The Twilight Zone, S1E27, "The Big Tall Wish"

Opening: In this corner of the universe, a prizefighter named Bolie Jackson, 183 pounds and an hour and a half away from a comeback at St. Nick’s Arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who, by the standards of his profession is an aging, over-the-hill relic of what was, and who now sees a reflection of a man who has left too many pieces of his youth in too many stadiums for too many years before too many screaming people. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who might do well to look for some gentle magic in the hard-surfaced glass that stares back at him.

It’s remarkable that “The Big Tall Wish” exists at all. It aired in 1960, when it was vanishingly rare to see Black actors in major television roles and even rarer to see them in roles that didn’t “require” them to be Black. You could easily have done this story—beaten-down, washed-up boxer wins his comeback fight thanks to one boy’s magical wish—with white actors. But Serling didn’t.

Partly, of course, this stemmed from the fact that Serling—who only created The Twilight Zone and its layers of metaphor and allegory after the network wouldn’t touch his script about Emmett Till—was passionate about justice. He wanted to fight against racism and for human dignity and individuality. He was also a professional infuriated by what he rightly saw as an unconscionable waste of talent. In both cases, he put his money where his mouth was.

The Twilight Zone Companion quotes Serling as saying: “Television, like its big sister the motion picture, has been guilty of the sin of omission. … Hungry for talent, desperate for the so-called ‘new face,’ constantly searching for a transfusion of new blood, it has overlooked a source of wondrous new talent that resides under its nose. This is the Negro actor.”

“The Big Tall Wish” proves his point, because it’s hard to watch this episode and not come away angry that Ivan Dixon didn’t have more of a career.¹ He’d get another groundbreaking role—supporting but still significant—five years later, on Hogan’s Heroes², but his performance here is powerful enough that he deserves a filmography studded with hits and major roles, and he never quite got that.

Dixon did, thankfully, get to do a substantial and impressive amount of work behind the camera, at least, directing episodes of everything from Starsky & Hutch to The Rockford Files to Quantum Leap to Magnum, P.I. to The Greatest American Hero. That would be an impressive record on its own, but you can also add the cult classic film The Spook Who Sat by the Door to the list. This guy deserves a biography.

Okay, getting into the actual meat of the episode now:

“The Big Tall Wish” is tonally complex—warm, bittersweet, and melancholy all at once. It features both magic and the loss of magic, and it doesn’t shy away from how painful that loss is and how much hope goes with it. Henry (Stephen Perry) lives in an enchanted world where the universe is on his side, where if he wishes the right “big tall wish” with all his strength, he can change reality—and by the end of the episode, his wish has been undone so thoroughly that he doesn’t seem to know it ever came true at all. He accepts, now, that the world will not rearrange itself for him—that it is, as Bolie says, made of concrete. It’s a heartbreaking loss of innocence, and it’s all the more painful because Bolie, who loves him, is the one who breaks him, the one who denies the magic until it all falls apart. At the end of the episode, the love is still there, but Henry’s world is harder and colder than it was before.

Honestly, it would be downright bleak if it weren’t for the aforementioned love and warmth—and the poignant universality of it all. Bolie doesn’t get his underdog triumph, and he’s over the hill with no way back, but it’s such a human loss, one we know we’ll all probably face at some point. Henry loses his belief in the power of wishes and learns what it’s like to hope and hope only to be disappointed, and we all absolutely learn that lesson at some point. We know what the two of them are going through is survivable, and we know it hurts, and “The Big Tall Wish” juggles all these emotions so nicely that we know and feel all that simultaneously.

It all has weight because the relationship between Bolie and Henry is genuinely sweet—playful, loyal, and tender. (Perry is absolutely adorable as Henry: one of a handful of great TZ child actors.) I love Henry’s earnestness—he has perfect little-kid intensity, where he’s clearly putting his whole heart into everything he says. His attempts to bolster Bolie are heartwarming, and I can actually get a little teary thinking about him saying, “You looked like a tiger even so,” when he talks to a defeated Bolie at the end.

Henry’s mother, Frances (Kim Hamilton³), is another nice presence in the episode, and Hamilton calibrates her performance really precisely. She holds herself back from Bolie just a little—the distance of a compassionate but practical woman who likes a man well enough, appreciates the attention he gives to her son (and understands that her son adores him), but recognizes all the same that he’s a bad bet and won’t tie herself to someone who’s on his way down.

The last bit of emotional context comes from Bolie’s neighborhood, and the episode quickly sketches in a believable social context for him—he’s known and liked, even before he wins. People wish him well on the way to the fight. They’re exuberant after he wins and awkward (and, in one case, angry and disappointed) after he loses, but success doesn’t completely transform his relationship to them. Whether he comes home a star or a loser, he still comes home to a community.

So we know, going into the fight, not only what’s at stake for Bolie but also what’s not—what he won’t, and can’t lose, and what will make the ending a little more bearable. There’s a realistic, textured bright side here—and we definitely need it, because there’s also a lot of very realistic pain and exhaustion.

