Adventures in Paradise “Walk Through the Night” (January 25, 1960)

A lean, fatalistic exemplar of pure action, in which directorial imagination triumphs over the budgetary limitations that typically compromise adventure fare in episodic television.  Richard Landau’s script introduces the characters with economy: “Scum - all of you,” says the man behind the bar of the fetid New Guinea dive where they’re all moldering, a wandering artist (Brock Peters), a B-girl (Mara Corday), a mercenary (Lawrence Tierney), a gigolo (Nico Minardos).  Soon the show’s hero, sailor Gardner McKay, is leading them on a trek through the jungle to rescue an injured man, and through a series of set pieces – hauling dynamite over a mountain, eluding a pursuing cannibal tribe – that producer-director Paul Stanley stages with a relentless pace and brutal, inescapable framing (a spider web in the foreground is a repeated motif).  Stanley’s stroke of genius is to leave the cannibals entirely off-screen, an unseen menace whose absence gradually shifts the story into the realm of horror; the climax is a heroine’s primal scream that slams (on an audio cut) into a bitter, ironic epilogue.  It’s an uncut jewel along the lines of the hard, nasty B-movies made in the fifties by Joseph H. Lewis or Sam Fuller or Budd Boetticher.  Television had its corps of great, muscular action directors too, all as yet not written about or even catalogued.  Start the list with Paul Stanley.