Quote of the day:

We’re all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.
—Robert Bloch

When Thriller debuted on NBC in 1960, I couldn’t watch it because it came on at 9 PM on Tuesday nights, which was a school night, and so I had to get to bed by 9:00 or 9:30 at the latest. So possibly the very first episode that I saw (at least the first complete episode) happened to be the one that many folks think is the best one that show ever produced, “The Cheaters”, which premiered on December 27, 1960.

It was based on a Robert Bloch short story of the same name which had appeared in the November 1947 issue of Weird Tales, and was adapted for television by Donald S. Sanford in a reasonably faithful teleplay.

It scared the living daylights out of me.

The title refers on the surface to a pair of spectacles that pass from one person to another during the course of the story, but it also alludes to an unfaithful spouse, a shoplifter, and a poker player who doesn’t play by the rules.

Mildred Dunnock and Jack Weston are among the hapless possessors of the spectacles.

Thriller had started out as an anthology series of crime dramas introduced by Boris Karloff, but after the first few episodes proved to be a flop with critics and audiences and the show was in danger of cancellation, some serious surgery was required. After a change of producers and a fresh perspective,Thriller began to introduce supernatural horror episodes as well as crime dramas, and both the ratings and the reviews improved. Oh, yes, they found a young composer named Jerry Goldsmith to write the incidental music.

It’s too bad that Thriller couldn’t concentrate exclusively on the horror episodes, as the audience didn’t know what to expect from week to week, but most of the horror shows were culled from the pages of the 1940s magazine Weird Tales, so there was a limited supply, even when Robert Bloch himself began to write the scripts. The show only lasted two seasons.

Once summer vacation came around, I was able to watch Thriller in reruns, of course, and when they reran “The Cheaters”, I was prepared for that ending so it didn’t give me the heebie-jeebies like it had on the first viewing, but it was still a shocker.

Stephen King has referred to Thriller as the best tv horror series of its kind up to that point. If it no longer possesses the power to frighten me the way it did when I was eleven, well, I’m older now. At least I think I am.

In comparing Bloch’s story to Sanford’s teleplay, I think I can understand why he made most of the changes that he did; they were either necessary for dramatic purposes or to help explain how information got passed from one character to another. The biggest change he made was to add a prologue that takes place 200 years in the past that explains how the spectacles were created; in the Bloch story, we don’t find that out until near the end. The prologue ends with a mystery that serves to help keep the viewer tuned in during the commercial breaks.

Here’s the opening prologue and Boris Karloff’s introduction to “The Cheaters”:

What did he see in that mirror? We don’t find that out until the closing scene.

There’s one more minor mystery about that prologue, or really Karloff’s introduction. In the Bloch story one of the characters is named Percy Dean, but he’s renamed Edward Dean in the teleplay. Still, Karloff refers to him in his introduction as Percy. Why? My guess is that Sanford originally retained Percy for the character’s name and included it in Karloff’s introductory remarks as well. Somewhere along the line, the character’s name was changed to Edward (perhaps someone at the network thought Percy sounded too old fashioned? Or too gay?), and the script pages were updated, but they missed the page with Karloff’s introduction.

Oh, and “The Cheaters” was directed by John Brahm, who had directed the movie Hangover Square back in 1945. That movie had so impressed the young Stephen Sondheim, that he stayed to see it a second time and wrote Bernard Herrmann, who had written the music, a fan letter.

Here’s the cover to the November 1947 Weird Tales that featured Robert Bloch’s original story:

And if you’d like to read Bloch’s story, here’s a link to the archive containing it: The Cheaters by Robert Bloch