Ninety Years Without Slumbering

"**Ninety Years Without Slumbering**"
"Ninety Years Without Slumbering"
The Twilight Zone episode
Episode no.	Season 5; Episode 12
Directed by	Roger Kay
Teleplay by	Richard de Roy
Based on	"Tick of Time"; by Johnson Smith
Featured music	Bernard Herrmann (variations on "My Grandfather's Clock")
Production code	2615
Original air date	December 20, 1963
Guest appearances
	Ed Wynn: Sam Forstmann ; Carolyn Kearney: Marnie Kirk ; James T. Callahan: Doug Kirk ; William Sargent: Dr. Mel Avery ; Carol Byron: Carol Chase ; Dick Wilson: Mover #1 ; Chuck Hicks: Mover #2 ; John Pickard: Police Officer
Episode chronology
← Previous; "A Short Drink from a Certain Fountain"	Next →; "Ring-a-Ding Girl"
	The Twilight Zone (1959 TV series) (season 5)
	List of episodes

Last updated September 07, 2024

"Ninety Years Without Slumbering" is episode 132 of the American television anthology series The Twilight Zone . The title comes from the lyrics of the song "My Grandfather's Clock", which is sung or played throughout the episode as a recurring motif. As in the song, main character Sam Forstmann (played by Ed Wynn) believes his life is tied to his clock's ticking.

Opening narration

Each man measures his time; some with hope, some with joy, some with fear. But Sam Forstmann measures his allotted time by a grandfather's clock, a unique mechanism whose pendulum swings between life and death, a very special clock that keeps a special kind of time—in the Twilight Zone.

Plot

Sam Forstmann is an old man who spends all of his time working on his grandfather clock, upsetting his pregnant granddaughter and her husband, with whom he resides. They press him into speaking with a psychiatrist friend of theirs. Sam confides in the psychiatrist that his father gave him the clock on the day he was born, and that he will die if it stops ticking. The psychiatrist thinks this belief is merely a subconscious rationalization of Sam's obsession with the clock and advises him to sell it. In an effort to appease his family, Sam puts the clock up for sale. However, when a neighbor expresses interest in it, he offers to let her have it with payment indefinitely deferred and come by every two days to maintain it.

Two weeks after he sells the clock, the new owners go on vacation for the weekend, so Sam cannot wind the clock. Desperate, he tries breaking into the house, but a passing policeman is alerted by the sound of the window shattering and takes him back home. There he lies weakly in bed and resigns himself to death. The clock stops, and his "spirit" appears, informing him "It's time to go." He chooses to stop believing in the clock's power, declaring instead that he wants to live to see his great-grandchild grow up. He, therefore, continues to live (and the "spirit" vanishes).

The next morning, he tells his expectant granddaughter, "When that clock died, I was born again."

Closing narration

Clocks are made by men, God creates time. No man can prolong his allotted hours, he can only live them to the fullest—in this world or in the Twilight Zone.

Production notes

"Ninety Years Without Slumbering" was a drastic reworking of an original script by George Clayton Johnson, "Tick of Time." Most notably, in "Tick of Time" the main character did indeed die when the clock stopped. Johnson disapproved of the changes made to his story, especially Sam Forstmann's anticlimactic confrontation with his own ghost: "It makes the whole plot trivial. In order to get involved with Sam Forstmann's issues, you've got to believe in those issues. So if Sam himself suddenly stops believing in them, it's a cheat." ^[1] Accordingly, Johnson and was credited onscreen under a pseudonym.

Marc Scott Zicree, author of The Twilight Zone Companion, was similarly appalled by the "inept" rewriting of Tick of Time as 90 Years Without Slumbering, particularly the climax: "Imagine: Sam Forstmann has fanatically clung to his beliefs, however misguided, in the face of all logic to the contrary; he has proclaimed said beliefs to a psychiatrist, even resorted to breaking and entering to keep the clock ticking...and what does he do at the last possible moment? Blithely talk himself out of his most strongly-held conviction of seven-and-a-half decades!"^[2]

This episode was Bernard Herrmann's final score for the series.

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References

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
Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982 (second edition)

External links

"Ninety Years Without Slumbering" at IMDb

↑ Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982
↑ Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982

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[1] Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982

[2] Zicree, Marc Scott: The Twilight Zone Companion. Sillman-James Press, 1982

[1]

[2]

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"