A couple of posts ago, I posted about Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, and by coincidence Journey to the Unknown is also a co-operation between Hammer here and Fox in the USA and was another of those shows which had an American in the cast to help the marketing, despite being set in Britain. I last wrote about this 1969 show four years ago and I see then that I commented that it was a slippery sort of show, being about the unknown in its broadest sense, and also was badly served by TV, being shown at odd times, not repeated, and so son. I have had no reason to change this verdict in the intervening four years.
As far as I can tell, online opinion is unanimous that The Indian Spirit Guide is the best episode of the series, with a story written by Robert Bloch and a clearly supernatural/deception theme. Leona Gillings wants to contact her deceased husband via a medium, and enlists the help of her secretary’s private detective boyfriend with the extraordinary name of Jerry Crown, to guide her through this exercise and avoid the number of frauds there are around. So the episode starts off with Crown straightforwardly revealing fake mediums and the tricks they are using. The first one he reveals is actually a man in drag and the revelation is very funny indeed.
As the episode progresses Crown realises he is on to a good thing and starts actually setting up false mediums for him to reveal so that Mrs Gillings will keep paying him his fees until she finds one who will actually contact her dead husband. Of course he assumes that he will never find a medium he can disprove in one way or another, and that this will just continue, until something happens to end his happy financial situation.
My favourite thing about this episode is that absolute stream of dodgy conmen and people clearly on their uppers forced to make a living by pretending to be psychic. I used to live hear a row of shops with flats above and knew someone who lived in the flat above an antiques shop which wasn’t. I don’t know why they felt they had to run a pretend antiques shop as a cover for the seances in the back room, but if you went in they would always find some reason not to sell any of their stock. My friend said that she was always being disturbed by people ringing the bell wanting to know where ‘the sitting’ was. It is in this slightly strange world of pretence and theatre that this episode is set. It isn’t part of the plot but if we stop to think about the number of frauds running various dodgy scams in this episode (one of the fake mediums is even a knife-throwing act), it is clear that not one of them could ever hold a job down of any sort. Crown himself describes being up to his ears in unpaid rent on his flat. Literally everybody in this episode is desperate in one way or another and it has made me look on Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) in a completely different way!
There is a criticism of this show on the internet which I don’t accept, which is that the ending of the episode is pretty much inevitable so it is completely predictable. In my opinion there are a few possible outcomes to the scenario that I’ve outlined above: for example, Crown could be revealed to be a conman, since it’s a show about the unknown the husband could actually appear to his wife and warn her, Crown could get a revelation that he himself has psychic ability and is hounded by the ex-husband forever, and so on.
I do have some criticisms, which are relatively minor ones. The single American actress in this is Julie Harris, who plays Mrs Gillings. I have a criticism about her accent, because she doesn’t do a bad go at a cut glass RP British accent, but the problem is that she slips in and out of the accent, sometimes sounded RP British and sometimes American. Stick to one or the other. The other criticism I have about her is more serious, and I’m probably going to upset so many people since her IMDB says that she was one of the finest classical and contemporary leading ladies ever to grace the 20th century American stage and won the Ton award five times (not being funny but she can’t have been that good if she couldn’t stick to one accent, I’m afraid). My criticism is that she is clearly hired to be the star but is completely outclassed by Catherine Lacey, who plays one of the mediums, and who has that genuine star quality which can hold an audience effortlessly. Of the two it is Lacey who dominates the scene, is clearly the leading lady and is clearly the better actress. Lacey is perhaps best known for playing the nun in Hitchock’s The Lady Vanishes, but of course here she is much older, rather wraith-like and has clearly grown into a mature, confident woman who just makes everyone else vanish. Not that she’s intending to dominate, it’s just that in my opinion nobody else can match up to her act. I suspect the problem is that the character Harris playing is intended to be utterly ineffectual, dependant on a conman for help, and so she fades into the background.
In comparison Tom Adams (think of the man who runs the home invasion in The Avengers’s Take-Over) plays his conman role in a quite understated way, which I think is absolutely right because it gives him the dependable, thinking impression that Mrs Gillings needs to get to trust in him. He also has to have a knowledge of the various tricks used by fake mediums, so a solid impression is the right one to give, I think.
I have a further quibble which I wouldn’t necessarily call a criticism, which is that at one of the seances Crown , in the name of controlling what is happening suddenly produces a case full of handcuffs, which I can’t believe you wouldn’t pre-arrange! However it is possible that this slightly bizarre scene is intended to crank up the weird, to get us ready for the truly bizarre thing which happens at the end, and aren’t I good, I’ve managed to write the whole blog post without giving the end away!
All in all an excellent journey to the unknown, just one where the medium manages to outclass the leading lady.
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