Classic Horrors Club

Writer | Mann Rubin
Director | Don Medford
Air Date | March 27, 1953

Here’s a switch: a wife supports her husband during hard times instead of nagging at him to get a job. Joan (Gaby Rodgers) encourages Bert (Leslie Nielsen) to keep writing his novel rather than take a paying job. After answering a newspaper ad from a known author offering to collaborate with an unknown, Bert sees an opportunity. Joan says he doesn’t need anyone else if he’d give himself a chance.

After telling her he won’t do it, Bert visits Lee Morton, anyway. Morton explains that the ideas aren’t coming for him any longer and he’s behind schedule. He offers Bert $500 per story to write their endings. Bert proudly presents Joan with $1,000 in cash, but she’s heartbroken that he broke his promise to her. About this time, Bert notices the newspaper. The ending of one of the stories, the strange murder of a nightclub singer and her two lovers, tops the headlines.

Believing all the stories will end in tragedy, Joan convinces Bert to return the money to Morton and never work for him again. However, when he intends to do it, Morton offers him $1,000 for one final story. Although you may anticipate the outcome, I won’t say anymore. It’s a good episode, but I wonder why, knowing his endings come true, Bert would write about a woman who dies instantly when a taxi skids into the side of a bridge.

Teleplay by | Willie Gilbert, Jack Weinstock
Story by | Robert F. Lewine
Director | Don Medford
Air Date | April 3, 1953

Finally, the one with Boris Karloff, making the episode review-proof. He plays Dr. Henry Marco, who, when the episode opens, is lying in the hospital dying. For the last six months, he’s insisted he’s a man from the future. The year is 1910. Flashing forward to 1953, his wife, Jane (Katherine Meskill) channels any number of previous wives in Tales of Tomorrow stories by scolding her husband spending all his time working on an experiment, a time machine, and neglecting his duties as the breadwinner. 

He’ll show her that the past can be profitable, though, by going back with a vial of penicillin that he intends to sell for a quarter of a million dollars. In 1923, Dr. Laskey (John McGovern) believes Henry, but that doesn’t mean he’s made a sale. When he returns home, he tells Jane:

I tried to sell some moldy bread, but they didn’t buy.

He’s going to try again and go back 13 years earlier than his last trip. When he returns and they’re set for the rest of their lives, he promises Jane he’ll smash the machine.

As we expected based on the opening, things go even worse for him in 1910,  He’s arrested for being a fraud and spends his final days in the hospital where the doctor holds the vial of medicine that could have saved him, if only he’d tried it. He may have blown his cover when he meets a younger Dr. Laskey and claims they know each other. There is a Henry Marco in 1910, though… a young boy who lives at the same address as the elder Henry Marco claims to live.