Although Roald Dahl is remembered primarily as a writer of children's novels, he made a sizeable splash within the sphere of adult fiction, penning a number of characteristically twisted morality tales for the older set that bore their way into popular consciousness. In the late 1970s and into the 80s, a number of these were memorably dramatised in the ITV anthology series Tales of The Unexpected, a collection of half-hour television dramas dedicated to the weird and the macabre. These came with the promise (advertised upfront in the series title) of an unpleasant surprise at the end, and were bookended by the classic, glaringly upbeat theme tune composed by Ron Grainer. The original series was comprised exclusively of dramatisations of Dahl's short stories (Dahl himself provided personal introductions through the earlier seasons), but as the show continued it took to pooling from a much broader selection of writers for inspiration, including Robert Bloch, Elizabeth Taylor and Stanley Ellin. All that mattered was that they shared Dahl's gleefully mean spirit and his penchant for the comically morbid. Kicking off affairs was "The Man From The South", which first aired on 24th March 1979, an adaptation of one of Dahl's most familiar short texts.
Published in 1948 under the alternate title of "Collector's Item", "Man From The South" (note the subtle difference given to the title of the ToTU adaptation) is a menacing tale of pride and bravado pushed to gruesome extremes. Set at a Jamaican tourist spot, it concerns an encounter between a mysterious South American man (his exact nationality is never specified) and a brash young US naval cadet, who boasts that his cigarette lighter never fails and is rapidly coerced into backing up this assertion. The South American man proposes that he will not get the lighter to work ten times in a row, offering to wager his car, a near-new Cadillac, as a prize if the cadet should succeed. Should the cadet fail, the man insists on an altogether more unusual trophy, but one that, in his words, the young man can absolutely afford to part with - the pinky finger on his left hand, which he will have the privilege of personally severing. The cadet initially balks at the proposal, as any rational person would, but is ultimately wheedled into the insanity, to the point that he not only agrees to go along with the bet but allows the man to physically fasten down his hand with the pinky outstretched so that he cannot pull it away if he loses. Now his prospects of keeping his body intact rest entirely on the reliability of the chintzy device he carries in his pocket. Ah well, it's only one little finger, right? At least he's not being asked to gamble his entire hand.
Something in the set-up of a person being artfully persuaded to lay their own body on the line to make a point of no genuine consequence has evidently captured the imagination of popular culture, for "Man From The South" is one of the most adapted and influential of all Dahl's stories. In addition to the Tales of The Unexpected dramatisation, it was also the basis of a 1960 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (starring Steve McQueen as the gambling cadet), then remade in 1985 for that series' 1980s upgrade. The Quentin Tarantino-helmed segment of the 1995 anthology film Four Rooms ("The Man From Hollywood") follows a group of characters attempting explicitly to recreate the scenario as represented in the aforementioned 1960s episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. A more implicit influence shows up in the Inside No. 9 episode "The Bill", which climaxes with its characters playing a game of "Stab Scotch" that I strongly suspect to have been inspired by the wager in Dahl's story. South Korean film-maker Chanwook Park put yet another finger-slicing game at the centre of his contribution to the 2004 horror anthology Three...Extremes ("Cut" - here, the chopper acknowledges that, thanks to advances in medical science, having one's finger severed isn't necessarily the irreversible penalty it once might have been, and makes the additional point of liquefying the forfeited digits in a blender). It was also parodied in the American Dad! episode "Stan's Night Out", in which the title character makes a similarly reckless bet over his ability to get a lawnmower started on the first try. I'm only surprised that The Simpsons have never done a Treehouse of Horror segment based around the premise, because when you've only got eight fingers to begin with, the stakes obviously go a whole lot higher.
