One Step Beyond (TV Series) The Visitor (1960) User Reviews

This Is Your Lucky Day

[wes-connors · 7/10 · 8 July 2010]

Summoned to their country home by alcoholic wife Joan Fontaine (as Ellen), silver-haired Warren Beatty (as Harry Grayson) doesn't believe it when she claims to have stopped drinking for good. Moreover, Ms. Fontaine, who has survived affairs and asylums, tells Mr. Beatty she doesn't him need anymore, either. "This is all a lot of female emotionalism," Beatty tells her, "It's probably your hormones or something." Some unspoken event shattered their marriage, but Beatty isn't ready to give up...

Essentially, this is the story of a failed marriage (of seventeen years) which - when the life of one of its members is threatened - slowly reveals its scar. And, while told in the often unbelievable "One Step Beyond" style, everything about the failed marriage is believable. Like the best of these dramatizations (this one by Larry Marcus), you have supernatural forces explainable by variable means. Add to that Fontaine looking for good TV scripts, and Beatty getting deservedly lucky. It equals a highlight for all.

******* The Visitor (5/10/60) Larry Marcus ~ Joan Fontaine, Warren Beatty, John Newland, Charles Webster

Second Chances

[AaronCapenBanner · 7/10 · 16 April 2015]

Warren Beatty & Joan Fontaine star as Harry and Ellen Grayson, an unhappily married couple who are having one last argument in their isolated country home on a snowy evening. Ellen is a recovering alcoholic, and Harry has given up on the marriage, but a car accident he is involved in on his departure knocks him unconscious, and somehow enables him to psychically send a younger version of himself to reconcile with Ellen, if it isn't already too late...Two fine performances by the leads in this sentimental second chance love story. Aged makeup on young(and mostly unknown) Beatty works well, and nice atmosphere is created.

"I'm not fighting. Lovers fight."

[classicsoncall · 7/10 · 11 February 2015]

Well you never know who'll turn up in these old programs from the Fifties, and I'd have to say that this episode probably features the two most successful One Step Beyond graduates ever. Warren Beatty and Joan Fontaine share top billing as a couple whose marriage is on the rocks and headed for the Big D. After Ellen Grayson (Fontaine) informs her husband Harry (Beatty) she wants a divorce, he leaves their mountain cabin in a snow storm and winds up crashing his car. Soon later Ms. Grayson is startled by another man knocking on her door seeking the use of a phone and some immediate respite from the bad weather.

If you've seen enough of these stories you might surmise it's Harry who shows up, but this time a younger version that Ellen recognizes, but he doesn't seem to be aware of who she is. Harry tells her about his troubled marriage, lack of a good job, and above all, his despair over his wife losing their baby at childbirth. As the old memories come flooding back to Ellen, she suddenly realizes that her husband really does love her and wanted the baby, even though their circumstances years earlier seemed otherwise.

As young Harry 'vanishes' from the room, the picture cuts back to present day Harry coming out of his accident induced daze and making his way back to the cabin. As usual, series host John Newland offers his conjecture regarding this 'accident in time', or perhaps Harry 'willing' his youthful self to appear at the cabin to confront his wife. Totally mind blowing to say the least, topped off by the 'It's a Boy' cigar band that she hands her husband, left behind by young Harry. You decide.

"I've stopped kidding myself about us"

[Goingbegging · 6/10 · 11 November 2021]

This is one of the less convincing psychic dramas in the series, drawn from "human record" (a useful weasel, to free them from the onus of proving that it's a true story). To compensate, however, we get an unexpected star performance from both Joan Fontaine and Warren Beatty as the married couple, however non-existent the chemistry between them, across such a wide age-and-culture gap.

The Fontaine character has become fed-up with herself as the alcoholic wife, forever lamenting the stillbirth of the child he'd declared he didn't want. ("This is your lucky day. The baby died." she'd remarked bitterly, coming out of the operating theatre.) Now she decides it's time for a New Me - divorced and teetotal - as she explains to him on a visit to their mountain cottage. He decides he might as well drive home, but crashes the car in a snowstorm, almost killing himself, with his head pressing on the horn, which blares continuously.

That sound is echoed by another car-crash close to the cottage, and a young man knocks on the door, asking to use the phone (which doesn't seem to be working). When he turns towards her, she faints on recognising a much-younger version of Beatty. As she recovers herself, he starts to tell her his life-story, including the hospital incident, in which he experienced a dramatic change of heart at the crucial moment, suddenly sensing the joy of fatherhood and a pang of regret for the dead infant.

We can't tell you the rest, but we never hear why he couldn't have told her at the time about his feelings in the hospital, which might have encouraged them to try again for a baby, and saved her from years of dreary alcoholism. (Also, the phone seems to be working again!)

Your host John Newland starts with a quite pointless theory about city folk wanting to escape to the mountains and vice-versa, and ends with a rather limp suggestion that the mature Beatty may have sent his younger self up to the cottage to prepare her for his own re-entry into her life.

A visit from the past?

[kapelusznik18 · 6/10 · 13 April 2015]

***SPOILERS*** Drying out in her rented country cabin after a near fatal binge of gin & vodka Ellen Grayson, Joan Fontaine, has decided to end her marriage to her long suffering husband in him putting up with her all these years Harry, Warren Baetty,and starting a new and rewarding life as either a brain surgeon or commodity broker. It's Harry who shows up to see if Ellen didn't fall off the wagon who gets the news of her dumping him that he seems to take with some pleasure in him knowing that he doesn't have to put up with her any more. Wishing Ellen good-by & good luck Harry takes off in a blinding snowstorm driving back home to the city where he's forced off the road by a gust of wind, some 50 MPH, and into a gully smashing his head into the steering wheel and ended up unconscious.

Back at the cabin Ellen gets a call from this tall dark & handsome stranger who's lost in storm who want to use her telephone to get help. Not at first knowing it as the two don't seem to make any eye contact with most of the lights out, due to a power failure, the stranger to Ellen's surprise is the spitting image of her now estranged husband Harry! Only that he looks at least 15 years, without a single gray hair on his head, younger! Chilling or better yet warming up by the fire pace the stranger, also played by Warren Beaty, goes into this long song & dance act about all the trouble he went through with his old lady who from what I can gather threw him out of the house because of his old fashion ideas. Like him mourning his new born child that was still born that his wife, not wanting a new mouth to feed, was glad to lose at childbirth! He even bought a number of cigars, at the hospital commissary, to celebrate the birth of his son to hand out to anyone he came in contact with; One of them Ellen Grayson!

****SPOILERS**** Ellen is so moved by the stranger's story that she changes her mind in leaving her husband who by now is well on his way of freezing to death. It's the family doctor Mason, Charles Webster, who gets there just in time to rescue Harry from turning into a Popsicle and the two show up at Ellen's place just as soon as the stranger, like a puff of smoke, leaves leaving a wrapper of one of the cigars as evidence he was ever there! Now in realizing what a kind and sensitive, from hearing out the stranger's story, person Harry really is Ellen changes her mind in leaving him as well as, feeling she's now completely recovered from drinking booze, refusing any medications for her alcohol addiction that Dr. Mason provides to her!

What's confusing about all this and what the host of the episode John Newlan never explains is if the stranger is really a young Harry Grayson and did he, the older Grayson, suffer the trauma that the stranger told Ellen about! As for Ellen I couldn't quite figure out if the story that the stranger told her had something to do with her as well as Harry! Or if it didn't it was so heart wrenching and touching that it by itself turned her life as well as opinions about Harry, who up to then she had absolutely no use for, around for the better!