Colgate Theatre: The Fountain of Youth (1958)
Season 1, Episode 5
9/10
The Fountain of Youth was a fascinating "What If?" concerning an Orson Welles television anthology series
26 August 2009
Just watched this Orson Welles rarity on YouTube. It was a pilot for a proposed anthology series hosted by Welles in which he narrates with still pictures of the leading characters of a particular episode being displayed before the story proper begins. In this one called "The Fountain of Youth", Scientist Humphrey Baxter (Dan Tobin) falls for a Broadway showgirl named Carolyn Coates (Joi Lansing) but after three years away in Vienna, she takes to someone closer to her own age, a tennis player named Alan Brody (Rick Jason). Not very happy with this turn of events but patient, Humphrey tells the engaged couple of a youth potion that only one of them can take...Quite compelling the way certain parts of the narrative take turns making one wonder how things turn out. I especially loved the way Carolyn looks at the mirror and sees various drawings of how ugly she dreads looking. Certainly could have been as unique a series as Rod Serling's "The Twilight Zone" (a show which almost got Welles to host) and the fact that Welles had plugged the following week's "episode" as "Green Thoughts" makes one think of what we could have gotten had this pilot become a series...
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