Vincent Price stars as Roger, a condemned man handcuffed to an officer as he is taken toward the prison where he is to die. After a train wreck he escapes, and he later finds his way to Mexico City, where he tries to earn money by selling poems. Returning to Los Angeles, he goes to the house in Beverly Glen where his wife Mary lived, and he confronts the people who now live there. The episode is the second part of James Poe's Present Tense, presented on the Escape series, with the original air date of January 31, 1950. The scene plays out in the narrator's own unsettled, dreamlike voice, which moves between memory, fear and the question of what he is truly guilty of.
Characters: Roger, Mary, Fred Snead, Lucita, Pollen
The transcript of “096- Present Tense -2”, an episode of Escape first broadcast January 31, 1950. Press a time to play from that line (a 60-second preview; Potato Plus plays it all). Escape plays Escape free, live around the clock. Search inside this transcript.
Transcript
Tired of the everyday routine, ever dream of a life of romantic adventure, want to get away from it all? We offer you escape! Escape, designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half hour of high adventure.
Tonight, we escape into the mind of a man who has been sentenced to die. A man who attempts to refuse the bitter fate society has imposed upon him. As James Poe tells it in his seething tale of violent death, present tense, starring Vincent Price.
Through the dim pain the cold dark land wields away, and the hills beyond below the stars of black and sharp, dead hills, dark sky.
Cold steel below my feet, cold as the face of the officer at my side, cold as the cuffs which link my arm to his, which join us on this journey to the prison, where I die.
Want a cigarette? No. Come on, take one. No, I don't use them. Oh. Has this happened to you before? What? Being handcuffed to a murderer. Has it happened to you before? Sure, plenty time. To an axe murderer?
Yeah, there's nothing special, brother. That's a guy's axe there. Well, I've lots of them. I could have escaped after it happened, but I didn't. Now it's too late. Late. Late ever too late. Never too late.
Too late. Escape. Escape. If the train were to be wrecked, if the detective were to be killed, late, late, the sweet escape, the light escape, the crash escape. The darkness, where am I? The cars must have gone down the kully, no lights and those people in pain.
This thing fastened to my wrist, went halfway through the glass of the door. Keep back, keep back from his blood. I don't seem to be hurt. No broken bones. The snake. Now the key in his pocket, his bloody pocket, and the cups are off.
…
Sweet softness with summer night coming. Soon the star starts lovely, heavenly. By the authority vested in me by the state of California.
I pronounce this man dead. Escape is produced and directed by William N. Robeson. Tonight we have presented Present Tense by James Poe, starring Vincent Price as Roger. In the cast were Charles McGraw's Fred Snead, Joan Banks' Mary, Harry Bartel is the doctor, and Ben Wright as pollen.
Also heard were Tom Tully, William Lally, Jeff Corey and Paul Freeze. Special music was arranged and conducted by Dale Castillo. Next week! You are alone at the controls of an experimental rocket aircraft. to be hurled forty miles out from the earth's surface into the limitless boundaries of space, into a nothingness from which there may be no escape.
Next week we escape with Graham Doar's imaginative and widely discussed story of a rocket pilot who receives the strangest and most terrible warning in the history of man, the outer limit. Bye then until this same time next week, when once again we offer you...
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