The Masks’ Director Made Twilight Zone History In More Ways Than One
In the fifth season episode of “The Twilight Zone,” called “The Masks” (March 20, 1964), an elderly millionaire named Jason Foster (Robert Keith) has gathered his daughter, her husband, and their two adult children for a Mardi Gras gathering. Jason, attended by his doctor (Willis Bouchey), is dying. He expects he’ll be dead by morning. Jason also hates his daughter and her family. He sees Emily (Virginia Gregg) as spineless, her husband Wilfred (Milton Seltzer) as greedy, her son Wilfred, Jr. (Alan Sues) as dumb and oafish, and her daughter Paula (Brooke Hayward) as vain and shallow.
At dinner, the family members all feign politeness, but the audience trusts Jason when he says they are all terrible people who are only interested in inheriting his fortune. After dinner, Jason calls the quartet into the drawing room for a Mardi Gras game. The patriarch has commissioned five expressive, full-face masks that he and his family are to wear. He jokes that the expressions on the masks represent the opposite of their intended wearers’ personalities, but are in fact perfectly in keeping with his opinions of them: Emily wears the Coward, Wildred the Miser, Wilfred Jr. the Brute, and Paula the Narcissist. Jason wears a skull face. He declares that if they don’t leave their masks on until midnight, they won’t inherit a penny.
What follows is a parlor drama where pieces of the characters’ dark personalities are revealed. No one is as decent as they purport to be.
They leave the masks on until midnight. When they remove the masks … well, you’ll have to watch the episode to see Rod Serling’s twist ending.
“The Masks” was directed by celebrated actress Ida Lupino. A revolutionary piece of trivia: Lupino was the only woman to direct an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
