User Reviews

Private eye Stu Bailey gets hired by the relatives of former silent screen star Doris Kenyon who is now retired and living comfortably off her carefully saved millions. She's got and she knows it a whole flock of greedy relatives who can't wait for the old girl to get ready for her closeup on the heavenly sound stage.

There are a lot of ways to look at this one. But the script makes no doubt that the bad ones are the relatives. Yet somehow one wishes that in the case of that other legendary silent queen Norma Desmond that she might have had some relatives looking after her before she went looney tunes.

She wants Efrem Zimbalist to find three of her old colleagues, writer John Carradine, leading man Francis X. Bushman, and director Owen McGivney. Unlike Norma who was waiting for Cecil B. DeMille to call, Kenyon is taking her own initiative and she's going to remake one of her silent classics and silent again.

I won't say more but she has the most prosaic of reasons for wanting to do this. One we can all relate to.

Yet the story could easily have been tilted the other way. No doubt the relations wanted their money and they are a greedy and grasping lot.

Best in the film is Carradine who summons all the scene stealing tricks at his command in this story.

Stu is hired by the disgruntled relatives of an aging former silent-movie star, who think she is squandering her money on an idea to do a modern silent movie. Crisp writing and pace in this one keep your interest, despite the lack of action scenes (aside from one obligatory fistfight between Stu and some goons). The tone is gentle, even poignant. Great roles for John Carradine and Francis X. Bushman as two of the old lady's cohorts from silent film days. One of the better episodes of Season 1.

"All Our Yesterdays" is the title of this early episode, and also the title of STAR TREK's next-to-last episode. Stuart Bailey (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) works alone here (only brief appearances from Roger Smith and Edd Byrnes), meeting a former silent screen star, Lucinda Lane (Doris Kenyon), who wants to invest her wealth in a comeback vehicle surrounded by former colleagues, against the wishes of her greedy relatives, who want all her money now by putting her away. Bailey proceeds to round up Lucinda's former co-star, Bramwell Stone (Francis X. Bushman), director Harkness Jones (Owen McGiveney), and screenwriter Roderick Delaquois (John Carradine), but is unable to impress Lucinda's personal secretary, Marcia Frome (Merry Anders), who only wishes to protect her employer. It is Lucinda's doctor (John Eldredge) who provides the final evidence that keeps the vultures at bay for a happy ending. Even with three brief appearances, jive talking Edd Byrnes shows why he came to dominate the series as he does two incredible back flips, begging to be cast in Bailey's silent epic. Doris Kenyon was indeed a former star during the silent era, who made her last feature in 1939, and whose final performance was in this 1958 television episode (she died in 1979). Lovely blonde Merry Anders was a busy actress on television, but her feature credits found her in low budget horror/sci fi, such as "The Hypnotic Eye" (1960), "House of the Damned" (1963), "The Time Travelers" (1964), "Women of the Prehistoric Planet" (1965), and "Legacy of Blood" (1971), her final film, which reunited her with genre veteran John Carradine. Among such a distinguished cast, Carradine holds his own, first seen in a tiny shack, lying in a hammock, no shoes or socks, kicking an empty bottle underneath him, clearly delighted to receive payment from Bailey. First he asks who died, then when told it's for a job, he tells Bailey to see his agent, only to learn that the man's been dead for 12 years! Sad truth be told, it's probably not far from the truth of what his career was like by the 1980s. His final television appearance found him working opposite son Robert in an episode of the new TWILIGHT ZONE, "Still Life" (January 3 1986).