The Night of the Meek

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“The Night of the Meek”
The Twilight Zone episode

Art Carney in The Night of the Meek
Episode no. Season 2
Episode 47
Written by Rod Serling
Directed by Jack Smight
Guest stars Art Carney : Henry Corwin
John Fiedler : Mr. Dundee
Robert P. Lieb : Officer Flaherty
Val Avery : Bruce the Bartender
Meg Wyllie : Sister Florence
Kay Cousins : Irate Mother
Burt Mustin : Old Man
Andrea Darvi : Little girl
Jimmy Garrett : Little boy
Nan Peterson : Blonde in the bar
Matthew McCue : Derelict man
Larrain Gillespie : Young female elf
Featured music none credited
Production no. 173-3663
Original airdate December 23, 1960
Episode chronology
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List of Twilight Zone episodes

"The Night of the Meek" is the December 23, 1960 episode of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone.

Contents

[edit] Opening narration

As heavy snow begins to fall, a drunk and dejected Henry Corwin, wearing his Santa Claus suit, stumbles and half-falls at a curbside lamppost. He is approached by two tenement children pleading for toys, a Christmas dinner and "a job for my daddy". As Corwin begins to sob helplessly, the camera slowly pans to the right revealing, in the same shot, Rod Serling standing on the sidewalk, wearing a winter coat and scarf, with the snow settling on his hair and coat:

“ This is Mr. Henry Corwin, normally unemployed, who once a year takes the lead role in the uniquely popular American institution, that of the department-store Santa Claus in a road-company version of 'The Night Before Christmas'. But in just a moment Mr. Henry Corwin, ersatz Santa Claus, will enter a strange kind of North Pole which is one part the wondrous spirit of Christmas and one part the magic that can only be found... in the Twilight Zone. ”

[edit] Plot synopsis

It's Christmas Eve. Henry Corwin, a down-and-out ne'er-do-well, wearing a worn-out Santa Claus suit, has just spent his last few dollars on six drinks at Jack's Place, the neighborhood bar. Bruce, the brusque bartender, throws him out after spotting Corwin, now low on funds, reaching for the bottle. Arriving an hour late for his seasonal job as a department store Santa, the visibly-drunk Corwin is soon fired by Mr. Dundee, the mean-spirited manager, acting on a complaint from the rude mother who pushed her ill-behaved son to sit on Santa's lap. As Dundee orders him to leave the premises, Corwin pours out his heartache over living in a "dirty rooming house on a street filled with hungry kids and shabby people" for whom he is unable to fulfill his desired role as Santa. Still in his outfit, he returns to Jack's Place, but is refused re-entry by Bruce who explains to the inebriated patrons that "Santa's a lush".

Stumbling aimlessly into an alley, he sees a large, cloth garbage bag which seems to have the ability of containing any item that's asked of it. Suffused with the spirit of Christmas, Corwin proceeds to hand out gift-wrapped presents to passersby and then, entering Sister Florence's "Delancey Street Mission House", to derelict men attending the Christmas Eve service. Outraged at this interruption, Sister Florence goes outside to fetch Officer Flaherty who proceeds to arrest Corwin for apparently taking goods from his former place of employment. Flaherty then contacts Mr. Dundee, who arrives at the police station, exclaiming, "Ah-ha, here he is, and here we are, and there that is". Calling Corwin a "moth-eaten Robin Hood", Dundee reaches into the garbage bag to display some of the purported "wholesale theft of thousands of dollars worth of goods", but all he manages to pull out are a couple of empty cans and a meowing stray cat.

Released, Corwin reaches into the bag and gives Dundee the Christmas present that he sarcastically requested, a bottle of cherry brandy, vintage 1903. Leaving the precinct, he continues to hand out gifts for the remainder of the evening, until the bag is empty. Burt, an elderly derelict, points out that Corwin has taken "not a thing" for himself. Corwin replies that his only wish is to do this every year. Returning to the alley where he found the bag, he encounters a young female elf, sleigh and four reindeer waiting to take him to his destiny as the eternal Santa Claus.

