In a remarkable second-season episode of The Twilight Zone, Agnes Moorehead stars -- indeed she is the only actor in the film -- as a woman who lives alone in some dark-woods home when suddenly a spaceship lands right on her roof. Unlike the stereotypical flying saucer from fifties sci-fi films, this ship is small; it must be to land on this woman's cabin! Two spacemen come out from the ship; she is terrified, and so begins a life and death struggle between the invaders and the woman.
The primary weakness in the show is that the spacemen look like toys next to Moorehead, and the design looks silly, like a mini-Michelin man. Now, of course, the point is that they are supposed to be much smaller than the woman, but author Richard Matheson had originally conceived the story as one where the audience would never see the little men: they'd be moving too fast, and all you'd have is Moorehead's reaction to them.
That said, despite the non-threatening look, these dudes cause some damage: they have a powerful raygun that marks the woman with what are either welts or burn blisters; they cut and blast some holes in her home; and on two separate occasions they cut her deep, once in the foot, and once in her hand. Moorehead's reactions are brilliant. You believe that this assault is terrifying her. She grunts, she screams, she walks about fearful and suspicious. It is a brilliant piece of acting, and she never says a single word.
The only dialogue heard in the episode comes at the very end. The woman has managed to catch one of the spacemen and destroy him. She then takes an ax or a club and smashes the ship to pieces. The other spaceman is aboard ship, sending out a warning message back to his home planet, warning them not to continue with plans to explore because this planet is populated by a race of giants. (The voice of the spaceman is that of the episode's director, Douglas Heyes.) The classic twist-ending is revealed in the final shot of the story, which I'll let you discover for yourself. This tv.com link will give you options for where you can stream the video at whatever your preferred commercial medium is: iTunes, amazon prime, netflix, etc.
"The Invaders" is a tour-de-force for Moorehead. A generation before, she'd starred in a classic radio drama, "Sorry, Wrong Number" for the program Suspense: a story of a neurotic woman who overhears a telephone conversation about someone plotting murder -- she thinks the wires got crossed, and as she desperately tries to get help, she suddenly realizes that she herself is the intended murder victim. It is a masterpiece of voice acting. Here in "The Invaders," Moorehead is able to express terror and desperation through her body language and in her cries and screams, but with no words to speak.
Heyes wanted Moorehead for the part because he thought it would be a great contrast between the two media and the gifts that one actor could bring. Heyes believed that because television is, after all a visual medium, a deaf person should be able to watch a program and have a pretty good idea of what is going on, even without hearing music or dialogue. If a blind person, on the other hand, sits through a program and can tell others what an episode is about, then the tv show is a failure, in Heyes' view. From an artistic perspective, there is much truth in what Heyes says; after all, it is called tele-vision. But from the institutional perspective, an episode like "The Invaders" is not successful.
By "institutional," I don't just mean the corporate culture that makes tv shows, or the "mass audience" arguments about television. I really mean the entire cultural experience of television. Because tv is a domestic medium -- or at any rate, one that does not utilize the facilities of movie theaters -- and because American tv is fueled by advertising revenue, we watch television with much less attentiveness than we do films in theaters. We are more likely to be distracted while watching television. Sound becomes a crucial component of the television experience: the dramatic music cues, or the suddenly excited sports announcer's voice, cue us in that something exciting is happening, and if we're not in front of the tube, we're going to miss it. "The Invaders" does offer very dramatic music (a score by veteran composer Jerry Goldsmith) but because there is no dialogue, the distracted home viewer may miss a lo while preparing dinner or texting to friends.
In this sense, "The Invaders" is "bad" television, since it does not use the aural aspect of the medium to its practical effect. Of course, try telling that to the youtube fans who have it in their top episodes lists and mashups.
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