The Twilight Zone, S1E17, "The Fever"

Opening: Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights all expenses paid at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs’s knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. and Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there’s a prize in their package, neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce. A most inoperative, deadly life-shattering affliction known as the Fever.

This is very far from being one of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes, but it does have some of my favorite behind-the-scenes trivia, all of which is related in Marc Scott Zicree’s The Twilight Zone Companion.

Apparently, the slot machine that so bewitches Franklin Gibbs caused a lot of hassle and necessitated a lot of artistic invention. For starters, at that time, slot machines were illegal in California, so the show had to borrow all those props from the police department, who were required to send an officer along to keep an eye on them. I know this was so no one would steal one, but I like the idea of some 1959 cop giving all these slot machines the stink-eye and just waiting for one of them to make the wrong move. Nothing’s coming to life on this guy’s watch!

Once they had the slot machine, they still had to figure out how to create its distinctive voice—a growly, grating, metallic call punctuated by the sound of falling coins. They put an amazing amount of thought into this. Zicree quotes producer Buck Houghton said, “We made it as metallic as we could. We put hundreds of dimes and quarters—not nickels, because they were lead and didn’t make the same sound—down a metal chute. So we just had yards and yards and yards of coins running down metal.” I love this, and in particular, the detail of thinking to exclude the nickels to get the sound right amazes me. Then they played the audio through speakers strapped to a man’s throat, on either side of his esophagus, so that his voice was replaced from the inside-out by the sound of clinking coins.

This kind of ingenious problem-solving is something I really treasure about older TV and movies, and I’m delighted Zicree thought to record the story.

Unfortunately, the episode as a whole is weak. There’s just too little going on here. Judgmental, self-righteous Franklin is forced to gamble, and that single pull on the slot machine lands him with a supernatural obsession that soon takes his life. The plot has so little development that even a half-hour episode still seems like it drags on a bit.

The two central actors, however, are excellent. Fantastic character actor Everett Sloane—who had already worked with Serling on Patterns¹—crafts an absolutely infuriating Franklin, with perfectly observed passive-aggression. (Sadly, Sloane lived only a few years after the airing of this episode—he killed himself in 1965, when he started going blind.) Vivi Janiss² is equally terrific as the meek but optimistic Flora, and we’ll see her again in “Man in a Bottle,” where her performance will again be considerably better than the script.

The initial scenes of this episode are the liveliest and most enjoyable, with great bits of background texture. I love the photographer being exhausted by the hotel-casino’s penchant for handing out free vacations as a PR stunt; it’s such a nicely gratuitous fillip of characterization that makes the world feel real. It makes sense that this is the part of the episode with the most wit and breathing room—it’s almost like we’re in Flora’s POV here, and we’ll soon be led into Franklin’s, which is much more unpleasant, claustrophobic, and obsessive.

Flora, on the other hand, is sweet, enthusiastic, and charming, and she praises the hotel’s staff for making them feel “important,” which is clearly a novel experience for her, considering how Franklin constantly denigrates her. She’s a middle-aged, small town woman who has won a multi-day package at a Las Vegas hotel, and nothing has ever happened to her before, and I just want her to have a good vacation. She won’t, but at least by the end of it, she’s free of Franklin.

In contrast to his wife, Franklin Gibbs is a sour-faced asshole who’s so busy being huffy about gambling that he can’t even spend ten seconds pretending to be happy for his wife. I like a more tangible return for my money, so I don’t enjoy gambling myself, Franklin, and I agree that casinos can be horrible, soul-sucking places designed to encourage people to make bad choices. But your extremely sweet wife won a free trip here and is tickled to death by it, so how about you just shut up.

He does not take my advice. “You know perfectly well how I feel about gambling!” he snaps at Flora. Then he reveals himself to be the champion of passive-aggression, alternating sentence by sentence between attack and condescension: “However, this is your vacation, Flora. You won it. However, I must repeat to you what I’ve said all along—it’s a terrible, horrible waste of time. But of course, it’s what you wanted.”

