Young Man's Fancy (1962)

Richard Matheson, from The Twilight Zone

We’ve got a change of pace for our Film of the Week, an episode from the series I consider unsurpassed in American television, The Twilight Zone. You mustn’t think of it as “science fiction.” There was some of that, sure, and a lot of the uncanny and preternatural, as in today’s episode, “A Young Man’s Fancy,” but Rod Serling hit it right when he called this realm of twilight the land of imagination. I’ve sometimes said that there were two principal forms the episodes in The Twilight Zone might assume, in a broad sense: Christian comedy, and, more frequently, Greek tragedy. Think of Oedipus, keen-minded, relentless, a father to the people of Thebes; it’s his very strength of mind, and his stubbornness and quick temper, that will bring him down. This episode, “A Young Man’s Fancy,” is tragic in the Greek sense. The title is bitterly and astonishingly ironic, and yet utterly appropriate.

First, I should say where we got the phrase “a young man’s fancy” from, because the writer of the episode, Richard Matheson, expected that some millions of his viewers would recognize it. It comes from the great and yet underrated poet Alfred Tennyson, in the poem “Locksley Hall.” There’s a young man speaking, young and passionate and now embittered. He fell in love with his beautiful cousin Amy, and they swore eternal love to one another, but her father put his heavy foot down, thinking more about money than about love, and her mother was a scold and a shrew, so Amy gave in and married a wealthy older man. The speaker, remembering the days before Amy’s capitulation, utters these memorable lines:

In the Spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast;
In the Spring the wanton lapwing gets himself another crest;

In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnished dove; In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.

For our American readers, a “lapwing,” a cheerful and chattering bird related to our killdeer, gets his name from his — or her! — habit of pretending to have an injured wing and hopping along the ground, to divert predators from the nest. And he’s really got quite a crest, too. The “robin” isn’t our American bird, which is a species of thrush, but a little sparrow with quite a bright brick-orange upper chest and neck. “Robin” as a name is just short for Robert, chosen in fun because it goes well with “redbreast.” Anyway, the robin and the lapwing and the rainbow-colored dove are all boasting brighter plumage, because it’s spring, and so too the “young man’s fancy,” his sprightly imagination, “turns to thoughts of love.” That is exactly as it should be.

But in Matheson’s playlet, things are not as they should be. First of all, the young man isn’t that young. Alex Walker (played by Alex Nicol) is 34 years old, apparently a confirmed bachelor, except that the woman who loves him, Virginia Lane (Phyllis Thaxter), has been waiting for him for many years. She sees the man he ought to be, even in the midst of his arrested development. As the episode begins, they have gotten married. It’s a hasty affair, from the office of the Justice of the Peace. They are ready to begin a new life, but first they must go back to Alex’s house, which is now up for sale. You see, it wasn’t just Alex’s house. It was his mother’s house. I mean that in the strongest terms possible. The old lady ran that house. We learn about all this from what Alex says. She cooked, she cleaned, she kept herself and her son together after her husband left them. She was a formidable woman, and everything in that house reminds Alex of her. The new Mrs. Winter wants nothing more than to get rid of that house and never return, but when they go there to seal up the sale with the realtor, Alex sees and hears one thing after another, and his new wife watches with slowly mounting alarm as he begins to lose himself in his memories. It is, in fact, a fight to the death between the Mrs. Walker who is the new bride, and the other Mrs. Walker, Alex’s mother. The son’s very manhood hangs in the balance.

All right — no spoilers! I will say this. Human nature, for good and bad, does not change. The nature of men and women does not change. What makes “A Young Man’s Fancy” powerful is not something creepy that gives us the shakes. It is that we know Alex Walker, we know Virginia, and we know the deceased old lady. They are not one in a million. They are archetypes. Watch the episode, and you will catch yourself murmuring, “Yes, just like Mrs. Wilson,” or “That’s poor Jim Rogers all over.” There’s a deep truth in here about the passage a boy must make from boyhood to manhood, a passage fraught with peril, demanding sacrifice. It may no longer be agreeable to say so, but truth is truth.

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