Tales From the Crypt: Season 3, Episode 14: "Yellow"
Welcome, boils and ghouls! It appears that we have made it to the end of another spooktacular season of Tales From the Crypt. “Yellow” closes the third season out in a BIG way. Big budget! Big runtime! Big stars! Big Director! Big themes! Big, big, big, big, big!
Yes, Tales From the Crypt aimed for the fences this time around with its longest and most expensive episode, a ripping World War I yarn about a yellow-bellied soldier facing down mortality in myriad forms and flinching hard from Executive Producer and all-around Hollywood big shot Robert Zemeckis, whose credits include such perfect motion pictures as Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Even by Tales From the Crypt standards, the production values for “Yellow” are extraordinary. An opening set-piece of lily-livered officer Matthew Calthrob (Eric Douglas) scrambling around a battlefield in fear as one soldier after another meets a gruesome, untimely end has some of the surround-sound vividness and intentionally overwhelming intensity of the Normandy scenes in Saving Private Ryan.
Before Band of Brothers, “Yellow” proved that you could make cinematic war epics on an HBO budget providing the budget is hefty enough and you have the power and leverage of someone like Robert Zemeckis, Steven Spielberg or Tom Hanks. Indeed, according to IMDB, Steven Spielberg was at one point supposed to direct “Yellow” but ended up being replaced by one of his most accomplished proteges.
At thirty-seven minutes, “Yellow” is far and away Tales From the Crypt’s longest episode. It’s the only episode to surpass the thirty minute mark but it justifies its generous runtime with an excess of ambition and achievement. An epic Paths of Glory homage, “Yellow” stars Eric Douglas as Martin Kalthrob, a man with a very reasonable desire: he REALLY does not want to get shot in the face with a bullet and die.
That’s not a problem with most jobs. Unfortunately for miserable Martin, he is an officer on the front lines in France during World War I. For men like him, waking up every morning to the very real chance that he’ll end the day in a body bag isn’t just a regrettable occupational hazard: it’s pretty much the job itself.
Martin, alas, has no stomach for warfare or violence or risking death. His strategy is to take as few risks as possible to maximize his chances of surviving the war. That sounds eminently reasonable to me but it earns the scared young soldier a richly merited reputation for being a coward.
When Martin’s cowardice results in the deaths of his men he tries to pretend that he fought valiantly despite being outnumbered by vicious Germans and armed with only a gun. The chickenshit soldier’s flimsy ruse falls apart almost instantly when Sergeant Ripper (Lance Henricksen) outs him as a man who froze and fled rather than fight and his general points out that the gun he claims to have used to send Germans to hell has never been fired.
Martin’s general is also his dad. Eric’s real-life father Kirk and the real-life star of Paths of Glory radiates old-time movie star magnetism as a powerful leader faced with the horrifying predicament of having to choose between his allegiance to his job and his allegiance to his family when a court martial determines that Martin is to be killed by firing squad first thing the next morning.
“Yellow” benefits tremendously from the meta-textual baggage its stars bring to it. Eric is tragically, perfectly typecast as a man who went into the family business but could never hope to measure up to his legendary father, personally or professionally. He’s all too convincing as a failure as a soldier and a man cursed to live and suffer forever in the outsized shadow of his old man.
That inadequacy is physical as well as psychological and professional. Eric looks just like his famous father, albeit with his famously sharp, confident features replaced by something softer and meeker. He has a weak chin where his father famously has a jaw of pure American iron and a purposeless, directionless air where his father is ferociously focussed.
“Yellow” makes a strength out of Eric’s weakness as an actor and a man. It’s easy to buy that he’s spent his entire life trying to win daddy’s love with zero success.
The elder Douglas feels guilty about his own failures as a father so he meets with his son in his cell and tells him that he can’t possibly go through with the execution of his own flesh and blood so he will place blanks in the guns of the firing squad so that he can fake his death and start life anew under a new name and identity.
The brutal twist in “Yellow” doesn’t necessarily even qualify as a twist. The general tricks his son into thinking that he will survive the firing squad with both his dignity and his life intact, only to put regular old bullets into the squad’s guns to ensure that his under-achieving, disappointing son will never let anyone down ever again.
It’s a vicious violation of the father-son bond but then the General clearly thinks that line was crossed permanently and disastrously when his son proved a coward instead of honoring the family tradition of stoic, uncomplaining military service.
When you’ve been doing the job as long as I have, you notice a lot of weird coincidences. Yesterday, for example, I wrote up “Golem”, an episode of Batman Beyond about a misfit whose father considers him a coward and a disappointment until he “proves” his bravery in a bleakly ironic fashion. In “Golem” that entails using a killer robot to wreak havoc instead of being a milquetoast victim of bullies paternal and otherwise. In “Yellow” that bravery manifests itself in a man sternly, nobly facing down death because he labors under the delusion that freedom and liberation await him rather than the eternal unhappy slumber of the grave.
Both stories work on an emotional as well as thematic level as explorations of toxic masculinity and the desperate things we will do in order to not look or seem weak in front of our fathers and the world at large.
“Yellow” experienced a curious second life when it was repurposed, alongside the season four episodes “King of the Road” and “Showdown” for Two-Fisted Tales, the failed pilot for a spin-off focussing on the hardboiled, tough guy strain of the Tales From the Crypt universe featuring William Sadler as Mr. Rush, a ghostly gun-fighter who acts as the connective tissues between stories in a manner not unlike the Crypt-Keeper.
Two-Fisted Tales never got picked up. Instead of launching a new series it sunk like a stone despite the star power and money involved. That’s too bad but the failed spin-off Perversions of Science proved that sometimes an idea can sound great in theory but prove absolutely abysmal in practice.
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