Sentence of Death / The Night America Trembled

JAMES DEAN starred in "Sentence of Death" in August 1953.

James Dean seen in rare TV appearance

If you are a fan of movie star James Dean, you probably think of “East of Eden,” “Giant” and “Rebel Without A Cause.”
He was an up and coming actor when an automobile accident cut his life short at the tender age of 24.
But before his three career-molding films, Dean did a heck of a lot of television that is largely forgotten.
One of his TV appearances, on “Westinghouse’s Studio One” is available on DVD. “Sentence of Death” has him playing a young man who is unfairly charged and convicted in the murder of a drug store owner.
The show aired live in August 1953. For the uninitiated, “Studio One” and similar programs were presented live. Cavernous studios had various sets assembled and numerous cameras. The director would go from the drug store set to police headquarters to a bar, to an apartment hallway and an apartment.
The lovely Betsy Palmer, long before she starred in the first “Friday the 13th” movie or before she was a regular game show panelist, played a rich society girl who decides for laughs to slum it at a neighborhood drug store.
She orders a ham sandwich and decides to invite her friends to join her. They would all order ham sandwiches and laugh at how the other half lives.
Except while in the phone booth, a man walks into the store, kills the shop owner and steals money from the cash drawer.
The victim’s wife and an elderly couple identify the Dean character as the killer and he is convicted and sentenced to death.
Palmer’s character, at first obnoxious and care-free, gets a conscious when she sees the man she believes did the killing at a bar. It isn’t Dean.
This is a compelling and well-acted presentation. It is available to us today only because someone placed a film camera in front of a television and recorded the program. So the quality isn’t the best, but it is more than viewable.
You wonder how such an undertaking could be so well-executed week after week. It is almost like filming a movie live and watching it as it is put together.
On the same DVD is “The Night America Trembled.”
If you ever wondered how America could misinterpret a radio play about Martians invading Earth for the real thing, this live dramatization will help. It happened in the 1930s in Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds.”
We see the radio studio, complete with orchestra and actors doing the show. Among the radio actors is a young Ed Asner, later Lou Grant and the voice of the Best Picture nominated “Up.”
John Astin, later to be Gomez Addams on “The Addams Family,” plays a newspaper writer.
The play jumps from the studio to a home where a girl is baby-sitting while being frightened out of her wits by the radio show. We see a bunch of guys listening from a bar. We see a guy at a bus station use all of his money for a ticket to get as far away from the “Martians” as possible.
Each set used, each street scene, had to be constructed. Scene switching had to be timed flawlessly.
What is so sad is that CBS burned many of the films of these programs, called kinescopes, to make more room for other things in the storage areas.
How short-sighted. If you rent these two programs, make sure you watch them with commercials. You will learn about the Westinghouse frost-free refrigerator, which gets rid of the ice and even the evaporating water.
Or check out the new Westinghouse clothes washer, at that time called a “Laundromat.”
I have reviewed other “Studio One” episodes before and they are all tremendous efforts and you will see tons of well-known actors when they were starting out.
Televisions may have been cruder in 1953, but programming was more sophisticated.
STUDIO ONE: SENTENCE OF DEATH / THE NIGHT AMERICA TREMBLED • Filmed in black and white with interactive menus • Suitable for all • 4 stars out of 4