Flora does her best to maintain some kind of high spirits despite her husband’s best attempts to crush them, but she can’t so much as put a single nickel in a slot machine before he runs across the room to yank her arm away and scold her. (I’d rather be married to Walter Bedecker from “Escape Clause.”) Flora wins the tiniest concession out of him—since the nickel is already in the machine, he will begrudgingly allow her to pull the arm. When she doesn’t win, there’s a quiet pathos as she says, “I’m not very lucky, am I?” No, she’s really not—and in this moment, I think some part of her knows that Franklin is the worst luck she’s ever had.

Franklin does not start out as an intentional hypocrite, which is the only thing I’ll say in his favor. He genuinely wants to walk away from the slot machines, and only a drunk man’s not-taking-no-for-an-answer manhandling gets his hand on that lever. But as soon as he wins a tidy little haul, the effect is immediate.

Everett Sloane and the camerawork both work together to show the almost sexual pull of Franklin’s compulsion. As he stares at the arm of the machine, he looks dazed with lust. It’s a particularly nice touch that while he tells himself—and Flora—that they’ll be smart and take the money home with them, his will to stay away is already so compromised that he goes to bed fully dressed, right down to his shoes and belt, as if some part of him always knew he would be getting up again.

For most of the episode, the supernatural quality of Franklin’s obsession is left ambiguous. A lot of it is just a straightforward metaphor for addiction—the slot machine is both figuratively and literally calling his name, he keeps seeing the stack of coins multiplying atop the dresser, and he’ll bend logic into a pretzel to justify why he just has to go gamble some more. It’s dirty money! He needs to give it back to the casino! Then, when he’s lost it and even more—when he’s having Flora hold his machine while he cashes yet another check—he pivots to describing it as a battle of good vs. evil. He has to conquer the malign, monstrous machine, which he sees as an “entity, with a will and a mind of its own.” He’s been robbed, and he has to get back all he’s lost. In any case, whatever his problem is, the answer is more gambling. That’s realistic enough, but the problem is that it’s not exactly dramatically interesting to watch a sweaty Franklin keep pouring all his savings into this slot machine, and it’s not exactly helped by a poorly chosen use of the show’s jazzy stock music.

But the house always wins, so the machine jams for the sake of eating Franklin’s last dollar: “[It] was ready to pay off, and it deliberately broke down so it wouldn’t have to.” I do like this, because there have certainly been times when I felt like inanimate objects were purposely thwarting or taunting me. It might be better if the episode ended here, with the supernatural element still ambivalent—a screaming, wild-eyed Franklin having to be strong-armed off the casino floor has a lot more impact as a final scene than what we get.

Instead, the slot machine—visible only to Franklin—pursues him. I think this would have scared me as a kid, but despite the work that went into creating the coin-clanging wailing, there’s a limit to how frightening “menacing slot machine shambles towards full-grown man” can be to an adult, and that limit is “not very much at all.” The machine chases him until he backs out the window and falls to his death, which is played very oddly. The hotel-casino employees stand around his body for a while and then just … leave completely. “Ah, a tragedy! Well, back to bed!” Don’t leave this corpse lying unattended in front of your place of business!

Of course, the only reason they leave is so the slot machine can roll up, look as smug as a slot machine possibly can, and return Franklin’s dollar before gloating over his corpse. So it did have a will of its own—but the loose end I really care about is whether or not the life insurance will pay out on this. Honestly, though, even if Flora is left broke at the end of the episode, being widowed is probably still the best thing for her. Sometimes you do win when you go to Vegas.

Closing: Mr. Franklin Gibbs, visitor to Las Vegas, who lost his money, his reason, and finally his life to an inanimate, metal machine, variously described as a “one-armed bandit”, a “slot machine”, or, in Mr. Franklin Gibbs’ words, a “monster with a will all of its own.” For our purposes, we’ll stick with the latter definition because we’re in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Robert Florey

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “The Last Flight”

1. And whom we’ve already seen in two Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes previously covered on this column, “Our Cook’s a Treasure” and “Place of Shadows,” though viewers may also recognize him from such minor, forgotten films as, you know, Citizen Kane. ↩︎
2. Also in two AHP episodes I’ve covered here, “You’ve Got to Have Luck” and “Mink.” ↩︎