Dixon and Serling’s script work in tandem to sell Bolie’s weariness, and he has a lot of really affecting lines that are masterfully delivered: “Tired old man trying to catch a bus. And the bus is already gone, left a couple years ago. Arms heavy, legs like rubber, short of wind. One eye almost gone.” Broken-down characters always bring out the poet in Serling.

Dixon also plays the hell out of the scene where Thomas (Henry Scott⁴), the cornerman he’s hired for the night, lays into him as a big-talking has-been. Thomas is supposed to be there to give him insight into the other fighter’s style, but he won’t cough it up. Why? Because his money’s on the other guy. He’s a sleazy cut-rate Satan ready to preside over Bolie’s descent into a kind of boxing hell, a churn of physical misery and punishment that’s less sport than mechanized pain. He’ll sign Bolie someday, he says, and add him to his roster of fighters who are long past it, who exist only to lose. It’ll only be a few months from now, and then he’ll have him.

He’s sickeningly convincing, and it turns out that we can’t hope for a miracle to spare Bolie from this kind of fate. We just have to cling to the kind of grit that keeps Bolie defiant even when he’s on the brink of losing it all—he’s still the guy who will respond to all this by saying, “I thought the smell came with the cigar. You wear it all over you. You stink, Thomas.”

The fight scene is really well-directed—Ronald Winston utilizes some of the same techniques (quick cuts between extreme close-ups to give you a manic crowd effect) here that he did in “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” and they’re arguably even more effective in this context. The emotion amps up nicely as we go from the spectators to the ring to Henry at home with the TV, and I really like the freeze-frame magic.

Inevitably, we get to the roof scene, where Bolie finally talks to the one person who can understand and contextualize why he remembers busting his knuckles and getting knocked down. This scene is brutal. Not even the sight of Henry holding a pet rabbit can make it easier on us.

I said before that this episode is so painful because it’s Bolie who breaks Henry, and this is where it happens—and what makes it even worse is that it’s not an accident. Bolie doesn’t just not believe in Henry’s wish, he’s angered by it.

“I’ve been wishing all my life,” he says. “I got a gut-ache from wishing, and all I’ve got to show for it is a face full of scars.”

This all gets additional interesting, ambivalent resonance from the casting. Bolie’s “disinclination to believe in a miracle” is, as Serling notes, nearly universal, but it’s hard not to think that Bolie has even less reason to believe in a miracle than his white counterpart would. It also makes Bolie’s role in stripping Henry of his “illusions” even more complicated.

Bolie’s fury is palpable. Why should Henry’s wishes work when his never did? Why should the world suddenly get easier in a way that makes no sense? He can deal with luck or a hard-earned win he pays for in blood and sweat; he can even deal with defeat. He can’t deal with a magic that’s ignored him until now. He hates this prospect so much that he lashes out at Henry, calling him a “little kook” and saying, “How’d I ever get mixed up with you anyway?” Ow.

Henry pleads with him to believe, hanging on Bolie’s neck and begging him over and over again, but Bolie can’t—and so the wish is undone. Bolie got knocked out and walked home down a quiet street. There’s no comeback, no second chance. It’s a nice, melancholy grace note that he can indeed handle this loss much better than he handled the miracle: he puts on a show of cheer for Frances and Henry, kisses Henry good night, and promises to take him to a hockey game. Life goes on, except Henry—who now seems to think he used the big tall wish only to have nothing happen at all—no longer believes in magic, and some part of Bolie feels responsible for that.

But when you can’t turn back the clock on introducing a kid to harsh reality, at least you can still take the kid to a hockey game. You can still show up, and there’s a fair bit of consolation in that. Sometimes, sweetly as well as bitterly, life goes on.

Closing: Mr. Bolie Jackson, 183 pounds, who left a second chance lying in a heap on a rosin-spattered canvas at St. Nick’s Arena. Mr. Bolie Jackson, who shares the most common ailment of all men, the strange and perverse disinclination to believe in a miracle, the kind of miracle to come from the mind of a little boy, perhaps only to be found in the Twilight Zone.

Directed by: Ron Winston

Written by: Rod Serling

Up Next: “A Nice Place to Visit”

1. And he’ll make another Twilight Zone appearance in “I Am the Night–Color Me Black.” ↩︎
2. Ironically, a show Rod Serling was not shy about hating, according to Anne Serling’s As I Knew Him: he disliked portraying Nazis as comic bumblers. ↩︎
3. Hamilton was more a TV actress than a film one, but she still has a lasting cinematic legacy in the form of Odds Against Tomorrow and To Kill a Mockingbird (though the latter role was uncredited, which is shocking to me). But she made frequent TV appearances, and you can see her going from being typecast as a maid to having multiple roles as a judge; in her second-to-last role, on The Practice, she was a Supreme Court Justice. ↩︎
4. We’ll see him again in “The Thirty-Fathom Grave.” ↩︎