Rod Serling's films brought his Twilight Zone themes down to earth

Born 100 years ago today, Rod Serling was a television man. He came up in the 1950s, at the dawn of the medium, during the days of live televised plays—Kraft Television Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, The Motorola Television Hour, etc. Big names would star in meaty productions without the opportunity for a second take, racing from one set to the next in the hopes that they wouldn’t miss their cue, and would have enough breath left to speak the words Serling had written for them. It was a wildly popular format for a while, but within a decade, it had almost disappeared.

Then of course, there was The Twilight Zone—Rod Serling’s magnum opus, and one of the most groundbreaking, influential shows to ever hit the airwaves. Spanning five seasons and 156 episodes, it was entertaining, innovative, and rich in ideas in a way that television hadn’t been before, and has rarely been since. It’s the headline to Serling’s legacy, and deservedly so.

Thanks to the unparalleled success of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling has been forever associated with the small screen rather than the big. Nevertheless, during his too-brief career (he died at 50, of a heart attack), he also made a number of theatrically released movies—many of which, like his most famous creation, thoughtfully and memorably explored the themes that preoccupied him all his life. Often, Serling’s movies were adapted from acclaimed teleplays he had written during that live TV era.

1956’s Patterns starred Van Heflin as Fred Staples, the new executive at an upmarket industrial firm. He’s being groomed to replace the aging second-in-command Bill Briggs (Ed Begley), whose kindness towards his underlings has made him an enemy of the big boss Walter Ramsey (Everett Sloane). Walter is determined to bully Bill into quitting, rather than going through the messy business of firing him. Although Fred is horrified at how Bill is treated, he remains dangerously tempted by the power that is being offered to him on a silver platter. 

Requiem For A Heavyweight, released six years later, tells the story of Mountain Rivera (Anthony Quinn), a prizefighter of 17 years who’s told by a doctor that one more punch in the face could leave him blind. His manager Maish (Jackie Gleason) cuts him loose, but severely in debt from having bet against Mountain in his final fight, is eager not to lose his piece of the pie. He tries to manipulate Mountain into a humiliating but lucrative new career path, sabotaging the gentle giant’s effort to make a more peaceful life for himself. 

Although the settings could hardly be more different—the former takes place in offices with chandeliers and oak paneling, the latter in sweaty locker rooms and dive bars—the two movies are both downbeat productions that ponder how a person can retain their inherent goodness in a poisonous world. Patterns argues that they can’t; Requiem For A Heavyweight argues that it’s possible, but might well demand the good person in question be forever robbed of their dignity. 

In Patterns, Fred is basically a good man, who is kind to all he meets. He does try to stick up for Bill, and repudiate Walter’s bullying. And yet, and yet. There’s a moment midway through the film where Fred realizes that he hasn’t helped Bill when he should have, because he enjoyed having the lion’s share of the credit for the report they both wrote. His subsequent horror—made all the more poignant because Van Heflin represented basic decency in so many movies of the '40s and '50s—invites a moment of penetrating self-reflection. For a moment, our hero views himself with horrifying clarity, and he does not like what he sees.

Soon though, he’s back to self-delusion. At the end of Patterns, Bill is no longer an issue, and Fred takes the job that is offered to him. He charged into Walter’s office determined to quit, but takes little persuasion to accept the deal, especially after negotiating even better terms. He tells himself that this new position will help him keep an eye on Walter’s corporate cruelty, but we’ve seen how easily distracted he is—how susceptible to flattery and the lure of power. We’re left with the queasy feeling that it won’t be long until he’s succumbed completely.

The ending of Requiem For A Heavyweight is queasier still. The sweet-natured Mountain discovers that his beloved former manager Maish, the man he considered his dearest friend, bet against him in the boxing match that ended his career. Mountain lasted longer than anticipated, so Maish owes some scary people more money than he can possibly pay. Because Mountain has refused to let Maish manage him into a wrestling career instead (this being a time when professional wrestling was considered degrading) those scary people have come to kill him.

Confronted with the imminent death of a man he loved, and could save, Mountain changes his mind. He dons his costume. As the closing title card appears, he is leaping round the ring dressed in Native American costumery offensive even for a film made in the 1960s, being jeered at by the audience. Any hope he had for a new life seems impossibly distant now. 

