William
Schallert celebrates his birthday this week! He might be more famous as
Patty Duke’s Poppo and (for me) the delightfully ill-tempered Nilz
Baris in “Star Trek: The Trouble with Tribbles,” but one of my favourite
roles of his is the almost mute ‘Quiet Sam’ in a 1961 episode of “The
Andy Griffith Show.” I love the earlier black-and-white episodes, with
Andy as the kindly justice of the law, and this episode might hold the
best of his honest family values/optimistic rural pluralism. Schallert’s
reclusive, reserved (introverted, maybe) outsider is treated with
somewhat invasive suspicion, even hostility by the otherwise friendly
townspeople of Mayberry, until he isn’t.
A neatly unveiled twist upends the misunderstanding to reveal the innocent and wonderful truth about this man, and his neighbours rise to and give of their better selves. Inclusiveness and loving non-judgment is/was a welcome theme to sermonise in changing times (it feels like a gentler, warmer treatment of the same subject Reginald Rose explored in his didactic but tensely compelling 1954 teleplay “Almanac of Liberty” with gaunt-cheeked Sandy Kenyon), and this sweet episode shares it in a beautifully heartfelt way Xo
A neatly unveiled twist upends the misunderstanding to reveal the innocent and wonderful truth about this man, and his neighbours rise to and give of their better selves. Inclusiveness and loving non-judgment is/was a welcome theme to sermonise in changing times (it feels like a gentler, warmer treatment of the same subject Reginald Rose explored in his didactic but tensely compelling 1954 teleplay “Almanac of Liberty” with gaunt-cheeked Sandy Kenyon), and this sweet episode shares it in a beautifully heartfelt way Xo
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