Aired on 23 October 1959, as the fourth episode of the first season of the now-cult TV series The Twilight Zone – written and presented by Rod Serling – it marks Mitchell Leisen’s return to the theme of cinema for the first time since Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Whatever happened to Barbie Jane? She’s a former movie star of Norma Desmond calibre, both in past grandeur and present delusion, who has shut herself away in a room, endlessly re-running her old films on 16mm. Played by Ida Lupino, Barbie Jane is coaxed into considering a new role and meeting with a former co-star – events that accelerate her psychological collapse and the episode’s drift into the “twilight zone” where logic dissolves and the fantastical takes hold. Leisen perceives cruelty and fickleness as inherent to the film world, especially Hollywood, and he extends that cynicism to his own image when a former star is shown as a frail old man running a chain of supermarkets in suburban Chicago. The actor chosen for the role, Jerome Cowan, bears a resemblance to Leisen himself. The episode suggests that the idea of being immortalised in or by the movies is, at its core, something morbid.

Ehsan Khoshbakht