal themselves behind the wheel of the car. In some scenes, they crouched down below the dash. In the scenes, where the car was filled with dark shadows, the driver was dressed all in black from head to waist, blending in with the shadows. For the brighter scenes, the driver appeared to be wearing white canvass to match the convertible top’s canvass covering.
• Tragically and ironically, in light of the episode’s final scene, actor Jay Overholts died in an auto accident at age 43.
• The women Mr. Finchley calls on the phone are: Agatha Moore and Pauline Donnelly, his “favorite, attractive young widow” who apparently informs him she is getting married.
• There were several press releases that stated actor Lew Brown played a telephone repairman, however he never appeared in this episode, though he did appear in two other Twilight Zone episodes: “Back There” and “Long Distance Call.”
• In the original draft of the script, Finchley was to be found inside his garage, but at the last minute the Cayuga crew (namely director David Orrick McDearmon) switched it to a swimming pool.
• The scenes outside Mr. Finchley’s house were filmed on Lot 2 at MGM, this is the same swimming pool as the one featured “Queen of the Nile,” “The Trouble with Templeton,” and “The Bewitchin’ Pool.” The opening shot with the TV repairman’s truck parked in Finchley’s driveway shows the same mansion as in the opening shot of “Queen of the Nile.”
• This episode features the second of four appearances by Barney Phillips on The Twilight Zone.

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 Thing About Machines.”