Route 66 (TV Series) The Swan Bed (1960) User Reviews

A Memorable Entry Thanks Mainly To Bethune

[dougdoepke · 28 June 2017]

Certainly can't claim the hour amounts to a promo for glamorous New Orleans. Instead we get a gander at some really seamy parts of the dock area. In fact, the 'shed' that Carrie and her mom live in would be condemned in the proverbial Slobovia. It's really Bethune as the impoverished, shy Carrie who makes up the main thread in a multi-plotted screenplay. She's so emotionally needy, I wanted to slip into the screen and hug her. Not pretty in the conventional sense, she does project an appealing presence. Too bad the entry doesn't provide her with more airtime.

The plot's really a mix of Carrie and her embittered mom (Fields); old man Gant (Hull) and a smuggling gang; and Public Health Doctor Stafford (Hamilton) and a possible bird flu epidemic. Any one of these threads could have fleshed out a good hour's drama. But I suspect as a new series, R66 wanted movie vets like Fields and Hull to add name recognition to the marquee. And that meant giving them enough dramatic spotlight to satisfy their standing. Anyway, that scene where a tentative Carrie goes to an upscale dress shop for something suitable for her date with Tod is a highlight. It's likely her first date and she's so poignantly self-conscious as she keeps asking the impeccable salesgirl for something less expensive. On the other hand, there's the raspy Fields with enough eye shadow to scare Karloff. Still, she does get to show her chops in a spotlighted scene near the end. Meanwhile, Buzz gets to slug a few guys, while Tod plays Carrie's protector.

All in all, between the location shots, our two road wanderers, and the appealing Bethune, I expect this third episode helped put the series on the TV map. That and Bethune certainly did for me, as I remember even now.

10/21/60: The Swan Bed

[schappe1 · 30 March 2015]

The boys are now in New Orleans and there's some early scenes of them touring their new surroundings. That's important because where they are has as much to do with the appeal of this show as what they do. But we have to have a plot and here we have two of them. They encounter Zina Bethune, another of the many teenage actresses that show up in these early episodes. She wants to experience life but is held back from her embittered, unhappy mother, (Betty Field). The boys, especially Todd, try to help her climb out of her shell. Next door to the hovel in which her penny pinching mother imprisons them is a dilapidated old showboat with a crew of one: grand old character actor Henry Hull, a drunken sot here. But befriends the lonely Zina. He also has a deal going with ruthless, (I kid you not) parrot smugglers who use the boat to store them. The problem is the parrots are carrying a disease potentially fatal to humans. No problem. Tod and Buz beat up the villains and convince Betty to let Zina have some money and freedom so she can live life in the big world.

Zina Bethune, (born 2/17/45 so she is 15 years old in this episode, flirting with Martin Milner, age 28 and George Maharis, age 31) like many actresses, started out a s dancer. Unlike most of those, she continued her career in dance while acting, even having her own dance company. She overcame some severe illnesses to do this: scoliosis, lymphedema and hip dysplasia. It gave her a life-long passion for helping disabled children. Her worthy life ended inappropriately five days before her 67th birthday in a grisly hit- and-run accident. But here she is at the beginning of it all.

Amazing Silliphant script

[lor_ · 5 September 2023]

Stirling Silliphant's amazing ability to include disparate poetic and more visceral elements in his complex screenplays is evident in this unusual story, as the 'vette convertible takes our heroes to New Orleans, where Maharis can work at the docks and Milner finds a job, with the aid of guest star Zina Bethune, doing menial work hauling fish for the tidy sum of $1 an hour!

Silliphant is unafraid to include outre element in his scripts, with a fascinating array this time. Central MacGuffin of the story is a potential outbreak of parrot fever (!), nipped in the bud by the health department's Murray Hamilton, who carefully uses Contact Tracing, that tried and true method of dealing with epidemics that was muffed by incompetence in the recent Covid-19 pandemic.

An old drunken seafarer, living in his decrepit old riverboat tied to the dock, is involved in lucrative parrot smuggling, the source of the problem. Zina is terrific portraying the vulnerable heroine, who is persecuted more than protected by her hardened mom, played memorably with just limited screen time by veteran Betty Field.

All of Betty's scenes are shot on stylized studio sets, contrasting with the atmospheric location color of New Orleans throughout the rest of the show. Her subplot develops the atmosphere of those Gothic horror movies involving aged leading ladies, that began a couple years later with "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?".

Adult themes and even outbursts of violence punctuate the episode, with the title revealed in a Field monologue as the bed she seems trapped in all these years, where Zina was conceived as a result of Betty's misguided liaison as a teenager with an unreliable man. Her speech about finally escaping her trapped life at episode's end reemphasizes the series' stress on seeking freedom, symbolized by the heroes in their Corvette always hitting the open road.

Her colorful speech dovetails neatly with a similar monologue voiced by Hull using the freedom of birds flying up into the sky and even the legend of the Phoenix, all inserted into Silliphant's fanciful story. There's plenty of adventure provided by Zina as a damsel in distress dealing with the gangster (Louis Zorich) running the parrot smuggling.

Fun is also provided by Maharis ogling on the docks via binoculars a sexy stripper sunbathing in her bikini (played by Elizabeth MacRae) who turns out to be a girl he once knew, and an unlikely romantic interest who catches parrot fever. Even her oddball role is carefully tied up at show's end, as the cast forms a strange procession, carrying her Striptease act backdrop set to be placed on a bonfire along with other materials exposed to the parrots' disease. And there's even a brief scene of kidnapped Zina and Milner trapped in the ship's hold with a scary bunch of agitated parrots, right out of Hitchcock's "The Birds" three years later!