Lois Nettleton dazzles and bewilders co-star Martin Milner in a ROUTE 66 episode that allows her to play a variety of women... or perhaps just one.
to watch Nettleton go from pleasant to indifferent to mildly annoyed with him as she stays fixed on her horizon.
We speak of the actors listening to other actors, a sign of their “being there.” Here, Nettleton’s not listening is even more telling. It’s this preoccupa- tion that fuels the show’s tension, a slowly simmer- ing suspense that becomes unbearable. We know Danny’s trouble. We see her missing the clues and want to warn her, as her good deed leads deeper and deeper into danger.
Marie’s increasing commitment to the old woman at the expense of her questionable love life is realized in a beautifully layered performance. Nettleton makes us so subtly aware of her compas- sion gradually winning out. With top-notch support from her co-stars, she’s the show’s vulnerable beating heart.
“Is love dependent on a category? On substance? On reality?” asks a very different Lois Nettleton. Isabelle is flamboyant, seductive, enigmatic, a will- o-the-wisp as hard to read as Marie was crystal clear. “Suppose I Said I Was the Queen of Spain” is a ROUTE 66 meditation on elusiveness, vulnerabil- ity to illusions, how truly we can know another, and the lengths to which one will go to make a fantasy work in the pursuit of happiness.
Tod Stiles (Martin Milner) finds himself haunted by a gorgeous mystery woman intent on surprising,
puzzling, challenging, but never answering. So per- sonable and intriguing is she that Tod allows him- self to fall into her world of games and enigma. It’s all frothy at first—Alice in Wonderland via Audrey Hepburn—but, when he tries to make substance of the intangible, she slips through his fingers like sand and Tod finds himself down a rabbit hole that’s almost a metaphor for parallel universes. Stirling Silliphant’s script itself tells us not to look for answers, flaunting its own ambiguity. But it allows Nettleton a glorious showcase, where she gets to riff through a rolodex of contrasts—beguil- ing, exasperating, touching—that help turn the show on a dime; from romance, to nightmare, to meditation. We watch and wonder: is she mentally ill? Cruel and calculating? Are there, in fact, more than one of her? Milner is a natural and effective foil, reacting as the viewer would, bewitched, both- ered and bewildered. But Nettleton has the heavy lifting, displaying that wonderful range, yet chan- neling it into a single personality. Consider the chal- lenge of breathing life into quicksilver: she must understand what ultimately we are not meant to, in order to make necessary, and convincing, choices. No mean feat.
The results are haunting, thought-provoking, and heartbreaking as the powerhouse of Nettleton and Silliphant leave us with an inscrutable fable, deliberately ambiguous, yet so potent.
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