“No matter what you wish for, you must be prepared for the consequences”
Title: “The Man in the Bottle”
Original transmission date: October 7 1960
Written by: Rod Serling
Directed by: Don Medford
Starring: Luther Adler
Vivi Janiss
Joseph Ruskin
Olan Soule
Lisa Colm
Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Desperation, greed, wish fulfilment, magic, redemption
Parodied? Multiple times
Rating: A -
Serling’s opening monologue
"Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, gentle and infinitely patient people whose lives have been a hope chest with a rusty lock and a lost set of keys. But in just a moment that hope chest will be opened and an improbable phantom will try to bedeck the drabness of these two people's failure laden lives with the gold and precious stones of fulfillment. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, standing on the outskirts and about to enter the Twilight Zone."
The last refuge of the truly desperate: the pawnbroker. The problem is, you can be the people’s friend, or you can be a businessman, but you can’t be both, not and still make a living. Mr. Arthur Castle is, however, the former, or tries to be, so that when a woman comes in offering a clearly worthless glass bottle for pawn and looking for a dollar, her situation affects him so that he gives in, knowing himself to be a fool. But he’d rather be a kind fool. So he pays the money and wonders what he’s going to do with an old bottle nobody would pay a cent for, never mind a dollar? But sometimes, kindness is its own reward.
And sometimes, not.
As his wife gently berates him for being so soft, Arthur knocks the bottle off the counter and the top pops out. And that’s not all that pops out. A thin stream of smoke slowly issues from the neck of the carboy, resolving into a man, who tells them he’s a (say it with me) genie, and can grant them four wishes. Rather foolishly - and obviously wanting to test the veracity of the man’s claims - Arthur wastes his first wish on a trivial matter: the replacing of glass in a broken display case. But when he sees the glass repair before his eyes, suddenly neither he nor his wife are quite so sceptical any more.
His wife, however, is scared of the genie, believing him evil, or else worrying that her husband is selling his soul, but Arthur rather predictably asks for a million dollars, which he gets. Suddenly his wife is no longer worried, as the money rains literally down from the sky. Rather nicely, the Castles don’t misspend their money, but use it to help their struggling friends and neighbours, however the big bad taxman steps in, and the IRS tell them they owe virtually all the money to the government. Oh, don’t get me started on the government!
Now the truth starts to hit home, as it does in any story with genies - there’s a sting in the tail. All wishes come with real-world consequences which must be faced, and if you’re the wisher you must think extremely carefully and box clever not to be outfoxed by the simple circumstances that will attend your wish. Also, as his frustration grows, Arthur becomes more irritable, less tolerant of his wife, snappy and agitated as he tries to think of a sure-fire wish that won’t come back to bite him and make him wish (sorry) he hadn’t asked for it.
His greed is now infecting his wife, who finally succumbs when he decides he wants the genie to make him “the ruler of a powerful country” and puts what caveats he can think of upon the wish, and of course you can see where this is going. When he realises he has been turned into Hitler, he remembers that he has one last wish, and as ever, uses it to undo his last wish, returning to the honest, but broke, pawnbroker he was in the first place. Suddenly his life doesn’t look so bad.
Serling’s closing monologue
A word to the wise, now, to the garbage collectors of the world, to the curio seekers, to the antique buffs, to everyone who would try to coax out a miracle from unlikely places. Check that bottle you're taking back for a two-cent deposit. The genie you save might be your own. Case in point, Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Castle, fresh from the briefest of trips into The Twilight Zone.
The Resolution
When it comes to genies, we all know how it’s going to end, and when Arthur makes his penultimate wish, it’s way too obvious what’s going to happen. For 1960 yeah, maybe, but to us worldly-wise and jaded viewers of “what-if” stories, nah. Poor.
The Moral
As with just about every genie tale, the moral is twofold: careful what you wish for, and be happy with what you have.
Themes
Desperation plays a close role in the lives of the Castles, as they struggle to meet their commitments, pay the bills and keep afloat. It’s like a dark shadow just glimpsed over the shoulder, waiting, reaching, stretching to drag them both down into the abyss. Magic has to be an element, as there’s a genie and wishes involved, and of course where there’s a genie there’s greed, and nobody ever wishes for world peace or love to all men. I’m sure I wouldn’t do that myself. When it comes to wishes, we’re all selfish and insular.
Oops!
Ah, does Serling not know his history? Hitler died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and yet here his general gives him poison to take.
And isn’t that…?
Luther Adler (1903 - 1984)
A lot of these older actors have, by the time 1960 rolls around, already played major roles in film and later TV, but as most of these will be unknown even to my generation (
Naked City, The Untouchables, 77 Sunset Strip etc) I’m going to see if from here on in I can pull out some interesting nuggets of whimsical information about their career, such as in the last episode, where Robert Cummings had roles in films whose themes or titles had to do with deserts or aircraft.
