Trollheart

Title: “The Four of Us Are Dying”
Original transmission date: January 1 1960
Written by: Rod Serling, from the short story by George Clayton Johnson
Directed by: John Brahm
Starring: Harry Townes as Arch Hammer
Ross Martin as Johnny Foster
Phillip Pine as Virgil Sterig
Don Gordon as Andy Marshak
Peter Brocco as Mr. Marshak
Milton Frome as Detective
Beverly Garland as Maggie


Setting: Earth
Timeframe: Present (at the time)
Theme(s): Hubris, dishonesty, greed, crime
Parodied? Not to my knowledge, no
Rating: A


Serling’s opening monologue

His name is Arch Hammer, he's 36 years old. He's been a salesman, a dispatcher, a truck driver, a con man, a bookie, and a part-time bartender. This is a cheap man, a nickel-and-dime man, with a cheapness that goes past the suit and the shirt; a cheapness of mind, a cheapness of taste, a tawdry little shine on the seat of his conscience, and a dark-room squint at a world whose sunlight has never gotten through to him. But Mr. Hammer has a talent, discovered at a very early age. This much he does have. He can make his face change. He can twitch a muscle, move a jaw, concentrate on the cast of his eyes, and he can change his face. He can change it into anything he wants. Mr. Archie Hammer, jack-of-all-trades, has just checked in at three-eighty a night, with two bags, some newspaper clippings, a most odd talent, and a master plan to destroy some lives.


A man able to change his appearance at will (see above) enters a hotel and scopes out a woman playing piano at the bar. He is wearing the face of a dead musician, Johnny Foster. The woman, Maggie, is shocked to see him, believing him dead. They were in love, and now he convinces her to run away with him, which she is all too happy to do. He tells her he staged his own death, to get away from the fame, and that with her he will start a new life. When one of his ex bandmembers recognises him though, he quickly changes his face so as not to have to answer any awkward questions.

Back at his hotel room, he changes his appearance again, this time taking on the face of a dead gangster. Armed with this new identity, he goes to see the partner who double-crossed him, who looks, not surprisingly, as if he has seen a ghost. Chased by the guy’s henchmen after he has taken all the money, Hammer runs down a blind alley, and desperate to change his face again takes inspiration from a poster of a boxer on the wall. The goons, seeing they have the wrong guy, leave.

He then runs into an old man, who turns out to be the father of the man whose face he has just assumed, though of course he doesn’t recognise him. Turns out this guy was a bad one, left his girl, broke his mother’s heart, and the father is angry and bitter. Back at his hotel, and wearing his own face again, he is arrested by a cop, but as they go through the revolving doors he changes back into the boxer, smugly giving the cop the slip. However the father of this man is waiting for him, ready to extract revenge. He shoots him before he can concentrate his power to change, and that’s the end of him.

Serling’s closing monologue

He was Arch Hammer, a cheap little man who just checked in. He was Johnny Foster, who played a trumpet and was loved beyond words. He was Virgil Sterig, with money in his pocket. He was Andy Marshak, who got some of his agony back on a sidewalk in front of a cheap hotel. Hammer, Foster, Sterig, Marshak—and all four of them were dying.

The Resolution

Well handled. Everyone has their past, and Hammer was just unlucky enough to choose to use the identity of one who had used everyone around him - rather like himself - and paid the price.

The Moral

I guess, no matter who you are or where you try to hide, your sins will eventually find you out.

Questions, and sometimes, Answers

This whole story is fraught with one major error: while Hammer can take the appearance of anyone he chooses, how is it that he also gets their voice, along with any inside knowledge they may have had? Sure, he’s read up on the musician Johnny Foster, but the gangster? He knows who his partner was, he knows who the deal was, he knows intimate details of the killing… these are things only the real hood would know, and yet he seems to have them in his mind. Does he, in addition to getting the face, get the memories and thoughts and mannerisms and voice too? Seems unlikely.

Why, when Hammer is shot, does the cop, who was arresting him and is only inside the lobby of the hotel, not come rushing out? He’s surely heard the shot, and he’s a cop after all.

Wasn’t Hammer taking a major risk when impersonating Foster? What if Maggie had asked him to play - one more, you know, for the road?

Themes

You'd have to say cowardice and greed are the two main ones here. Hammer has the ability to change his face (like many Twilight Zone stories, this power is neither explained nor challenged, it simply is - if you want to watch this show, you're going to have to take some things on faith) but instead of using his talent for good he uses it to enrich himself. Witness the confrontation with the girl when he "is" Johnny Foster - he could have just run away with her - she was ready and willing to go. But no, he has to have money, so shakes down a gangster to ensure he can live the high life, and it's the escape from here that precipitates his meeting with a man he has never met, wearing the face of a man he has never been, and leads to his death.

He's a greedy man, somewhat in the same vein as our Mr. Bedeker in "Escape Clause", and indeed the one in the previous episode too, men who want to wring everything they can out of life, even if by so doing they wring all the joy and love and goodness out of it too. It's surely cowardice to - if you have the power - keep changing your face, your identity. Isn't this the purest form of insecurity there is? And what of the people who see him "wearing" this face, like Johnny Foster's bandmate, who believed the trumpeter dead? He doesn't care how the sudden reappearance of Foster affects this guy; he shakes him off angrily. He doesn't figure in his plans.

It's a dishonest way of behaving, abrogating any responsibility whatever. If things go wrong, if you can't face a situation, as Tom Waits once sarcastically wrote, "Change your face, change your life" - which is exactly what Hammer does. But in the end a life of (one must surely assume) petty crime and using other people catch up with him, and he dies because he just chose the wrong face, as Fate laughs in the shadows.

Note: So far, this is the first (I don't know if only but certainly the first) episode in which nowhere, not in the intro nor the outro, does Serling mention the Twilight Zone.

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