The Twilight Zone, S1E3, "Mr. Denton on Doomsday"

Opening: Portrait of a town drunk named Al Denton. This is a man who’s begun his dying early—a long, agonizing route through a maze of bottles. Al Denton, who would probably give an arm or a leg or a part of his soul to have another chance, to be able to rise up and shake the dirt from his body and the bad dreams that infest his consciousness. [Intro: peddler.] In the parlance of the times, this is a peddler, a rather fanciful-looking little man in a black frock coat. [Intro: revolver.] And this is the third principal character of our story. Its function: perhaps to give Mr. Al Denton his second chance.

The prevalence of Twilight Zone Westerns is a detail of the show that’s kind of slipped out of the public consciousness, but there are a lot of them, and several are quite good. (Post-TZ, Serling had an unfortunately short-lived Western series called The Loner.) “Mr. Denton on Doomsday”¹ has the honor of being the first.

It immediately wins my favor by casting the great Dan Duryea—consummate heel on screen, consummate nice guy off it—as Al Denton. It’s an unusually sympathetic and textured role for Duryea, and he plays the hell out of it, selling Denton’s ground-in-the-dirt humiliation and stunned reaction to even the smallest bit of unexpected respect. Before we know about his hard-edged past, though, there’s the faintest shadow of it in how he chooses humiliation over charity. He’d rather sing “How Dry I Am” in a cracked voice to get a young punk to buy him some whiskey—and rather drink that out of a broken bottle—than take someone’s well-meant pity.

That’s no way to live, maybe, but it sets up Denton’s psychological need for some form of self-respect. Alcoholics Anonymous tells people to accept that they’re powerless over their need to drink; Serling believes that finding a little bit of power again could be Denton’s way out of his sickness. On TZ, alcoholism is often implied to be the result of heightened, hurt sensitivity, with characters who are too attuned to their own and others’ suffering drinking to take away the edge of the pain. When they can find a helpful (or at least less agonizing) way to engage with the world again, their need fades.

So traveling peddler Henry J. Fate (Malcolm Atterbury) steps in, supernaturally providing Denton with a revolver. (Denton wakes up with it, so it’s a miracle, not a gift; he can accept that.) We have another series milestone here, as Fate kicks off the show’s delight in otherworldly characters giving themselves transparent aliases.

While it might be a stretch to call any magical gun episode anti-gun, it’s aged rather well in the regard—much better than you might expect from an opening that positions as a revolver as a defeated man’s potential savior. Even before we get to the excellent finale, Denton’s revolver—which fires perfectly without him aiming it or even intending to shoot—is non-lethal and even mostly non-violent. He bests town bully Dan² by shooting the gun out of his hand and then bringing a chandelier down on his head, and that’s enough to send Dan away with his tail between his legs and win Denton a little more dignity. The only real violence in the scene comes when Denton stares Dan down and slaps him, telling him not to call him “rummy” anymore.

Here, the best-case scenario for guns is a kind of trick shooting, where you get to demonstrate skill without actually hurting anyone—it’s what John Dall loved in Gun Crazy, essentially—and Denton’s tragic back-story is the worst-case scenario. He was once very good with a gun in his own right, no mystical interference necessary, but: “I was so good that once a day, someone would ride into town and make me prove it.” This version of the West is full of men eager to establish a name for themselves by shooting down the area’s top gunfighter, and—as we soon see—they don’t like to take no for an answer. Denton kept getting presented with the choice of killing or dying, and he kept choosing to kill—until he defended his title and life against a sixteen-year-old boy, started drinking, and never really stopped.

There’s something moving about how Denton immediately accepts that the cycle is about to begin all over again, especially since he believes that this time, there’s no chance that he’ll win. He knows that he didn’t have anything to do with the perfect shooting that humiliated Dan; he knows he’s lost his gift and that his hands aren’t steady anymore. Him using his drinking money to get a shave is partly a beautiful little look at him reclaiming some of his dignity, but it’s also profoundly bittersweet. As he says, “I want to look proper on the day I die.”

And, indeed, a man named Pete Grant instantly sends his friends to set up a quick-draw shootout between them. Since it doesn’t seem like Pete Grant lives in town, this is hilariously quick. Did someone send him a telegram telling him that Al Denton got up off the bar-stool and is now back in the game? Did they ride to him at a breakneck pace? Who knows. The important thing is that it highlights the inevitability of Denton being forced back into one of these situations and gives him a nice line: “It didn’t take any time at all. Just time enough for one shave.” Serling has a gift for these bittersweetly resonant lines.

He turns to Henry J. Fate, whose painted coach proclaims him to be a “dealer in everything.” Denton’s all set to run, but Fate offers him a potion that will ostensibly solve his problem—“Just so you might remember sometime the night Fate stepped in.” (If my last name were Fate, I would say this all the time. I would be so annoying about it.) The potion will make him the fastest draw around and let him shoot incredibly well without even aiming, but its effects will only last for ten seconds, so he’ll have to down it at exactly the right time and act quickly. Again, there’s magic in the mix, but Denton has his own agency to hold on to.

Atterbury does a fantastic job with Fate, injecting him with the right amount of ambiguity for just long enough. In the end, he’s a variation on a guardian angel, but it’s hard to know that for sure from the jump: he’s played with just enough potentially sinister edge that he could have been a trickster figure looking to stir up some chaos and bloodshed. When we see that he sold the same potion to Pete Grant—when Denton and Grant down it at the same time and stare at each other, each of them suddenly understanding what’s happened—it’s a great little twist that at first seems to imply that Fate has screwed them both over.

By someone else’s standards, maybe he has—but not by Denton’s and not by Rod Serling’s. When Denton and Pete shoot simultaneously, they both hit and ruin each other’s gun hands, taking them out of the vicious circle forever, something Denton explicitly identifies as a blessing for them both. It’s a gun story where the happy ending is having your gunfighter skills ruined, which is an unusual and oddly uplifting story beat. Losing the ability to take one simple, deadly action frees them to make any other choice in the books.³ Another show might play this as a kind of metaphorical emasculation, but Serling sees this injury as empowering, not taking away these men’s manhood but giving them the potential to express a fuller version of their humanity.

Closing: Mr. Henry Fate, dealer in utensils and pots and pans, liniments and potions. A fanciful little man in a black frock coat who can help a man climbing out of a pit—or another man from falling into one. Because, you see, fate can work that way, in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Allen Reisner

Written by: Rod Serling

Cinematography by: George T. Clemens

Up Next: The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine

1. There’s a band with this name now! ↩︎
2. Martin Landau, who would appear in North by Northwest in the same year. ↩︎
3. Will the third episode of every series I cover for this column inevitably involve two gunfighters being relieved that an apparent miracle has prevented them from shooting each other? I can only hope. ↩︎