The Twilight Zone - Vol. 30

Rating:
Summary: Earl Hamner's enchanting love story of "Jesse-Belle"
Review: Earl Hamner, Jr.'s best script, "Jesse-Belle," one of the few hour-long Zones that actually succeeded, is the highlight of Volume 30 in "The Twilight Zone" DVD series. In the Blue Ridge Mountains young Billy-Ben Turner (James Best) proposes to Ellwyn Glover (Laura Devon), but Jesse-Belle Stone (Anne Francis) loves the boy too. So she visits Granny Hart, who is supposedly a witch, and gets a love potion. However, Jesse-Belle soon learns there is a price to pay for that potion: each night she turns into a leopard because now she too is a witch. After that, things get quite complicated in this backwoods love triangle. A unique episode because it does not end with Serling's narration, but with the folk song Hamner wrote for that is heard at the beginning of the show. In "Sounds and Silences," written by Rod Serling, John McGiver plays Roswell G. Flemington, who owns a model-ship company and who loves to play records of naval battles very loudly. When his wife finally has enough and walks out on him, Roswell thinks he can enjoy making all the noise he wants, but that night he discovers that suddenly every sound in the world, even the dripping of water, has become deafening to him. This episode did not appear in syndication because of a lawsuit from a writer who had contributed a script called "The Sound of Silence," about a man who could not hear sounds, to Serling a few years earlier. Jackie Cooper plays ventriloquist Jonathan West in "Caesar and Me," written by Adele T. Strassfield. The Caesar in question is Jonathan's dummy Little Caesar, who talks his human friend into turning to a life of crime to make some money. A minor episode, certainly not as memorable as Serling's "The Dummy." Hamner's classic tale of love and witchcraft is the only reason to pick up this volume of episodes from the Zone.

Rating:
Summary: Earl Hamner's enchanting love story of "Jesse-Belle"
Review: Earl Hamner, Jr.'s best script, "Jesse-Belle," one of the few hour-long Zones that actually succeeded, is the highlight of Volume 30 in "The Twilight Zone" DVD series. In the Blue Ridge Mountains young Billy-Ben Turner (James Best) proposes to Ellwyn Glover (Laura Devon), but Jesse-Belle Stone (Anne Francis) loves the boy too. So she visits Granny Hart, who is supposedly a witch, and gets a love potion. However, Jesse-Belle soon learns there is a price to pay for that potion: each night she turns into a leopard because now she too is a witch. After that, things get quite complicated in this backwoods love triangle. A unique episode because it does not end with Serling's narration, but with the folk song Hamner wrote for that is heard at the beginning of the show. In "Sounds and Silences," written by Rod Serling, John McGiver plays Roswell G. Flemington, who owns a model-ship company and who loves to play records of naval battles very loudly. When his wife finally has enough and walks out on him, Roswell thinks he can enjoy making all the noise he wants, but that night he discovers that suddenly every sound in the world, even the dripping of water, has become deafening to him. This episode did not appear in syndication because of a lawsuit from a writer who had contributed a script called "The Sound of Silence," about a man who could not hear sounds, to Serling a few years earlier. Jackie Cooper plays ventriloquist Jonathan West in "Caesar and Me," written by Adele T. Strassfield. The Caesar in question is Jonathan's dummy Little Caesar, who talks his human friend into turning to a life of crime to make some money. A minor episode, certainly not as memorable as Serling's "The Dummy." Hamner's classic tale of love and witchcraft is the only reason to pick up this volume of episodes from the Zone.