User Reviews

This drama presented by Douglas Fairbanks, Junior lives up to his introduction: an extremely powerful Mary Morris performance demonstrating in bold relief the power of an authoritarian leader to subvert human dignity, and how one can stand up to it. What surprised me is how this particular story avoided the pitfall of making the villains stick figures and instead looking to uncover even their underlying (though self-suppressed) humanity.

Morris is a colonel in the army of a dictatorship occupying an Eastern European country, reporting to a no-nonsense general (played by Andre Morell) who is assigned the difficult task of rebuilding and shoring up a crucial train track that has been severely damaged by landslides -it's got to be ready by the next day to facilitate at troop transit by train the next day. She orders conscripts of able-bodied local men to do the necessary physical labor, and this includes interrupting a wedding in progress, taking the groom among others as forced laborers.

Morris is tough as nails and fully dedicated to her military profession and autocratic government and military, but the story shows her near-shock at the sight of the beautiful, innocent young bride Jan Miller (as is her superior, Morell). With subtle acting we see how Morris' entire existence seemingly passes before her eyes as she sees the joy in the young girl's eyes, and wonder silently if she's wasted her life in her job rather than fulfilling herself through love and marriage. The beauty of the girl's wedding dress, which Miller made herself, becomes coveted by Morris, and is bandied about in a way tha demonstrates how the unfortunate people of this nation are under the thumb and live strictly at the whim of their autocratic rulers. Resolution of this drama is heartbreaking, thanks to Morris' tour de force performance.

This is a recently recovered episode which, to many, may be of value because of a certain Chris(topher) Lee appearing on the cast list. While it's always good to see him, it turns out he only has a small role, mainly just one scene.

Even if you are not a Lee completist, there are reasons to watch, mainly due to the lead actress, Mary Morris.

In appearance, Morris reminds me of '30s Katharine Hepburn, and her work shares some of the same internalized fire-a woman who is headstrong, but left in turmoil due to struggling with both her femininity and her striving for roles given to men in society.

However, unlike Hepburn, whose roles often contained the more typical Hollywood ending of either landing a man or dying nobly due to lack of one, Morris is given a slightly more nuanced fate to play. And she plays all of the material in a complex, intelligent manner that carries the character along.

The inherent misogyny in such a tale is undercut by the relatively restrained screenplay-there is no easy East vs West posturing, and the potential picture of a bitter, loveless woman of the state lashing out at the family-and-marriage-defined ingenue is given more shading than one might expect.

We are left with a woman who has had to face questions about herself, and the choices she made - choices the state made for her - and in the end, she has no easy answers. She just has to go on with her life, whatever that life is going to be. In that sense, this episode holds up far more than one might expect.