Night of the Cliffhanger's Return

It had been nearly twenty years since William Witney, Republic's ace action helmer, had directed his last serial - The Crimson Ghost in 1946. And it was nearly ten years after the curtain had fallen on the last new American serial, "new" being a generous description since the last of the chapterplays ground out by both the once-proud Republic and by Columbia in the fifties were so filled with stock footage that it was rare to find a fresh cliffhanger or action scene among the lot.

Then, on the night of September 24th, 1965, it happened. The cliffhanger returned and William Witney was once again behind the camera, calling the shots. For this was The Night Of The Deadly Bed on the new CBS show The Wild Wild West. The screen was a lot smaller, but the action and the heroes and villains were just as big as they had always been at the Saturday matinees of the thrities and forties.

Robert Conrad as Jim West was cocky as Don Barry in The Adventures of Red Ryder (1940). About the same height too. He took on a supervillain who styled himself after Napoleon and who plotted to take over Mexico with the help of a monstrous super-train equipped with a steel battering ram.

It was a fast-paced 50 minutes of high octane pulp. Best of all it featured true cliffhangers - ones that were "to be continued" after a set of commercials instead of next week, but cliffhangers all the same. One sees Jim West drugged and lying in the titular deadly bed as a heavy canopy bristling with razor spikes lowers down towards him. Another has West strapped to an oversized gong as a heavy log is drawn back, ready to ram forward and, uh, take its toll on our hero.

These perils are beautifully framed and cut, a return to Witney's salad days. They're not the only echoes of the golden past either. In the opening teaser alone we encounter former Republic serial stuntman Dale Van Sickel as a mariachi who plucks a guitar string and uses it as a garrote. West then hurries to a warehouse where he has arranged to meet another agent. A bomb explodes and the man is cut down. Dying, his face and mustache covered in dust, he utters a single word: "Flory". Shot in extreme close-up. it's a sly reference to the opening of Citizen Kane and Orson Welles' deathbed whisper of "Rosebud."

The episode climaxes with a peasant revolt in the madman's undeground lair, a labyrinth of monstrous machines, spurting jets of steam and a roaring open furnace. It harkens back to Buster Crabbe's Flash Gordon leading a revolt in the atomic furnace room of the Hawkmen's city in the clouds.

There's a lot of joy and energy in William Witney's work on screen. Unfortunately, there wasn't lot of joy offscreen. Bobby Conrad insisted on performing beneath the crushing weight of the deadly bed's canopy. Witney thought it was too risky and insisted on using a stuntman for the shot. They fought so long and hard the set was shut down. In the end, Conrad won and Witney let him do the stunt.

Then again, maybe Conrad didn't win at all. Witney only made one more Wild, Wild West, then left the show to never return.