Larry Blamire's STAR TURN
SERIES:
THE TWILIGHT ZONE
Episode:
“And When the Sky was Opened” Guest stars:
Rod Taylor, Charles Aidman, Jim Hutton Roles:
Clegg Forbes, Ed Harrington, William Gart Original airdate: 12/11/59
Full disclosure: Existential horror (and its cousin, loss of identity) has become my favorite flavor. I think it cuts deepest, to some primal black hole. INVADERS FROM MARS, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, this TWILIGHT ZONE episode (and the equally chilling “Mirror Image”), some of Antonioni, WORLD ON A WIRE, PICNIC AT HANGING ROCK, NOWHERE MAN, the re- cent mini-wave (TRIANGLE, ABSENTIA, COHER- ENCE); there’s nothing I find more alluringly alarming. Perhaps it explains why, as a kid, I was so haunted by the final image of the burned sil- houettes of the perfect nuclear family in the
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swimming pool at the end of THE DAY MARS INVADED EARTH. One of my first stage plays concerned a group of test subjects who vanish one by one.
Rod Serling took Richard Matheson’s chilling story “Disappearing Act” and brilliantly retooled it for camera. “And When the Sky was Opened” con- cerns three astronauts, just returned from an early space mission, who are systematically erased from existence, with only one retaining memory of the vanished each time. The first we meet, Clegg Forbes (Rod Taylor), relates the initial disappearance in flashback.
Rod Taylor was on the verge of stardom, launched the following year with George Pal’s THE TIME MACHINE, and I’m hard-pressed to imagine a star today who combines masculinity, charm and vulnerability with the naturalness and ease of this guy. Or at all, for that matter. From light comic lead (the delightful SUNDAY IN NEW YORK) to hardboiled bruiser (DARK OF THE SUN and DARKER THAN AMBER), you always believed him. And if Bill Smith calls him the toughest guy he ever worked with, you can bet that’s accurate.
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