The Twilight Zone, S1E13, "The Four of Us Are Dying"

Opening: His name is Arch Hammer, he’s 36 years old. He’s been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, and a part-time bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickel-and-dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt; a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark-room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him. But Mr. Hammer has a talent, discovered at a very early age. This much he does have. He can make his face change. He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes, and he can change his face. He can change it into anything he wants. Mr. Archie Hammer, jack-of-all-trades, has just checked in at three-eighty a night, with two bags, some newspaper clippings, a most odd talent, and a master plan to destroy some lives.

Look at that opening. Damn, when Rod Serling wants to insult somebody, he can do it with eviscerating eloquence.

This is Twilight Zone noir, and that’s not a stylistic well the series will go to very often, perhaps with good reason. While it can do exceptional things with the cinematic style of film noir, and there are a couple standout episodes that feel inspired by noir but successfully go in their own direction, like “The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine,” grittier and more grounded looks at how people’s choices damn them are not entirely TZ.¹ “The Four of Us Are Dying” adheres to the genre template without finding much meaning or resonance in it. It fascinates me that this is based on a George Clayton Johnson short story, when the excellent episodes he would eventually write directly for the show feel about as different from this as you can get.

Still, while I have my complaints about this episode, it has an extremely cool premise—a sleazy shapeshifter blows into town, uses his talent for profit, and ultimately pays the price²—and the performances are all good, with Beverly Garland³ doing especially fine work as the melancholy-but-hopeful Maggie. The stylistic touches, like the disconnected neon signs hanging around Arch in a cloud as the episode begins, are a familiar way to do soundstage-bound city scenes, but they also have panache; the harsh, nerve-fraying score—original to the episode and crafted by the great Jerry Goldsmith very early in his career—is excellent.

Plus, while I don’t think Serling had a particularly noir-inclined heart, he could absolutely do noir dialogue, and the lines in this episode absolutely hum. For sheer distinctiveness, I award the top prize to Maggie’s “unravel the flesh” (as a replacement for “hands off”), but I’m also very fond of Johnny’s friend exclaiming, “They said you were removed by a locomotive!”

Part of the problem with the episode is that we’re following Arch Hammer (Harry Townes, whom we saw in the AHP episode “The Creeper”), and there’s no there there. He’s awful, and he’s not even interestingly awful. I was more compelled by Fred Renard from last week’s “What You Need,” because the episode found his emotional core—a bottomless lack of satisfaction—and pitied him a little for being what he was. Arch Hammer is only as interesting as his gift. Outside of it, he’s flat and awful, a shitty user with nothing inside him.⁴ All four of the Arch actors—Townes, Phillip Pine⁵, Ross Martin⁶, and Don Gordon⁷—do a good job; they’re all convincing as one man shuffling through a handful of roles and disguises. They’re just stuck playing a character with no interiority.

To some extent, that could be deliberate, and under other circumstances, I could like the notion that Arch constantly shifting between other people’s faces and identities means that he’s become largely empty of self. That even pays off well at the end, when he needs a new face and, frantically scrambling to think of one, can’t even come up with his own. But this is an icy, purely cerebral notion, and its lack of an emotional hook makes it feel out-of-place here.

The technical fault of the episode is that much of it lies in Arch scrambling to use his gift to profit and stay out of trouble, and the gambits he comes up with aren’t that clever and the scrambling isn’t that tense or well-paced. It’s a structural problem: we come upon Arch when he’s already decided on his main two activities for the night (using Johnny’s face for Maggie and Virgil’s for the gangsters), so we don’t get the vicarious interest of being welcomed into the scheme. I can understand it for the Maggie part, since his deceptive seduction is skin-crawling and repugnant, but it would have been a vast improvement to be riding shotgun with Arch as he strategizes Virgil’s return from the dead.

Actually, seeing more planning and process on his part at all would be nice. A how-to breakdown is almost always intrinsically interesting, and it’s even better when it’s something your audience will never get to experience, like, say, impersonating someone when you can mimic their face but don’t know their mannerisms or style of speech. I suppose Arch mostly lucks out on that front, since the people he’s trying to fool are too dazed by grief or shock to question anything, but losing that particular pleasure still rankles.

Besides, putting us in a situation where we’re vicariously improvising on the fly and with limited knowledge would be one of the few things that could get us to empathize with Arch despite his awfulness—and that little bit of connection would make the ending, where his improvisation finally fails, have much more narrative impact. This was the kind of thing Breaking Bad did really well, where the problem-solving could be addictively compelling even when Walt was at his worst.

