Four O'Clock (The Twilight Zone)

"**Four O'Clock**"
"Four O'Clock"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 3; Episode 29
Directed by	Lamont Johnson
Teleplay by	Rod Serling
Based on	"Four O'Clock"; by Price Day
Featured music	Stock
Production code	4832
Original air date	April 6, 1962
Guest appearances
	Theodore Bikel: Oliver Crangle ; Moyna Macgill: Mrs. Williams ; Phyllis Love: Mrs. Lucas ; Linden Chiles: Luther Hall, FBI agent
Episode chronology
← Previous; "The Little People"	Next →; "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby"
	The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 3)
	List of episodes

Last updated October 09, 2024

"Four O'Clock" is episode 94 (season 3, number 29) of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone .

Opening narration

That's Oliver Crangle, a dealer in petulance and poison. He's rather arbitrarily chosen four o'clock as his personal Götterdämmerung, and we are about to watch the metamorphosis of a twisted fanatic, poisoned by the gangrene of prejudice, to the status of an avenging angel, upright and omniscient, dedicated and fearsome. Whatever your clocks say, it's four o'clock, and wherever you are it happens to be - the Twilight Zone.

Plot

Oliver Crangle is a hate-ridden fanatic who lives in an apartment with his parrot, Pete. He maintains records of people he believes to be "evil" and has convinced himself that the so called "evil" people (communists, subversives, thieves, murderers) are engaged in a world wide conspiracy and have taken over Washington. He makes phone calls to them and their employers at all hours, writes letters regarding their actions, demands their prompt firing, and threatens to involve higher authorities if they do not comply. Unsatisfied with the results of his anonymous calls and letters, he searches for a more effective way to eliminate evil from the world; he settles on the idea of shrinking all evil people to two feet tall. Throughout the episode, Crangle's parrot Pete periodically calls out "nut," asking for a nut to eat, which Crangle gives him.

His landlady Mrs. Williams arrives, whom he berates and treats horribly to make her leave. Mrs. Lucas also comes to Crangle's apartment and pleads for Crangle to leave her husband, a doctor, alone. Crangle is convinced that because her husband was unable to save the life of a woman in the ER who died from her injuries, that he is a murderer and evil. Due to Crangle's letter writing to the hospital, her husband has started to feel extremely guilty for the woman's death, and Mrs. Lucas wants Crangle to stop. Crangle simply believes that those people are also evil. Mrs. Lucas leaves, realizing Crangle is insane.

Crangle calls a number of government agencies, and Agent Hall of the FBI is sent to investigate. Crangle tells him of his plan to shrink every evil person at 4:00 that afternoon through sheer force of will, mentioning his belief about a global conspiracy involving the evil people of the world. He also mentions that he has tried such feats before (trying to turn wheels into triangle shapes due to believing that evil uses public transportation to move). He believes that by shrinking all evil people to two feet tall, that they will be unable to carry on their everyday lives and eventually become extinct. Hall asks Crangle if he has ever had any psychiatric help and tells Crangle that they do not need his kind of help because they have the law. Hall says that both support and help in upholding the law are appreciated, but what Crangle is doing is instead interference. Crangle accuses him of being in on the conspiracy. As Hall leaves, Crangle screams at him that he too will be two feet tall in just 20 minutes. When 4:00 rolls around, Crangle is horrified to find that he himself has been shrunk to two feet tall. He struggles in vain to get up to his window sill, and one last time Pete calls out the word "nut", implying that he had been insulting Crangle by calling him a "nut" the entire time.

(In the radio adaptation starring Stan Freberg, the ending was altered to be more gruesome as Pete the parrot mistakes the now-shrunken Crangle for a "nut".)^[1]

Closing narration

At four o'clock, an evil man made his bed and lay in it, a pot called a kettle black, a stone-thrower broke the windows of his glass house. You look for this one under 'F' for fanatic and 'J' for justice in the Twilight Zone.