Emerging from the precinct, Flaherty and Dundee, now slightly light-headed from sampling the brandy, hear the tinkle of bells and confirm to each other that they have, indeed, just seen Henry Corwin, in a sleigh with reindeer and an elf, ascend into the night sky on Christmas Eve.

[edit] Closing narration

“ A word to the wise to all the children of the twentieth century, whether their concern be pediatrics or geriatrics, whether they crawl on hands and knees and wear diapers or walk with a cane and comb their beards. There's a wondrous magic to Christmas and there's a special power reserved for little people. In short, there's nothing mightier than the meek. ”

[edit] End credits

  • "THE NIGHT OF THE MEEK"
  • Directed by Jack Smight [third of four TZ episodes—see "Episode notes"]
  • Written by Rod Serling [thirty-sixth of ninety-two TZ episodes]
  • Produced by Buck Houghton [forty-sixth of one-hundred-one TZ episodes]
  • The Twilight Zone Created by Rod Serling
  • Starring Art Carney as Henry Corwin [sole TZ appearance, but previously starred in Rod Serling's "The Velvet Alley" on Playhouse 90—see "Episode notes"]
  • John Fiedler as Mr. Dundee (the department store manager) [first of two TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]
Robert P. Lieb as Flaherty (the police officer who arrests Corwin)
  • Val Avery as the Bartender ("Hello. Jack's Place. No, Jack's not here. This is Bruce")
Meg Wyllie as Sister Florence (who leads a rendition of "Joy to the World" at the Christmas service for skid row derelict men)
  • Kay Cousins as Irate Mother (of "Percival Smithers", the ill-behaved kid who tells "Santa Corwin" that, for a Christmas present, he wants "a new front name")
Burt Mustin as Old Man (Burt, who receives from Corwin a pipe and a smoking jacket) [first of two TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]
  • unbilled (in order of appearance) Andrea Darvi (Little girl pleading with "Santa Corwin" for "a carriage and a dolly and a playhouse... a job for my daddy")
Jimmy Garrett (Little boy pleading with "Santa Corwin" for "a gun and a set of soldiers and a fort... a big turkey pot Christmas dinner")
Nan Peterson (Blonde in the bar, sitting next to the sleeping drunk, as Henry Corwin knocks on the window glass of the bar door) [second of four TZ appearances—see "Episode notes"]
Matthew McCue (Collins, one of the derelicts at the mission, who requests a sweater... "what size? who cares what size")
Larrian Gillespie (Adolescent female elf who, along with a large sleigh and four reindeer, waits for "Santa Corwin")
Reindeer Furnished by SANTA'S VILLAGE Skyforest, California

[edit] Episode notes

By November 1960, The Twilight Zone's second season had already broadcast five episodes and finished filming sixteen. However, at a cost of about $65,000 per episode, the show was exceeding its budget. As a result, six consecutive episodes were videotaped and then transferred to 16-millimeter film for TV transmission. Total savings on editing and cinematography costs amounted to only about $30,000 for all six entries—not enough to justify the loss of depth of visual perspective, which made the shows look like stagebound live TV dramas, or even soap operas. The experiment was therefore deemed a failure and never attempted again.

Even though the six shows were recorded in a row, through November and into mid-December, their broadcast dates were out of order and varied widely, with this, the fourth one, shown on December 23, 1960 as episode 11. The first, "The Lateness of the Hour", was seen on December 2, 1960 as episode 8; The second, "Static" was shown on March 10, 1961 as episode 20; the third, "The Whole Truth", appeared on January 20, 1961 as episode 14; the fifth, "Twenty Two" was seen on February 10, 1961 as episode 17; and the last one, "Long Distance Call" was transmitted on March 3, 1961 as episode 22.