Maish is never portrayed as a cartoon villain. He’s clearly ridden with guilt, and like Fred, looks stricken when he realizes how much he’s screwed over a man who really trusted him. Nevertheless, his demons—greed, and self-preservation at all costs—win out, and drag a good man down with him. The most sympathetic character in Patterns doesn’t live to see the finale; in Requiem For A Heavyweight, he looks doomed to spend the rest of his life as a mockery. In a Rod Serling movie, there’s rarely an uncomplicated hero, and when there’s a villain, it was far more often a system or an ideology (capitalism, prejudice) than an individual. A feature-length duration allowed the time to dig into such complexities in a much deeper way than in a 22-minute TV episode.

Patterns was released before The Twilight Zone started, and Requiem For A Heavyweight between seasons three and four. When his next major film hit theaters, in early 1964, the show that cemented Serling’s legacy was limping to the end of its increasingly troubled run, and he was fed up to the back teeth with the medium. “Television has left me tired, frustrated,” he told The New York Times at the end of that year. “Television gave me identity as a writer, you can’t knock that. It’s just now I like the movies better.” 

The movie that had him feeling that way was Seven Days In May. Adapted from the novel by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, it was the most accomplished, glossiest entry in Serling’s filmography. With John Frankenheimer at the helm, and a cast crammed with legends—Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Ava Gardner, Fredric March—it followed the attempt of high-ranking military general James Mattoon Scott (Lancaster) to overthrow President Jordan Lyman (March), following Scott’s vehement disagreement with Lyman’s signing of a nuclear treaty.

Though it wasn’t his story originally, Seven Days In May offered Rod Serling plenty of opportunity to work in his prime mode: speechifying. Sometimes Serling’s love of a grand speech could border on self-parody, but it was seldom as full-flight glorious, or as well-served by the cast, as it was in this 1964 movie. Watching today, it’s remarkable how much March’s warmly eloquent President Lyman calls to mind Martin Sheen’s President Bartlet, commander in chief on The West Wing. (Perhaps it’s not just a coincidence that creator Aaron Sorkin would give another major character on the show the surname Lyman?)

Rod Serling yearned to use his writing to discuss contemporary events, and was often prevented from doing so by TV censorship, or the fear of upsetting sponsors; part of the reason The Twilight Zone gravitated around sci-fi was because he “found it was all right to have Martians saying things that Democrats and Republicans could never say.” By adapting Knebel and Bailey’s novel, he was able to tackle such issues on a decidedly more terrestrial basis. 

Seven Days In May was released in those politically fraught days of the mid '60s, and focused on a nuclear non-proliferation treaty with the U.S.S.R. of the kind that had actually been signed the year before. “The enemy's an age—a nuclear age,” March’s president says near the end of the movie. “It happens to have killed man's faith in his ability to influence what happens to him.” Though those lines have a close equivalent in the source novel, they also gel with Serling’s tendency to see the villain of the piece as far less tangible than a flesh-and-blood human.

While his methods are literally treasonous, Lancaster’s General Scott is genuine in his belief that he is doing the right thing. He thinks it’s ludicrous to expect the U.S.S.R. to comply with any nuclear treaty, and that signing one has put the U.S. in mortal danger. In his view, overthrowing Lyman and assuming the office himself is the only way to save the country. In adapting the novel, Serling does a masterful job in underlining that Scott’s plan is deadly, dangerous, and wrong on every level, and absolutely must be stopped—but that the motives behind it were, in a messed up kind of a way, honest. It was a precarious tightrope for Serling to walk, and he didn’t wobble. 

Serling’s work on Seven Days In May was widely applauded—he was nominated for a Writer’s Guild of America award for the screenplay, which would be the highest garland his movie writing earned him. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to capitalize on that momentum. In the years immediately following, his sole big screen effort would be 1966’s Assault On A Queen, which saw Frank Sinatra pull a heist on the ship The Queen Mary. You may think that sounds entertaining—you’d be wrong.

Two years later, however, came Planet Of The Apes. Simply put: astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) crash lands on a planet ruled by apes, from whom he has to escape. Even if you haven’t seen the original, the likelihood is you’ve culturally osmosed its much-parodied finale. 

