Goodyear Theatre (TV Series) Points Beyond (1958) User Reviews

Pretty weird!

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 13 February 2024]

While some might think that "The Twilight Zone" was a first of its kind, several other TV shows of the 1950s had weird, fantastical plots like this show. "Points Beyond" is ample proof that "Goodyear Theatre" made a few sci-fi sort of shows!

Julie Adams plays a woman who is suicidal and feels hopeless. After her suicide attempt, a strange man appears in her room...offering her contentment if she goes to a certain address. There, she learns that they are sending people to live on Planet Verna...and they are happy to take her to an all-new life there! Well, before going, she tells her husband (Sterling Hayden) and he agrees to look into it with her...even though he is a skeptical cop. What's next? See the show.

While I was not in love with the twist at the end, it certainly IS one of a kind and interesting. Well worth seeing and very Twilight Zoney!

Cult behavior

[lor_ · 2 October 2023]

Based on a short story by Jack Finney (so famous for his "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"), "Points Beyond" broadcast on Goodyear Theatre plays like an episode of "One Step Beyond" or "The Twilight Zone". However, I was quite surprised how timely it is 65 years later in the way it treats cult behavior, currently exemplified in real life by the QAnon phenomenon.

The script adaptation by David Swift (a successful writer-director in the comedy genre, including "The Parent Trap") is rather clear in dealing with people who have become tired of the world as it currently is (in 1958, but more so in 2023) and are offered a one-way trip to a Utopian other world, a planet named Verna.

Heroine, Julie Adams, perfect casting for this genre, has attempted suicide, and is approached in her hospital bed by a mysterious stranger (Joseph Holland, an imposing bald actor who never rose on TV beyond basically bit parts) who promises her escape and gives her a card from a travel agency. Raymond Greenleaf (that name always suggests to me the character from Patricia Highsmith's "The Talented Mr. Ripley") is the travel agent who gives her a brochure and offers her an escape from worry and fear.

Putting meat on the bones of this story is casting Sterling Hayden as Julie's possessive ex-husband, who conveniently happens to be running the police's Bunco Squad, routinely investigating con artists. He's embittered by the current society, tired of dealing with low-lifes in his daily job, and is loathsome in his attempt to dominate Julie, when she's long since been rid of him.

Her story about her upcoming trip to another, better world piques his interest and he poses successfully as a prospective customer at the travel agency (and in fact, is actually ripe for escape from his oppressive life) and goes through the motions of following Greenleaf's instructions: "Liquidate what you have and give it to us when you leave" for Verna.

A bus takes him, Julie and a bunch of other suckers to a barn 40 miles from town and leaves them to wait. Greenleaf has explained that the trip to distant (light-years away) Verna, is by a form of time-travel, but Hayden gets impatient, informs everyone that this is obviously a scam and leaves the barn, only to see, too late, the folks disappear in a cloud of smoke, with the vistas of Verna's forests briefly visible, leaving him behind and forlorn, left telling his sob story to a bartender, drowning himself in drink.

This fantasy sheds light on what seems to me inexplicable: that literally millions of people believing (and escaping) in wild conspiracy theories like QAnon and the ongoing cult of Trump.

A fun sidelight: I watched "Points Beyond" on YouTube, with a commercial hawking L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology plunked smack dab in the middle of the show! Hmm... another conspiracy!

A very strange tale

[searchanddestroy-1 · 17 December 2012]

I would say it's a fantasy tale, so rare in this kind of TV shows. Sterling Hayden plays here a cop; so at the beginning, you may think it's a crime flick, in the line of CRIME WAVE, starring the same Sterling Hayden. And you would be wrong.

The story begins where Hayden finds his wife at the hospital, after she drank too much, with a handful of sleeping pills. She was through with him, and his police job. She wanted to "escape". So he swears to her that he will change.

The two of them go to a sort a travel agency, a very weird one, actually. The guy here proposes them a strange voyage to allow them to escape from the daily boredom.

And that's here where everything becomes very unexpected...

I won't tell you any more else about this eerie story.

Try it.