  • Jack Smight (1925–2003), a director of numerous TV episodes, made-for-TV movies and theatrical films, helmed four TZ episodes, including three of the six videotaped ones, the other two being "The Lateness of the Hour" and "Twenty Two". His first TZ assignment was "The Lonely" which, shown as the seventh episode of the first season, was the first regularly-filmed installment after the pilot episode.
  • A character star, Art Carney (1918–2003) was best known to TV viewers as "Ed Norton", Jackie Gleason's sidekick on Gleason's various shows during the 1950s and 60s. Despite Gleason's starring status, it was Carney who received the honors—six Emmies and a Best Actor Oscar, to Gleason's none. This was Carney's only TZ appearance but, nearly two years earlier, on January 22, 1959, he starred in Rod Serling's semi-autobiographical story, "The Velvet Alley", the eighth of ten Serling teleplays featured on Playhouse 90, the most prestigious of the many live drama anthology series from the Golden Age of Television. Carney's role, that of an aspiring writer who sells his first teleplay to a major TV drama series, paralleled Serling's own career. The name of Carney's "Night of the Meek" character, Henry Corwin, was a tribute to Serling's idol, legendary television, film and, most memorably for Serling, radio writer Norman Corwin whose lengthy career, in contrast to Serling's relatively brief 50-year lifetime, has spanned over seven decades. On May 3, 2008, Corwin celebrated his 98th birthday.
  • Busy character actor John Fiedler (1925–2005) has played officious, usually bespectacled characters in hundreds of radio shows, TV episodes and movies starting in the 1940s. Appearing on TV from its earliest days, he was one of the cadets in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet from 1951 to 1954, had regular roles in three series between 1973 and 1984 and did countless cartoon voices, including that of Piglet for Disney. His other TZ part was in third season's penultimate episode, "Cavender Is Coming", a sitcom pilot complete with a laugh track.
  • A unique character, Burt Mustin (1884–1977) was a retired car salesman who began acting in films and television in 1951 at the age of 67 and continued as a performer for the next twenty six years, dying eleven days short of his ninety-third birthday. Here, he's an elderly denizen of skid row, whom Corwin addresses as "Burt" and presents with a pipe and, as a follow-up, with a smoking jacket—in his other TZ appearance, he's again typecast as one of the residents of the old-age home in third season's "Kick the Can".
  • Attractive blonde Nan Peterson played mainly decorative parts in some twenty TV shows and four films during a five-year period between 1959 and 1964. She was the title character in the poverty-budgeted 1959 independent Louisiana Hussy and is remembered by specialized genre fans as one of the two female leads in two other small-scale productions, 1959's The Hideous Sun Demon and 1963's Ed Wood-scripted Shotgun Wedding. Her four TZ appearances, with very limited dialogue, are spread between the beginning and the end of her brief career. Here, she is little more than an extra, sitting at the bar, next to a drunk whose sleeping face is in foreground, turned towards the camera. Her first performance, as the mother of a child on the merry-go-round, is in first season's memorable fifth episode "Walking Distance", and her second, the most prominent of the four, in the episode videotaped immediately before this one, "The Whole Truth", where she and Jack Ging play a newly-married couple planning to buy one of Jack Carson's worthless used cars. Her final acting role was three years later, in February 1964's fifth season installment, "From Agnes—With Love", in which, as here, she is unbilled in her bit part as a secretary.
  • A stage musical based on this episode was written by lyricist/librettist Patrick Cook and composer Frederick Freyer. It has not been produced because of copyright issues.

[edit] Themes

A similar theme was explored in the episode "I Dream of Genie". As Corwin, representing Rod Serling's expression of the true meaning of Christmas and rejection of its crass commercialism and consumerism, tells Mr. Dundee, "Christmas is more than barging up and down department store aisles and pushing people out of the way...I wish that the meek shall inherit the earth".

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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