One Step Beyond (TV Series) The Open Window (1959) User Reviews

An Artist Creates a Picture Without his Canvas

[tinman19602003 · 7/10 · 21 July 2006]

In "The Open Window" (ep. 1-29), a commercial artist (Higgins) sees a woman in the apartment opposite his window, and it looks like she is trying to kill herself. He rushes over to the apartment with the landlord in tow, only to discover the apartment is empty. Apologizing, he feels that he must have dreamed or imagined the experience.

Later he sees the same thing happen, but again there is no one there. This time the disgusted landlord is not amused. Finally, he talks to his friend, a doctor, and he explains that the man is just overworked and needs to rest. Back at home, the artist begins another canvas and while his model (Fletcher) is taking a break she calls his attention to the woman across the way, who looks like she is committing suicide. The distraught model rushes over and the landlord opens the door. From his window, the artist sees his model and the landlord as they turn off the gas and open the window. This time it was real! As usual, John Newland tells us that this story is based on true events and asks if precognition is something you too might have experienced. The transfer quality of this episode is very good, and the story is well done and suspenseful. Well worth a look.

Window into the future

[sol1218 · 6/10 · 5 July 2010]

(Some Spoilers) Maglazine artist Tony March, Michael Higgins, having a hard time scathing his top fashion model Jeannie, Louise Fletcher, takes a breather from his work and plops himself down on his easy chair by the window of his Greenwich Village flat. Half asleep Tony notices the person next door, Lori March, talking on the phone to what seems to be her boyfriend Harry who had just broken up with her.

From the conversation that the woman has with him Harry must be some dish since she's practically on her knees begging Harry to take her back and let, whatever they were, beyonds be bygones. With having the phone slammed in her face by Harry the woman then closes the window and turns on the gas stove in an attempt to kill herself! Kill herself over Harry! Seeing a suicide in progress Tony runs down to he hotel where the woman is staying in order to save her life! The hotel manager, Charles Steele together with Tony open the woman's door and find the room empty with no clue to what Tony was talking about!

As Tony starts to doubt his own eyes he seeks help from his friend Doctor Leon, James Seay, and his wife Ella, Elizabeth York, who tell him that he's been working too hard and that may well have caused his hallucination of seeing the woman next door trying to kill herself! It's some time later when Jeannie shows up to be sketched she sees what Tony had seem before which no one believed him in seeing! The same woman closing the window and turning on the gas in order kill herself over Harry!

**SPOILER** With two people seeing the same event not one Jeannie, Tony by now is too confused to know the difference between fantasy and reality, rushes down to the hotel manager who unlocks the woman's door and saves her just in time before the gas does her in.

It seemed that Tony in his over-hyped and overworked brain had somehow been able to see into the future because of it. With no one, not even himself, believing what he saw It took Jeannie who just happened to show up at his studio flat when that tragic event was about to happen that in fact prevented it from happening!

Save The Woman

[AaronCapenBanner · 7/10 · 14 April 2015]

Michael Higgins stars as magazine artist Anthony March, who is sketching a model(played by future Academy Award-winning Actress Louise Fletcher) who happens to overhear a woman from a nearby apartment upset at her boyfriend breaking up with her, and is then alarmed to see her attempt suicide by gassing herself! However, he is even more confused when it turns out that there is no such woman in that hotel room....but there soon will be, and that model will be his eyewitness. Intriguing story with the man and the viewer in a way sharing the same experience. Was filmed before as an episode in the never broad-casted series "The Veil", hosted by Boris Karloff.

One Flew East, One Flew West, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

[wes-connors · 6/10 · 14 March 2010]

Greenwich Village magazine illustrator Michael Higgins (as Anthony March) can't seem to capture pretty model Louise Fletcher (as Jeannie) on his canvas. "For $25 an hour, you're not going to get Audrey Hepburn, you know," Ms. Fletcher (the future "Best Actress" winner) declares. Neither would they get Grace Kelly. Mr. Higgins is further troubled when he sees future soap opera star Lori March committing suicide through "The Open Window" of his apartment.

But, when Higgins goes to investigate, there is no sign of the dead woman! The summer setting and situation are clearly swiped from "Rear Window" (1954). Mainly, it's the Alfred Hitchcock film's "Miss Lonelyhearts" subplot, done in a "Twilight Zone" style. But, it's nicely performed by the cast and crew, with Higgins especially excellent, in the lead; and, it couldn't have been easy to come up with non-derivative ideas for these TV dramas every week.

****** The Open Window (11/3/59) John Newland ~ Michael Higgins, Louise Fletcher, Lori March, Charles Seel

"How did he know? How did he know?"

[classicsoncall · 6/10 · 1 February 2015]

Bookending the story, series host John Newland offers complementary theories of 'psychic lightning' and theories of time to try and explain what the viewer has seen. Specifically, he mentions that illustrator Anthony March (Michael Higgins) may have experienced something akin to a phonograph needle replaying a selected groove on a vinyl record over and over again as an explanation for March's recurring vision of a woman about to commit suicide. An interesting theory, as many instances of premonitions and precognition have preceded documented events after someone had a 'feeling' about them.

Part of the fun in catching these old programs, besides their entertainment value, is seeing who shows up in them. In this episode we have Louise Fletcher early in her career when she was popping up in a whole slew of TV shows of the era. Keeping in mind that this was 1959, a time I believe when the minimum wage might have been around a dollar an hour, I thought it quite extraordinary that her modeling gig was earning twenty five bucks an hour! I guess there's no limit to that number today for a top model, but hearing it mentioned in the show seemed quite unusual.

Anyway, if true, this is another one of those unexplainable occurrences that "One Step Beyond" featured weekly that one is left to ponder and decide for one's self if it's believable or not. Makes you wonder.

Living in each other's pockets

[Goingbegging · 8/10 · 12 October 2021]

John Newland often talks about premonitions in the form of radio-waves returning to visit the mind. This time he changes the record - and talks about a record. With the needle jumping into the future. Not such an apt analogy, but different anyway. As is his naming of the real-life person who is supposed to have taken this week's 'step beyond', a famous magazine illustrator called Anthony March.

This evening, March is doing his moody creative prima donna, to the irritation of Jeannie, the model-girl he is sketching, whom you won't recognise as Louise Fletcher, the future Nurse Ratched of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', noted for the huge impact she was able to make without conventional glamour. Even here, fifteen years younger, glamour isn't really it. More like character, personality and power, compelling intrigue and admiration.

As she leaves, he vaguely notices the view through the opposite window (almost touching distance in Greenwich Village, and well within earshot), where the old hotelier is letting a room to an unaccompanied woman. Then March nods off...

The next thing he knows, the woman is on the phone, pleading desperately with her lover not to abandon her, or at least not to ring off, which he promptly does. And March can see exactly what she is doing, closing the window, jamming a towel under the door, and switching on the gas. Yet when he races round to the hotel, and persuades the old man to open her door, the room is empty.

March confides his situation to a sympathetic doctor neighbour, who tells him he was probably drifting in and out of a dream (using the word sub-conscious correctly, not as deep as the unconscious). Reassured, he goes back to sketching Jeannie, but suddenly the woman across the way is on the phone again, speaking the identical words, and then making the same moves to gas herself.

This time it's Jeannie who races around to the hotel, and the sceptical manager reluctantly opens up again - to find a room full of gas, and a guest who would have died if they hadn't immediately sent for an ambulance. "How did he know?" says the old man wonderingly, looking across into March's flat. "How did he know?"