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.
