The Night of The Meek - Personnel and Cast With Multiple Twilight Zone Credits

Personnel and Cast With Multiple Twilight Zone Credits

• Jack Smight (1925–2003), a director of numerous TV episodes, made-for-TV movies and theatrical films, helmed four Twilight Zone episodes, including three of the six videotaped ones, the other two being "The Lateness of the Hour" and "Twenty Two". His initial assignment was "The Lonely" which, shown as the seventh episode of the first season, was the first regularly filmed installment after the pilot episode.

• A character star, Art Carney (1918–2003) later appeared as Santa Claus in CBS' December 1970 hour-long Muppet special, The Great Santa Claus Switch, and in ABC's December 1984 television film, The Night They Saved Christmas. Best remembered by TV viewers in 1960 as Jackie Gleason's sidekick on Gleason's various 1950s comedy/variety shows, including The Honeymooners' "Ed Norton", it was Carney who received the honors – six Emmies and a Best Actor Oscar (for 1974's Harry and Tonto) — to Gleason's none. This was Carney's only Twilight Zone appearance but, nearly two years earlier, on January 22, 1959, he starred in Rod Serling's semi-autobiographical story, "The Velvet Alley", the eighth of ten Serling teleplays featured on Playhouse 90, the most prestigious of the many live drama anthology series from the Golden Age of Television. Carney's role, that of an aspiring writer who sells his first teleplay to a major TV drama series, paralleled Serling's own career. As in Serling's 1963 screenplay for the political thriller, Seven Days in May, in which a highly moral minor character is named Art Corwin, the appellation of Carney's "Night of the Meek" character, Henry Corwin, was a tribute to Serling's idol, legendary television, film and, most memorably for Serling, radio writer Norman Corwin whose lengthy career, in contrast to Serling's relatively brief 50-year lifetime, had spanned over seven decades. He died on October 18, 2011, five-and-a-half months past his 101st birthday.

• Busy character actor John Fiedler (1925–2005) played usually bald and bespectacled officious types in hundreds of radio shows, TV episodes and movies starting in the 1940s. Appearing on TV from its earliest days, he was one of the cadets in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet from 1951 to 1954, had regular roles in three series between 1973 and 1984 and did countless cartoon voices, including that of Piglet for Disney. His other Twilight Zone part, as a bureaucratic angel (without spectacles), was in third season's penultimate episode, "Cavender Is Coming", a failed sitcom pilot replete with a laugh track.

• A unique character, Burt Mustin (1884–1977) was a retired car salesman who began acting in films and television in 1951, at the age of 67, and continued as a performer for the next twenty-six years, dying eleven days short of his ninety-third birthday. Here, he's an elderly denizen of skid row, whom Corwin addresses as "Burt" and presents with a pipe and, as a follow-up, with a smoking jacket, while, in his other Twilight Zone appearance, he's again typecast, playing one of the residents of the old-age home in third season's "Kick the Can".

• Child actress Andrea Margolis (born 1952) performed in over a dozen TV episodes in a six-year period, starting unbilled with this, her first role, playing the little girl in the opening scene, pleading for "a carriage and a dolly". Her second Twilight Zone appearance, with billing in the closing credits, came in the episode broadcast the following week, "Dust", in which she portrays another pleading child, Estrelita, a little Mexican girl, helping her father beg for the life of her condemned brother. Starting in 1962, she began to be credited as Andrea Darvi, which she used as a stage name until 1966, when she gave her last acting performances: an installment of I Spy and an unbilled role in Alfred Hitchcock's Torn Curtain. She subsequently became a journalist as well as a social worker and discusses "The Night of the Meek" at length in her partially autobiographical book about child actors, Pretty Babies, published in 1983 by McGraw-Hill.

• Attractive blonde Nan Peterson (born 1939) played mainly decorative parts in some twenty TV shows and four films during a five-year period between 1959 and 1964. She was the title character in the poverty-budgeted 1959 independent Louisiana Hussy and is remembered by specialized genre fans as one of the two female leads in two other small-scale productions, 1959's The Hideous Sun Demon and 1963's Ed Wood-scripted Shotgun Wedding. Her four Twilight Zone appearances, in which she barely utters a couple of words, are spread between the beginning and the end of her brief career. Here, she is little more than an extra, sitting at the bar in Jack's Place, next to a drunk whose sleeping face is in foreground, turned towards the camera. Her debut performance, as the mother who calls out to her merry-go-round-riding child, can be seen in first season's memorable fifth episode "Walking Distance", and her second, the most prominent of the four, in the episode videotaped immediately before this one, "The Whole Truth", where she and Jack Ging play a newly married couple considering the purchase of one of the substandard vehicles in the lot of used-car dealer Jack Carson. Her final acting role, a bit part as a secretary, was three years later, in February 1964's fifth season installment, "From Agnes—With Love", in which, as here, she is unbilled.