Wing Man

I can’t believe I didn’t know this.

Last week, the filmmaker Richard Donner, director of such big budget spectacles as The Omen, Superman and Lethal Weapon, died at 91 years old.

I have to confess that I am not a particularly big fan of Donner’s movie work.

While there is no denying that his films were incredibly popular, I found several them to be rather noisy and uninteresting.

Like many of the older filmmakers, Donner got his start in television, directing episodes of such classics as Wanted: Dead or Alive, Have Gun Will Travel and Perry Mason.

I’ve been watching several of these shows lately on the MeTV channel and I’ve seen Donner’s name a few times, but I had no idea until I read his obituary that he directed what is arguably the most famous episode of The Twilight Zone, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”

C’mon, don’t sit there and tell me you don’t know what episode I’m talking about.

That’s the one from 1963 with a pre-Kirk William Shatner portraying a man recovering from a nervous breakdown looks out the window of a plane and sees a monster on the wing trying to pull apart the engine.

The plane is being battered by a brutal thunderstorm and, of course, nobody believes Shatner when he tells them about the gremlin outside his window.

I cannot begin to guess how many times I have seen this particular episode and it never grows old.

It is a claustrophobic masterpiece, especially if you’re afraid to fly like I am, and it holds up despite the passage of time and some rather cheesy special effects.

Richard Matheson, who wrote the story upon which the episode is based, said the monster looked like a panda, but it’s the scariest panda I’ve ever seen.

I’m shocked that I didn’t know Donner directed this show. Maybe I learned this fact years ago and it just slipped my mind, although that is not a particularly comforting thought either.

Now if Richard Donner had just filmed this one episode and quit the entertainment business, he’d still be a legend in my book.

But, luckily, he didn’t. In fact, just a year before The Twilight Zone, Donner directed one of my favorite episodes of The Rifleman.

Scare Tactics

Simply titled “Gunfire”--which pretty much describes every western ever made--the episode stars Lon Chaney Jr. as a six-gun psychopath who is awaiting transfer from the local jail to the prison in Yuma, Arizona where he is to be hanged.

Chaney, however, has other plans and the story takes on the feel of a mini-horror movie as our hero, Lucas McCain, and the town’s marshal, face off against a gang of unseen killers who strike from out of the darkness.

Casting the monster movie legend Chaney as the villain amps up the spookiness a hundredfold.

Another episode, “Outlaw Shoes,” does a take on the old amnesia story line, a favorite of far too many TV shows where a memory-deprived Lucas is mistaken for a vicious gunslinger.

A lynch mob quickly forms to mete out some rough injustice and as the bloodthirsty vigilantes drag Lucas toward the hangman’s noose, I’m almost certain that Donner uses a handheld camera to convey a sense of confusion and terror.

Handheld camera work may not sound like much now, but I don’t think you saw much of that in TV shows of the early Sixties.

Many years ago, one of the old New York revival houses—the Elgin, or the Carnegie Hall Cinema, I don’t recall which--hosted a series dedicated to the work of British filmmaker David Lean, who directed such beloved films as Great Expectations and Brief Encounter.

Entitled “Lean When He Was Lean,” the retrospective focused on the director’s earlier films, before he went on to helm such epics as Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

The program’s organizers maintained that Lean did his best work when he had smaller budgets. I don’t know enough about Lean’s career to comment yea or nay, but I wonder if one could make a similar observation about Richard Donner.

I find his TV work—done on tight schedules with tighter money—to be more exciting and visually creating than any of his films that I’ve seen.

In fact, “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” was shot under even greater pressure than usual because of scheduling constraints, technical problems with the simulated storm, and a slew of special effects challenges.

Donner crammed three-days of filming into two and still came away with an unforgettable episode.

Thanks for that memory, Mr. Donner. And for so many others.