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For the first few seconds after Orson Welles and Rod Serling finished screening their Twilight Zone pilot for CBS executives, the only sound that could be heard in the projection room was the ticking of the clock on the wall. As Welles would recall years after the fact in his autobiography, he was afraid for a moment that the pilot might have been a bomb. But after a minute, one of the executives rose to his feet and spontaneously started applauding; before long, his fellow suits had joined him in the applause, clearly impressed by the fruits of Serling’s and Welles’ labor. Here was a show that promised to grab viewers by the lapels and not let go; it took the TV drama anthology genre back to its roots while simultaneously adding new wrinkles that would keep the audience interested week after week.

Relieved and flattered by the Zone pilot’s positive reception, the Welles-Serling team quickly threw themselves into the task of writing additional episodes for the debut season of the new series. This being the early days of the Atomic Age, many of those episodes would have as their primary theme the horrors of nuclear war and the severe mistrust between East and West that was the engine driving the threat of global atomic holocaust. The first Twilight Zone episode to explicitly make nuclear war a major plot theme was “Finally Time Enough”, the story of a constantly harried banker with a passion for books who found himself the last man on Earth after World War III and ended up taking shelter in the ruins of his hometown library. Nobody who watched the episode would ever forget its tragic closing scenes when the banker(portrayed by Burgess Meredith) sat down to start reading through the library’s collection only to have a piece of the roof crush him while he was in the middle of his second book.

“Time Enough” chilled everyone who saw it-- and helped to ensure a second series for Zone once the first season was concluded. Viewers who’d already been fans of the series found a new reason to appreciate it after watching “Time”; many of those who hadn’t been fans of Zone
quickly became so. Within a week after “Time Enough” was first aired, the CBS offices received thousands of fan letters asking the network to repeat the episode, and CBS was quick to oblige. In years to come, “Time” would be one of the most series’ popular episodes and even get mentioned as the basis for a possible Twilight Zone feature film.

Not that the Serling-Welles team necessarily needed nuclear war as a means of scaring the living daylights out of the viewing audience-- the uncertainties of modern life were a fertile enough breeding ground for drama with a supernatural or science fiction twist. Case in point:“Escape Hatch”, a modern spin on the old Faust legend which featured a hypochondriac apartment dweller who sold his soul to the Devil for the sake of immortality and, like the original Faust, wound up feeling he’d gotten the short end of the stick. Another episode which delved into the psychological turmoil inherent in 20th century urban life was“To Sleep”, in which a stressed-out advertising executive was driven to insanity and then death by insomnia-induced hallucinations stemming from the pressures of his job. A few weeks after “To Sleep” made its television debut, Serling touched on his World War II experiences for the first time since “Time Element” in the supernatural saga “Bleeding War”, in which a Marine fighting in General MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign found himself given the unexpected-- and unwanted-- talent of being able to read in his fellow soldiers’ psychic auras which one of them was going to buy the farm in combat.

While Zone was establishing its identity and building its audience, Welles worked on the script for his next feature film project. Titled Touch Of Evil, it was an exploration of racial and social prejudice dressed up in the guise of a murder-mystery set on the Texas-Mexico border. Given the conservative racial mindset which prevailed in America at the time, the movie’s basic concept had been a tough sell in Hollywood, but by sheer force of force of will and promises of massive public interest in the film as a result of the almost inevitable controversy its storyline would generate, Welles had won the skeptics over.

     Welles was not only the chief scriptwriter on Evil, he was also a key member of its cast-- he would be portraying one of the film’s heavies, a border town sheriff with a deep-seated grudge against all Hispanics. In order to play that role convincingly, he would have to adopt a mindset that was 180 degrees removed from his own staunchly liberal political beliefs. By his own admission he became “an absolute nightmare to deal with” every time he stepped into character for his role in the movie-- at one point Welles even got alarmingly close to having it out with Rod Serling when the two men were chatting on the phone one afternoon after he shot a scene as the sheriff.

     The Mexican desert didn’t do very much to help Welles maintain his composure; as anyone who’s traveled there knows, temperatures in that region can sometimes surpass the 110-degree mark in the heat of the afternoon(in the both literal and figurative sense). No less than three times during the shooting of Evil Welles had to be hospitalized for heatstroke, and a member of his production team nearly died of a heat-induced dehydration problem in spite of all efforts to keep the movie’s cast and crew fully supplied with water. It finally got to the point where the movie’s leading man, Charlton Heston, half-jokingly suggested to Welles that its closing scenes should all be filmed at night when the weather would be cooler.

But the heat of the Mexican desert would seem more like an Arctic chill in comparison to the inferno of controversy that would overtakeEvil when it was theatrically released in the spring of 1959. The film was the subject of angry protest rallies in the Deep South, just likeOthello had been nearly five years earlier; nowhere were those rallies bigger or more vociferously angry than in Texas, where Welles became the Lone Star State’s most despised enemy since Santa Anna as right- wing protestors vilified the movie for what they considered a blatant and intentional slight on their home state’s honor. The outcries were especially loud in the Dallas area, where the Texas Rangers had to be called in to thwart a pack of anti-Welles agitators from storming the city’s largest theater and burning its prints of Evil.

The movie hardly got unanimous applause north of the Mason-Dixon line either, for that matter; a film critic for the Village Voice in New York complained that the racist tirades of Welles’ character were endorsing what he called “the KKK philosophy of race relations”, and in making such a complaint utterly missed the point that these tirades were meant to illustrate the character’s evil and narrow-mindedness-- in short, to motivate people to root against, not for, the character. In Boston, the New England regional branch of the U.S. Communist Party held a protest rally denouncing Welles as “a crypto-fascist bigot” and urging party members along with the public to boycott the movie(which caused the rally’s chief organizer considerable embarrassment in light of his subsequent admission he hadn’t seen the whole of the film).

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Touch of Evil did have plenty of defenders, however, and one of them could be found in a surprising place-- at the desk of the main film critic for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, right in the heart of the old Confederacy. In his review of the film, the critic called it “a much-needed examination of the American conscience” and “perhaps the finest work Welles has to date put on screen”. The fact that the correspondent typing those lines was the grandson of a Confederate soldier who’d served under Robert E. Lee made his endorsement of the movie all the more remarkable. Although his comments would open up theJournal-Constitution to a barrage of angry letters and cost them at least one subscriber, he would not retract a single sentence of his comments, nor did his editors ask him to. The article marked a turning point in the changing of Southern attitudes towards the movie; among other things, it emboldened previously reticent supporters of the movie to speak up in its behalf. This in turn prompted people who had previously been on the fence about Evil to go out and see it-- and this gave the film a considerable boost at box offices across the whole United States. The movie ended up becoming one of 1959’s top-grossing films and went on to secure a number of Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture. Welles’ star was on the rise-- and it would rise higher still over the course of the next five years...