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References

↑ The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas Vol. 4, Blackstone Audio, Inc., ISBN 978-1482937022

Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)
DeVoe, Bill. (2008). Trivia from The Twilight Zone. Albany, GA: Bear Manor Media. ISBN 978-1-59393-136-0
Grams, Martin. (2008). The Twilight Zone: Unlocking the Door to a Television Classic. Churchville, MD: OTR Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9703310-9-0
The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas Vol. 4, Blackstone Audio, Inc., ISBN 978-1482937022

External links

"Four O'Clock" at IMDb

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Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
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[1] The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas Vol. 4, Blackstone Audio, Inc., ISBN 978-1482937022

[1]

v t e The Twilight Zone (1959) episodes
Season 1	"Where Is Everybody?" "One for the Angels" "Mr. Denton on Doomsday" "The Sixteen-Millimeter Shrine" "Walking Distance" "Escape Clause" "The Lonely" "Time Enough at Last" "Perchance to Dream" "Judgment Night" "And When the Sky Was Opened" "What You Need" "The Four of Us Are Dying" "Third from the Sun" "I Shot an Arrow into the Air" "The Hitch-Hiker" "The Fever" "The Last Flight" "The Purple Testament" "Elegy" "Mirror Image" "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" "A World of Difference" "Long Live Walter Jameson" "People Are Alike All Over" "Execution" "The Big Tall Wish" "A Nice Place to Visit" "Nightmare as a Child" "A Stop at Willoughby" "The Chaser" "A Passage for Trumpet" "Mr. Bevis" "The After Hours" "The Mighty Casey" "A World of His Own"
Season 2	"King Nine Will Not Return" "The Man in the Bottle" "Nervous Man in a Four Dollar Room" "A Thing About Machines" "The Howling Man" "Eye of the Beholder" "Nick of Time" "The Lateness of the Hour" "The Trouble with Templeton" "A Most Unusual Camera" "The Night of the Meek" "Dust" "Back There" "The Whole Truth" "The Invaders" "A Penny for Your Thoughts" "Twenty Two" "The Odyssey of Flight 33" "Mr. Dingle, the Strong" "Static" "The Prime Mover" "Long Distance Call" "A Hundred Yards Over the Rim" "The Rip Van Winkle Caper" "The Silence" "Shadow Play" "The Mind and the Matter" "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" "The Obsolete Man"
Season 3	"Two" "The Arrival" "The Shelter" "The Passersby" "A Game of Pool" "The Mirror" "The Grave" "It's a Good Life" "Deaths-Head Revisited" "The Midnight Sun" "Still Valley" "The Jungle" "Once Upon a Time" "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" "A Quality of Mercy" "Nothing in the Dark" "One More Pallbearer" "Dead Man's Shoes" "The Hunt" "Showdown with Rance McGrew" "Kick the Can" "A Piano in the House" "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" "To Serve Man" "The Fugitive" "Little Girl Lost" "Person or Persons Unknown" "The Little People" "Four O'Clock" "Hocus-Pocus and Frisby" "The Trade-Ins" "The Gift" "The Dummy" "Young Man's Fancy" "I Sing the Body Electric" "Cavender Is Coming" "The Changing of the Guard"
Season 4	"In His Image" "The Thirty-Fathom Grave" "Valley of the Shadow" "He's Alive" "Mute" "Death Ship" "Jess-Belle" "Miniature" "Printer's Devil" "No Time Like the Past" "The Parallel" "I Dream of Genie" "The New Exhibit" "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville" "The Incredible World of Horace Ford" "On Thursday We Leave for Home" "Passage on the Lady Anne" "The Bard"
Season 5	"In Praise of Pip" "Steel" "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" "A Kind of a Stopwatch" "The Last Night of a Jockey" "Living Doll" "The Old Man in the Cave" "Uncle Simon" "Probe 7, Over and Out" "The 7th Is Made Up of Phantoms" "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain" "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" "Ring-a-Ding Girl" "You Drive" "The Long Morrow" "The Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross" "Number 12 Looks Just Like You" "Black Leather Jackets" "Night Call" "From Agnes—With Love" "Spur of the Moment" "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" "Queen of the Nile" "What's in the Box" "The Masks" "I Am the Night—Color Me Black" "Sounds and Silences" "Caesar and Me" "The Jeopardy Room" "Stopover in a Quiet Town" "The Encounter" "Mr. Garrity and the Graves" "The Brain Center at Whipple's" "Come Wander with Me" "The Fear" "The Bewitchin' Pool"