A sculptor falls in "love" with a young Greek woman half his age and brings her and her supposed mother over to the U. S. so that he can create a statue with the girl as the model, and also so that he can shout at everyone until his innocent and guileless muse agrees to marry him.
Difficult to find anyone to root for in this one. The sculptor is obnoxious, moody, violent, drinks heavily, browbeats his associates--and yet he's a friend of Perry's so we're supposed to be in his corner. In fact, Perry and Della are all for this age-inappropriate romance! "Marry her and keep her behind locked doors" is pretty much Perry's advice; and when it appears that the model's "mother" may be pressuring her to date other suitors, there's a tendency to blame the young woman, and slander her as manipulative and heartless. Della laments how much the young vixen has "hurt" their buddy, the grizzled, drunken sculptor. Yuck.
I used the term "innocent" above, and that's a word you hear a lot in the episode as well. The sculptor uses it to describe the young model more than once; that's the main appeal she holds for him--rather than courting a woman closer to his own age and life experience, one that would be on more equal footing with him, he wants a sweet, young, innocent, naïve, unworldly, childlike, simpleminded--well, someone he can dominate, control, groom, and mold to his specifications, like the clay he works with. He even wants to separate her from her presumed mother and isolate her from other friends, so there won't be anyone to stand up for her and object to his treatment of her. (A quick word on that "mother": though several of the men in the story describe her as an awful, screeching "harridan", no behavior like that is ever shown to the viewer. She's a snob, yes, and a blackmailer, and I feared at one point that she might even be pimping out her young charge--but throughout it all she's rather softspoken and restrained in her criticism of the sculptor. It's odd that the writers were so keen to portray her as a frothing-at-the-mouth shrew from the perspective of other characters but included no scenes or dialogue for her that support it.)
The script itself is rather overcomplicated, involving a revolutionary wool-carding process and Greek tycoons and forged contracts and people who aren't who they claim to be, and I didn't find it particulary interesting; the meat here is the obsessed, possessive sculptor and his fixation on the model who never met someone she didn't like. I've noticed that several of the stories this season hinge on some kind of new invention or process; the '60s were a time of great technological advancement and it made for some handy plot points.
Eventually Perry scores yet another witness stand confession from the sculptor's equally soused-up friend, an opportunistic and ultimately murderous magazine writer played by John Anderson, who deserves the bulk of the acting accolades for the episode. His scene at the end in which he's giving testimony in a relaxed, nonchalant, possibly boozy fashion is fun to watch. He admits he tried to sabotage the sculptor's amorous intentions toward the model because he felt his pal just wasn't destined for happiness with a woman. One could hardly be blamed for wondering if the writer's affection for the sculptor wasn't a tad more than brotherly. And then finally the sculptor does indeed give up on his plan to marry his model, the only time in the entire episode I came close to liking him; he does it by handing her off to another man, as if she were something of his to give away, like a jar of olives, and though the model had earlier declared that she WAS in love with the sculptor, and willing to be his wife--maybe a bit of Stockholm Syndrome at work there--she goes off with the more age appropriate gentleman compliantly without much indication of how she feels about him. I never did understand the relationship between the model and the fake mother, and why the younger woman was so obedient to the elder. Just that kind of girl, I guess.
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