Shy Beth (Shirley Knight) is now to the city and still struggling to make friends. Fortunately, her friend Janet gets her a nice corporate job. Unfortunately, Janet then vanishes and Beth discovers that her co-workers are more than just office workers, I won’t spoil the twist, since the title of this episode already did that.
Legion of Demons aired on February 2nd, 1973 and it undoubtedly led to a lot of viewers saying, “I think they filmed that at my office!”
Enjoy!
At the start of this made-for-TV western, experienced lawman Dave Harmon (Clint Walker) has just been appointed the new marshal of Yuma. He’s served as the marshal of several towns, all of which were near rowdy army bases. He’s a laconic, no-nonsense lawman who is quick with a gun and smart enough to negotiate with the local Indian tribes.
As soon as Harmon rides into town, he comes across the King Brothers (Bruce Glover and Bing Russell) making trouble. He kills one of the brothers in a saloon and then takes the other one to jail, where he’s mysteriously gunned down during a midnight jailbreak. It turns out that there’s a third Harmon brother, cattle baron Arch King (Morgan Woodward), and he rides into town looking for revenge. He gives Harmon a set amount of time to find and arrest his brother’s killer or Arch and his men are going to return to town and kill Harmon.
Fortunately, Harmon has a witness to the jailbreak murder. Andres (Miguel Alejandro) is a young, Mexican orphan who sleeps at the jail. He witnessed the murder but he only saw that the killer was wearing what appeared to be army boots. Harmon’s investigation brings him into conflict with the local army base’s commandant (Peter Mark Richman) and also leads to the discovery of a plot to defraud the local Indians.
The main problem with Yuma is that it was clearly designed to be a pilot for a weekly television series and, as a result, it introduces a lot of characters who don’t get much to do. There’s a lot of talk about how Harmon is searching for the men who earlier killed his family but that subplot is never resolved. (If Yuma had been picked up as a weekly show, maybe it would have been.) Yuma has to set up the premise for a potential show and tell a complete story in just 70 minutes. That’s a lot to handle and Yuma ends up feeling rushed and incomplete.
As a B-western for undemanding fans of the genre, it’s acceptable. Clint Walker was a convincing lawman and the film was directed by Ted Post, who knew how to stage a gunfight. But it’s not really a western that you’re going to remember for long after you watch it.
Long before he played the long-suffering Mr. Feeney on Boy Meets World, William Daniels made his film debut as another school principal in the 1963 film, Ladybug Ladybug.
In Ladybug Ladybug, Daniels plays Mr. Calkins and he’s got a lot more to worry about than just some unstable student with an unhealthy fixation on a girl that he’s gaslighted into loving him. No, Mr. Calkins has to deal with the very real possibility that a nuclear war might break out at any second. One day, when an imminent nuclear attack warning signal goes off, no one can be sure whether or not it’s real or if it was an accident. However, Mr. Calkins takes no chances. He dismisses school for the day and tells all of the students to go home.
However, there’s a problem. The school is in a rural area and most of the students live several miles away. Because it’s early in the day, there aren’t any school buses running. The children will have to walk home. To make sure that the kids get to safety, they’re divided into groups. A teacher is assigned to each group, tasked with keeping the children calm and making sure they reach their houses.
It’s a long walk and the countryside is deathly quiet. Some of the children talk about what’s going to happen if there really is a war. Others, being too young to understand the seriousness of the situation, treat it all like a game. As each child reaches their house, they have to deal with parents who are more concerned about why their child has come home early than the fact that there might be a war about to break out.
Back at the school, Mr. Calkins and a few remains teachers wait. One teacher tries to clean up her classroom, all the while realizing that there’s a chance that the classroom will never be used again.
And we, the viewers, keep waiting for a bomb to drop or, at the very least, some sort of clarification about what’s really happening. We wait in vain. The film’s ending is harrowing but, at the same time, ambiguous. Is the world ending or are the children going to wake up in the morning and head back to school? It all depends on how you interpret the film’s final few moments.
Of course, by the time we reach that ending, a group of children has already taken cover in a bomb shelter. Unfortunately, their self-appointed leader has decided that there’s not room for all the children, which means that one girl ends up getting kicked out. Wandering around outside, she finds an old refrigerator to hide in. Your heart sinks as you watch her climb in and close the door behind her….
Ladbybug Ladybug is a grim film. At times, it runs the risk of being a bit too grim. The film definitely gets across its point but it’s so relentlessly depressing that it’s a bit difficult to sit through. Of course, Ladybug Ladybug was filmed around the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis so, for many viewers in 1963, the film was less an allegory and more just a record of the feelings and fears that they had to deal with every single day. Towards the end of the film, when one of the children desperately starts to yell, “Stop! Stop! STOP!,” he was undoubtedly speaking for an entire generation that grew up under the shadow of mutually assured destruction.
Ladybug Ladybug was one of the many nuclear war-themed films to be released in the early 60s. One could easily imagine it as being a companion piece to Fail Safe. While President Henry Fonda is debating whether or not to sacrifice New York, the children are simply trying to get home.
In this episode of The Night Gallery, Leonard Nimoy plays a widower who is happy to be rid of his invalid wife. However, he then gets a cat who doesn’t seem to like him. And who can turn into a leopard and a tiger at will…
I just like this episode because it features a kitty!
Through the Shattered Lens 