Early TV via Schlitz Playhouse has Gene Lockhart strongly punching across a no-frills tale of the fate of one of those rugged individualists, so beloved to writers like Ayn Rand (see: The Fountainhead).
As spooky music plays, I expected something out of the One Step Beyond vein, but instead we have businessman Lockhart refusing to leave a single room in his 30-room mansion, convinced he cannot open the door: his hand freezes when he tries to turn the knob. He has a mania, and despite his doctor's pleas he refuses to see a shrink.
On a rainy night, an itinerant family of fruit pickers seeks shelter in the mansion, and the doctor attends to their ill infant. Their cute daughter (wonderfully played by young Beverly Washburn) manages to befriend Lockhart, much against his mean and nasty attitude, and after an incident with a pistol (rather artificially injected into the scenario) that temporarily blinds him, the kid reads him to sleep from her story book on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
There's a wonderfully heart-warming ending with a moral lesson about stealing and admitting the truth that nicely rounds off this 1/2-hour. It's the sort of inspirational entertainment that went off the air with the end of shows like "Touched by an Angel" or "Little House on the Prairie", but still works viewed 70 years later.
As spooky music plays, I expected something out of the One Step Beyond vein, but instead we have businessman Lockhart refusing to leave a single room in his 30-room mansion, convinced he cannot open the door: his hand freezes when he tries to turn the knob. He has a mania, and despite his doctor's pleas he refuses to see a shrink.
On a rainy night, an itinerant family of fruit pickers seeks shelter in the mansion, and the doctor attends to their ill infant. Their cute daughter (wonderfully played by young Beverly Washburn) manages to befriend Lockhart, much against his mean and nasty attitude, and after an incident with a pistol (rather artificially injected into the scenario) that temporarily blinds him, the kid reads him to sleep from her story book on Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
There's a wonderfully heart-warming ending with a moral lesson about stealing and admitting the truth that nicely rounds off this 1/2-hour. It's the sort of inspirational entertainment that went off the air with the end of shows like "Touched by an Angel" or "Little House on the Prairie", but still works viewed 70 years later.