Twonky, The |
USA • 1953 • 84m •
  • Directed by: Arch Oboler. • Starring: Hans Conried, William H. Lynn, Gloria Blondell, Edwin Max, Janet Warren, Evelyn Beresford, Bob Jellison, Norman Field, Stephen Roberts, Connie Marshall, William Phipps, Bennie Washington, Lenore Kingston. • Music by: Jack Meakin.    The last thing College Lit Professor Cary West wants, while is wife is out of town, is a TV set to keep him company; but that's just what wife Carolyn has bought for him. He is relieved when the serviceman returns to collect the $100 deposit Carolyn forgot to give him; good, he doesn't have the money so the man can take the TV back! Only, a $5 bill he accidently dropped on the floor near the TV has suddenly developed 19 siblings, and the serviceman leaves, cash in hand. West soon realizes he has a major problem: the TV is alive. It lights his pipe, washes his dishes, vacuums his rugs. It also chooses what he can read, write, and marches around to military music; and It also zaps anyone who tries to harm Cary in any way, such as treasury agents investigating the duplicate $5 bills, the police who investigate a call placed by the TV set to the phone company requesting a 'female companion' be sent over for Cary's comfort, and a female bill collector who decides to move in til Cary pays his wife's bills. Cary's sole confident in the adventure is is Gym Coach Trout, who theorizes the set is inhabited by a thing which has time-travelled from some authoritarian society of the future and landed in the TV by accident - a ''twonky'' he calls it. Now the only thing to figure out is how to get rid of it, since the Twonky also has the capacity and willingness to defend itself above all else, even serving its master Cary...
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Review:
The textbook author, a Johns Hopkins professor no less, was too young to have experienced the era he was writing about and appeared to have established a hypothesis, and then bent some facts, ignored a lot of other facts, shoehorned non-compatible ideas and reinterpreted events to suit his thesis. His idea was that the film industry had taken control of television from the very beginning. As someone whose had a TV since 1948 and can remember as far back as 1949 with certainty I know that this is completely wrong. Yet this is what's taught in out Universities. It gives one pause to think what about what we accept as history from more remote times?
Famously the film industry was offered (before WW2) Television first. It was thought that films could be distributed electronically from central points saving on prints, projectionists, physically transporting reels of film, etc. The offer was rejected. Television was taken up by the Radio Industry. NBC and CBS along with DuMont and Westinghouse were the first to start up stations. It fit into the radio model pattern, sponsorship, shows of 15, 30 and one-hour lengths. Sponsors bought time for particular shows and became identified with the shows. Often sponsors or their ad agencies produced the shows themselves.
The film industry's response was to go out of its way to ignore television. In 1951 MGM released WALK EAST ON BEACON where the script has to go through back-flips as the FBI use television surveillance but can't mention the word television. In THE NEXT VOICE YOU HEAR the voice of God is heard by families clustered around the family radio. At Warner Brothers, no television set was allowed to be seen in any set shot for the company. Independent producer Sam Goldwyn was more forthcoming, expressing the sense of doom that the other moguls refused to articulate when he predicted that people would stay home to watch bad movies for free instead of going out to pay for bad movies.
Only Universal, owned by the Music Company of America, the major talent agency in Hollywood, went into television with their Revue Productions. This was actually illegal because it was a clear conflict of interest for a company to both represent talent and produce (employ them) but they got an exception because of a deal made by the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Ronald Reagan. Reagan went from 18th vice-president of SAG to president because the other 19 guys quit to go into independent production because of the Consent Decree and being a producer and actor's union official was a Conflict of Interest. The actors like Robert Montgomery, David Niven, Charles Boyer etc. went on to produce TV series. When Ronald Reagan also went into production with Revue it was a secret and illegal if not unethical.
But in 1951 the film industry was basically in ostrich mode. Arch Obler was a radio hot shot, representing absolutely the summit of the mediums achievement. His show LIGHTS OUT was universally admired. LIGHTS OUT was a sort of precursor to the Twilight Zone, heavily weighted as a writer's medium, taking up serious subjects in a fantastical genre.
Obler had already begun writing and producing for TV when he shot THE TWONKY. This was not a film industry production but an independent (yeah, they had them in those days) production. Most of the action takes place in one large house, one might speculate that it was Obler's. The actors, starting with Hans Conried, were all stars from radio. The film can be "listened to" as a radio show. Almost all of the action is shot either in the house or on location, pretty much on the fly. Though listed as a 1953 release (it ran in only three theatres) it has been reported as being filmed in 1952 though from the appearance of Conried's daughter, Trilby, filming must have started in 1951.
This film was like a living example of LIGHTS OUT, a cautionary tale of the one eyed monster taking over everybody's life, controlling consciousness, defining the context of human life all under the aegis of helping mankind. By the end of the decade Rod Serling would have perfected the form and could easily have made The Twonky as a half hour teleplay.
So unlike the official Film Industry, Obler not only recognized and participated in the new medium, but also called out a warning that some interactive TV from the future could dominate all human life on the planet, even the right to be wrong.
A more modern rethink of this prospect can be seen in Sam Peckenpaugh's last film, THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND (1983), which had the advantage of having observed some 35 years of a television saturated society.
The film industry wouldn't begin to pry its way into television until the middle to late 50s. Sponsored programs disappeared in the 70s as TV stations just sold time.
Review by max von meyerling from the Internet Movie Database.
Movie Database