Cimarron Strip “Knife in the Darkness” (January 25, 1968)

The renowned science fiction writer and essayist Harlan Ellison was also one of the best freelancers toiling in television for much of the sixties, and at least a half a dozen of his scripts are contenders for this list.  Along with the Young Lawyers discussed above, I’ll confine myself to one more: this audacious high-concept piece that transplants Jack the Ripper into the old west, hacking up saloon girls in the back alleys of Cimarron City.  Ellison’s story was, in the words of Cimarron producer Christopher Knopf, “an examination of urban violence versus western violence, and how urban violence wins every time.”  It’s postmodern in that it transmutes the show’s western format into a horror tale, but Ellison extends the utmost respect to the rules of his chosen genre, confining the action to a single night (it’s almost a “locked-town” mystery) and laying out an array of creepy suspects without ever keying on one as the obvious culprit.  Is Jack the stammering knife sharpener?  The blustery card sharp?  The urban social reformer, or the Brit who claims to be on the trail of Jack himself?  Director Gunnar Hellstrom picks out the fog-enshrouded streets as his key visual and ratchets up the tension to an unbearable level with a prowling camera and a pulsating score by Bernard Herrmann (his last for television).  The image of the Ripper revealed, wielding a scalpel and a grimace of madness, is genuinely scary, and the wicked fate Ellison devises for his villain resonates on a number of unexpected levels.