So, about that finale. Rod Serling was not the sole author of Planet Of The Apes—it originated as a novel by French author Pierre Boulle. Serling was hired to adapt the novel, and then Michael Wilson, who already had Lawrence Of Arabia, A Place In The Sun, and Boulle adaptation Bridge On The River Kwai among his illustrious credits, was brought on to rework Serling’s drafts. According to Serling, when it came to the final screenplay, the structure was largely his, and the dialogue was Wilson’s. 

Although it’s completely different to Boulle’s novel, to this day it remains somewhat in dispute as to whether Serling or Wilson dreamed up the “Statue of Liberty on the beach” finale—that the consensus has settled around Serling appears to be down to, as much as anything, how closely it resembles the twist endings of several different episodes of The Twilight Zone. 

In fact, as a whole, Planet Of The Apes is quite possibly the feature film of Serling’s that most resembles an extended episode of The Twilight Zone. It all harkens back to his quote about Martians saying things that humans couldn’t; the ape society, with its prejudices and bureaucracies and figures warped by power, was a clear mirror of our own. Though he didn’t have a hand in the movies that would follow Planet Of The Apes, it seems only fitting that one of the most socially conscious writers in screen history would have helped set into motion one of the most thoughtful long-running screen franchises.

In 1972, The Man was the last film of Serling’s to get a big screen run during his lifetime—it was actually made for TV, but first given a very limited theatrical release. The story of Douglas Dilman (James Earl Jones), a senator who becomes the first Black president via two deaths and a resignation, The Man was adapted by Serling from Irving Wallace’s best-selling novel. 

The Man was far from Serling’s best work, but it was a tough ask. Considering that Wallace’s source novel was well over 700 pages, Serling’s ability to condense it into a cogent 90-minute feature that only feels a little overstuffed was a testament to his skill as a screenwriter. Nevertheless, the limitations of the TV movie budget must have been fairly egregious on the big screen. And Serling being Serling, although his rarely paralleled ability to craft a good weighty speech results in some stirring passages, the setting and the subject matter lead to some of his grandiloquent excesses being left unchecked. 

Still, Rod Serling had an exemplary partner in James Earl Jones, who he called, “the most uniquely skilled man… [he’d] ever worked with.” Jones injected tremendous inner conflict and vulnerability into Serling’s stately words, and used them as the basis of a performance that, in a picture with less working against it, would surely have picked up some awards.

In The Man, Dilman is not elevated to the presidency with the mandate conferred by an election, but via the deaths of those ahead of him in the line of succession. He is treated at best as a substanceless figurehead and at worst with overt, noxious racism by the members of his cabinet. As he had in Patterns, and in Requiem For A Heavyweight, Serling places his most honorable character into an acidic, inhospitable environment with vanishingly few allies. Dilman never actually wanted to be president in the first place, and throughout the film experiences nothing that would apparently make him change his mind. 

In the Wallace novel, Dilman decides not to seek re-election. In the movie, after he makes an unpopular decision that seems sure to erode any limited support he did have, it looks like he will go the same way. But then right at the end, questioned by a reporter on the way to the floor of his party’s political convention, he says, “On the contrary—I plan to fight like hell for the nomination.” The closing credits play as he stands behind the presidential podium, resolute. 

From all we’ve seen and heard beforehand, it’s highly unlikely Dilman will secure the nomination, let alone a full presidential term of his own. Yet his determination to fight on, in the face of an unwinnable struggle, makes this as close as you get in Serling’s filmography to a happy ending. 

In his movies, as he did in The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling shined a light on the human race that was often glaringly unflattering. Yet he was not a misanthrope, and continued to write intelligent, thoughtful characters that were led by their better angels—good men, who would do the right thing, the tough thing, even at great detriment to themselves. They would rarely win, and would often in fact meet quite miserable ends, but the mere fact of their existence seemed to suggest that we were not entirely doomed. 

That the last major project released in Serling’s lifetime would offer his honorable hero the slim potential for a brighter future proved an atypical but fitting end note. However bleak his worldview could appear, and however little we deserved it, Rod Serling never stopped hoping for the best for humanity.