Well, enough about this jerk. Let’s talk about the two characters I do care about: Maggie and Peter Brocco’s Mr. Marshak. Maggie is my favorite character of the episode. She’s a fantastic onscreen presence—a sweetly husky singing voice, effortless dignity, and a kind of balletic physicality—and there’s an awful pathos to her situation. And in the end, of course, she loses her Johnny all over again, because Arch won’t be able to make their date. That’s a good thing, really, but the mental image of her standing in the train station waiting for him is a heartbreaking one.

Mr. Marshak’s story is similarly tragic. Arch takes on the appearance of Mr. Marshak’s son, Andy, a successful boxer, only to immediately run into Mr. Marshak near his newspaper stand. I usually don’t care if a Twilight Zone episode employs a couple coincidences, but this seems like quite the stretch. On the other hand, it’s at least the one bit of Arch improvisation we get, with him trying to read the encounter and figure out who this guy is supposed to be to him.

While Maggie was still caught up in mourning the possibly-not-that-great Johnny, Mr. Marshak has long since accepted that his son is a “punk” and a ”monster,” a brute who broke his mother’s heart and “did dirt to a sweet, innocent girl who would’ve cut her arm off for [him].” (Must’ve been pretty bad for Marshak to side with the girl over his own son: we have morality trumping blood here.) He’s wrong about who he’s talking to, but he’s not wrong about this: Arch, too, is a punk and a monster of sorts.

Arch gets away from Andy Marshak’s father and Andy Marshak’s consequences—for a while—only to return to his hotel and run into his own, since the cops are there to arrest him on a “bunko” rap. There’s another nice shot here where Arch retrieves his hat and coat and stands with his back to the camera for a long time, building up the anticipation of him turning around and revealing a new face but then surprising us by staying himself. He’s a little bit too smart to change that obviously; he waits until he hits the revolving door.

Then it’s just the previous scene in reverse, with him running away from his consequences and straight into Andy Marshak’s, in the form of a bullet. It’s not a bad ending, but it’s not quite as strong as I would like. I think a tighter structure would underline the cosmic justice here—Arch has been using the gains of other people’s lives, and now he finally reaps their losses, too, and his confidence that he can cheat his way out of paying for his actions is what dooms him. As it is, it’s there, but it doesn’t have the necessary feeling of inevitability. If anything, the execution of it feels too random.

It’s worth noting that while Arch’s transformations are mostly well-done, with some simple, judicious cutting to substitute one actor for another, the swimmy, awkward transitions of his identities cycling across his face as he’s dying are a little clumsy in comparison. The last flickering tour of his most recent faces feels necessary—it’s like he’s winding down, all his mechanisms for avoiding trouble finally sputtering to a stop—but I have to wonder what poor Mr. Marshak thinks about it all. Is he secretly relieved that he did not, in fact, murder his heel of a son? Is he stricken with disappointment? So confused that he doubts his own sanity? We just leave him standing on the street, so we’ll never know for sure.

Closing: He was Arch Hammer, a cheap little man who just checked in. He was Johnny Foster, who played a trumpet and was loved beyond words. He was Virgil Sterig, with money in his pocket. He was Andy Marshak, who got some of his agony back on a sidewalk in front of a cheap hotel. Hammer, Foster, Sterig, Marshak—and all four of them were dying.

Directed by: John Brahm

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: Third from the Sun

1. This is almost TZ doing AHP, just as “The Case of Mr. Pelham” was AHP doing TZ (miraculously ahead of time). ↩︎
2. It was probably an influence on the 2019 TZ‘s “The Who of You.” ↩︎
3. Garland has a long filmography, but sadly for me, a lot of it is TV that I haven’t seen, like My Three Sons and Scarecrow and Mrs. King. ↩︎
4. Per the Scranton Tribune, Harry Townes (who played the real Arch) subsequently became an Episcopalian minister, possibly out of a desire to scrub Arch Hammer’s slime off his soul. Before that, though, he had a great character actor career, especially on the small screen. ↩︎
5. He’ll be back in “The Incredible World of Horace Ford.” ↩︎
6. I mostly know him from Experiment in Terror. ↩︎
7. He was in Bullitt, and we’ll see him again in “The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross.” ↩︎