urick

Created by writer Anthony Lawrence, after the 1971 TV movie "Sweet, Sweet Rachel", and supervised during the first season (the first thirteen episodes) as an executive story consultant, the framework of "The Sixth Sense" is detective story but with wild macabre elements throughout the ESP phantasmagoria: delirious visions, hallucinations, apparitions, delusions, nightmares, mind transfers, memories from strangers, premonitions. As in the tradition of the private eye helped by his secretary, Dr. Michael Rhodes is supported by assistant librarian Nancy Murphy who only stays during the first seven episodes. The show's first ambition is to introduce to the audience the paranormal by rational and scientifical means and therefore, Dr. Rhodes plays the edifying and idealistic College professor who encounters hostility and skepticism. Too rigid and anecdotal to turn into a success, "The Sixth Sense" displays good episodes as "The House That Cried Murder", "Lady, Lady, Take My Life" (featuring a psychic lynch mob), "Once Upon a Chilling". Actually, "The Sixth Sense" is the second attempt to spread the ESP genre, after the 1959 anthology "One Step Beyond"--hosted and directed by John Newland; Newland participated in three "Sixth Sense" episodes: "Dear, Joan, We're Going to Scare You to Death", "Through a Flame, Darkly" and "And Scream by the Light of the Moon, the Moon"--, but with a regular conventional character and an early 1970's psychedelic film-making style. Many directors from other Universal fantastic shows worked on "The Sixth Sense": John Badham, Jeff Corey, Daniel Haller and Barry Shear from "Night Gallery" and Allen Barron from "Kolchak, The Night Stalker".

"The Unknown" is an elegant, oddball and symbolic tale that pays tribute to many classic works: first, the core of the drama comes from Henri-Georges Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques"--the drowning of a man--and then borrows elements from Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho"--the old dark house and composer Dominic Frontiere's music remind the shrill violin of "Psycho" during the murder in the lake scene--, Val Lewton's 1940's noirish productions--fear created by the power of suggestion--, injects some literary references to William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (see David McCallum's monologues delivery) and anticipates the mood of Ingmar Bergman's "Persona"--see the close-ups combined with quick cuts of both actresses inside the mansion. The camera works of Conrad L. Hall and William A. Fraker are superb and innovative: see how they transform Nature to give it a dreamlike texture during the lake scene. The general art direction and the dramatic structure are so refined that make this TV movie almost like a feature film. I think this is a work of art for 1964's standards. For the anecdote, the rip through main title by Wayne Fitzgerald as well as Dominic Frontiere's original score was re-used in 1967 for Quinn Martin's "The Invaders".