Walking Distance (1959)
Written by Rod Serling for The Twilight Zone
What if you could go back home in time, to meet your younger self. What would you say? I guess that depends on whether you are happy now, or were happy then, and you feel that you have never been quite so happy since. It is true, I guess, that we tend to look back upon our youth and remember the good, and it is also true that old people have always said that the trees aren’t as green as they used to be, the warriors aren’t as strong, the young aren’t as respectful of their elders, the music isn’t as sprightly, and so on. Homer’s pleasant old campaigner Nestor is always saying such things; to hear him tell it, even Achilles would have been just a piker in the old days. Part of it is that when we’re young, we really do have to look up at things, and they still have much of the charm of being new and fresh. That wonder is something we ought to cherish and foster, because in this regard the child is right.
Still, the question remains, and it’s the heart of our Film of the Week, which for a change isn’t a feature film but a short teleplay, the fifth episode of the first season of The Twilight Zone. Martin Sloan (played by Gig Young, a perfect role for his expressive looks and his air of melancholy) is the vice-president of an advertising agency in New York. He walks with a noticeable limp, from an injury he suffered in a childhood accident involving a merry-go-round. Martin is driving through upstate New York — where the writer of this episode and the creator of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling, came from. His car needs some repair, and when he hobbles in to a diner and soda shop, he hears that he’s just a mile and a half away from Homewood, his boyhood town. “It’s walking distance,” says the young fellow behind the counter. And Martin, who remembers the shop, though so much has changed since, decides to walk to the town. But when he gets there, the year is not 1960. It is twenty-five years earlier. And he wants desperately to see his mother and father, who have since passed away, and to say something to young Martin, because Martin the grown-up man is lonely, is not happy; he misses the cotton candy, the merry-go-round, the bandstands, the concerts in the open air, the much simpler life of a small town far away from big businesses, the terrible pressure you are under if you work for one (see Patterns, which we’ve featured here, also written by Rod Serling), and all the glare and noise of New York City.
I’ve said that it’s natural to look back on the sweetness and the peace of your childhood, but we shouldn’t dismiss Martin’s (or Rod Serling’s) wistfulness as mere nostalgia. For the situation in 1959 was a new thing in the world. Technological development was proceeding at breakneck speed, sweeping everything before it, changing not only how people kept their vegetables fresh or got from one town to another, but the very nature of their attachment to places, and their perception of time. It wasn’t just that Martin Sloan — or Rod Serling — didn’t like the music of his day as well as he liked the big bands from days past. Change is one thing; obliteration is another.
This episode is flawless, a small gem. Its understated dialogue, cinematography, acting, and a beautifully haunting score by Bernard Herrmann all come together, as if they were simply inevitable. Pay close attention to the quiet and intensely heartfelt scene between grownup Martin and his father (Frank Overton; his craggy face is also most expressive, here with moral courage and tenderness). Pop knows, finally, who Martin is, but he has to tell his own son that he doesn’t belong there anymore. He has to go back where he came from. “Are things really so bad where you are, Martin?” he asks. Maybe Martin has missed the bandstands because he’s been looking in the wrong places. Perhaps, perhaps. You be the judge.
One of the BEST episodes from one of the BEST shows from “The Golden Age of Television” …