The Twilight Zone “Walking Distance” (October 30, 1959)

The temptation is to pick a scary one – “It’s a Good Life,” with little Anthony wishing his terrified neighbors into the cornfield – or one of the political allegories, like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” with the suburban everypersons turning on each other to root out the alien among them.  But the best Twilight Zone is this portrait of Martin Sloane, a burned-out Madison Avenue exec who’s so fed up with the rat race that he sets out, on foot, toward his long-lost home town and finds that it’s still 1936 there – and that he’s still there too, still eleven years old and carving his name on the same bandstand in the town square.  Everything comes together in Rod Serling’s finest treatise on his favorite theme, the double-edged allure of nostalgia, laid out here as a barely disguised requiem for his own idyllic Binghamton childhood.  Bernard Herrmann’s score is sublime, and director Robert Stevens’ brave use of extreme closeups reveals a deserved confidence in his amazing cast.  As Sloane, Gig Young taps an unsuspected well of melancholy beneath his glib charm.  He’s matched by Frank Overton as the father who accepts the impossible and gently tells his time-travelling adult son that he must return to the unhappy present, so that the young Martin’s childhood may remain undisturbed: “only one summer to a customer.”  And that’s where Serling will break your heart, because, contrary to his father’s faintly expressed hope, the Sloane who returns is no wiser, no more at peace among the cacophonous rock-and-rolling soda-fountain teens of 1959 than when he left.