So here, while Adler played in the above shows and also
Mission: Impossible and
Hawaii Five-0, and appeared in many movies, none of them are big names we would know. However he did star in
The Magic Face and
Cast a Giant Shadow, each of which could indirectly refer back to genii, but the most interesting is a movie he did in 1975, which was titled
The Man in the Glass Booth, which is only one word and indeed three letters removed from the title of this episode. Weird, huh? He also has that kind of face that made me think I definitely knew him, but I realise now I don't. Possibly also interesting, given how he ended up in the story, that both his first and surname seem German… Oh, and I read further too that he played Hitler in two movies, one of which was that one
The Magic Face. Spooky!
And he was Jewish!
Vivi Janiss (1911 - 1988)
And the coincidences just keep coming! Or should I say, Cumming, as believe it or not, she was married to (drum roll please) Robert Cummings, who we met in the previous episode! No, really. And not only that, in an episode of private eye/comedy series
The Rockford Files in 1977, she played a pawnshop owner! You couldn’t make this stuff up! Seems we met her in the season one episode “The Fever”, but I don’t think I noted her as really, beyond the links to the previous episode and this, her film and TV life doesn’t really mark her out.
Jack Ruskin (1924 - 2013)
Some
Star Trek credits here: Ruskin played in four of the franchises, the original series as Galt in “The Gamesters of Triskelion”,
Deep Space 9 as the Klingon Tumek in “The House of Quark” and “Looking for Par’mach in All the Wrong Places” and as a Cardassian in “Improbable Cause”,
Voyager as a Vulcan Master in “Gravity” and in
Enterprise in the episode “Broken Bow”. He was also in the movie
Star Trek Insurrection. Apart from that rather impressive roll call, he was in the classic movie
Robin and the 7 Hoods, the cult TV series
Get Smart, as well as both
The Six Million Dollar Man and its spinoff,
The Bionic Woman and the movies
Prizzi’s Honor and
Indecent Proposal.
One thing that really strikes me as I do these bios is the fact that someone who may play the smallest, most insignificant part in an episode could have the brightest and most famous career, or at least be a well-travelled actor. So it is with this guy, whose total contribution to the episode is about two minutes, if that. He plays the IRS man (oh boo yourself!) but his resume is impressive.
Olan Soule (1909 - 1994)
With a staggering
7,000 radio commercials and ads under his belt, 60 movies and credits in over 200 TV shows, Soule is probably best known for being the voice of Batman in various animated series, a role which gave him fifteen years of employment, from 1968 - 1983. He also appeared in shows such as
Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantasy Island, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Addams Family, Little House on the Prairie, Dallas and
Bewitched, and was in movies like
North by Northwest, Days of Wine and Roses, The Cincinatti Kid and
The Towering Inferno, as well as two classic cult sci-fi movies,
This Island Earth and
The Day the Earth Stood Still (uncredited in both).
Questions, and sometimes, Answers
Obviously it’s done for dramatic effect, but why does Arthur have to be Hitler in the bunker at the end? If the genie had been kinder, he could have put him into the dictator’s body during the height of his power. Yes, it would have been abominable to have inhabited that twisted consciousness, but at least he could have “enjoyed” being Hitler for a few years. And do we assume his wife has taken on the persona of Eva Braun? Overly vindictive, I feel.
As only his last wish was undone (though he said he wished everything was back as it was) are we to assume that all the money he gave away remains? Did his taxes go to the IRS? And is it even possible that the tax on a million dollars could be almost a million dollars? What is that: like 98% tax? Surely that’s not right, especially in the 1960s?
Why
four wishes? For story purposes, sure, but general myth and story tradition holds that a genie grants three wishes, not four. Special bargain, one time only, never to be repeated, act now before it’s too late?
The Times they are a Changin’
Or not, actually. People are still desperate for money and as you’ll see from such shows as
Pawn Stars and
Hardcore Pawn, the humble pawnbroker still does a roaring trade. When the bank laughs at you and the credit union kicks you out, your last option before throwing your lot in with the unscrupulous loan sharks or payday loan companies (same thing really) is to head down to that famous sign and see what the man in the shop can do for you.
Sussed?
I’d have to say yes. It’s hard to come up with a new twist on the old genie story. After all, it goes right back to the
1001 Nights/Arabian Nights (and maybe further), and always takes the same tack: the wisher ends up realising he has been tricked, or not read the small print closely enough, and his last wish undoes everything and sets all back to how it was. Once Arthur made his third wish it was painfully obvious what was going to happen. Had it been his fourth, that might have been better.
The WTF Factor
Low, 4 at best. Hardly even deserves that. Very very predictable.
Personal Notes
There is at least some change to the standard genie story, with the creature this time emerging as the bottle opens, not when it’s polished - kind of hard to imagine why Arthur might have bothered polishing an old bottle, which is probably why it was changed - and then at the end the smashed bottle reconstitutes itself, waiting for the next victim.
And is there really any need for his narration in the bunker? “Oh no! I’m Hitler!” Is there seriously anyone in the world who doesn’t know that face? Completely and absolutely superfluous and, I feel, a major insult to the viewer’s intelligence. It did however set up a nice parody decades later when
Futurama came on air and used stories from
The Scary Door as introductions to some of the episodes.