In the installment of Tales of The Unexpected, the titular man is played by Puerto Rican actor Jose Ferrer, and the cadet (nameless in the story; Tommy in this telling) by Canadian actor Michael Ontkean, best known for playing Sheriff Harry S. Truman in the 1990 mystery series Twin Peaks. As in the original story, their macabre exchange is witnessed by two incredulous third parties - Rawlsden (Cyril Luckham), counterpart to the anonymous narrator of Dahl's story who was called upon to act as referee to the wager, and an English girl (Pamela Stephenson) who accompanies the cadet and said relatively little in the original telling (but when she did speak up was plainly the voice of reason). Here, she too is given a name (Cathy) and a somewhat more vocal presence throughout the narrative; not only does she denounce the bet as "ridiculous and stupid", but she makes repeated efforts to persuade Tommy to back out of it. Dahl notes in his introduction that the episode was filmed on location, in its actual setting of Jamaica; given that many editions of ToTU take place in largely interior settings and exude that musty, frugal, bottled feeling endemic to television anthologies of the era (a characteristic brutally skewered in another Inside No. 9 installment, "The Devil of Christmas"), "The Man From The South" boasts an unusually colourful, picturesque aesthetic that plays to its macabre merit. There's an unsettling contrast between the sun-soaked, travel brochure-ready scenery and the incongruous depravity slowly unveiling itself from underneath the parasols; it brings out those eerily familiar aspects of the story that have the air of being lifted from an authentic urban legend about the dangers awaiting unwary tourists in foreign lands they mistakenly assume to be their personal recreation rooms.
The script, written by Kevin Goldstein-Jackson, sticks closely to Dahl's story, with most modifications being implemented for the purposes of expanding the narrative to twenty minutes. There's an additional sequence in which Tommy gets to see the man's vehicle, which here happens to be a Jaguar and not a Cadillac (a change I would like to think was done for reasons other than enabling a cheap gag at the expense of the man's inconsistent pronunciation of the word "Jaguar"). The most interesting change occurs early on, when the man is making small talk with Luckham's character and drops that he's come to Jamaica entirely on his wife's insistence; in his words, he was "forced, as it were." In the Dahl story the man makes no mention of a wife, or why he's in Jamaica; this additional snippet of dialogue not only foreshadows the story's resolution, but makes its implications all the more explicit.
What is immediately suspicious about the man's proposal is that he has no obviously
worthwhile incentive for entering into the wager. Ostensibly, he's the
participant with more to lose than to gain. Worst case scenario, Tommy
succeeds and he's down a flash and expensive car. Best case scenario, he
keeps the car that's already his and gets to chop off one of Tommy's
fingers. So what's even in it for him? The sinister implication is that,
for the man, the pursuit and seduction of a prospective victim provides
incentive enough in itself. He's in this game because he's enjoying his
increasing mastery over the young cadet, goading him into one
compromising position after another. He carefully manipulates Tommy,
getting him to climb down from his initial assessment that this is a
"crazy bet" to agreeing that a little finger is something he can
absolutely afford to lose, and then has him willfully submitting to his physical restraint procedure involving nails and a ball of yarn. As the story climaxes, we do not doubt that he is fully committed to his end goal of depriving Tommy of his little finger. Yet
nobody in either the original story or the ToTU episode cares to
outright question the man's motivations. The closest we get in the
latter is a moment (not present in the original story) where Cathy warns
Tommy that not only is the man deadly serious about severing his finger
if he fails, he seems only too eager to do so. Rawlsden doesn't vocalise it, but is visibly just as repelled by the cartoon bouyancy with which the man asks a hotel maid (Angela Malcolm) to fetch a kitchen blade "that goes chop, chop". Ferrer plays the man as a devilishly broad caricature (as the narrative requires), but his performance absolutely gets under your skin.
In Tommy's case, we suspect that Cathy, repulsed though she is by the very prospect of the wager, is providing a good chunk of his own motivation for entering into this foolhardy arena. Naturally, he is not inclined to back down to the threats of an older foreigner who seems intent on undermining him at every turn when he's looking to do a little seduction of his own. We suspect that it's less the car per se Tommy is eyeing than the opportunity to impress a prospective girlfriend with a vehicle procured through a little guts; his posturing to the man is equal parts posturing to Cathy. But the risk he takes is absurdly immense. He tells Cathy that his little finger has never proven particularly useful to him, but it is a weak assertion, betraying as it does an unconscious inclination toward self-punishment for his own passivity; tellingly, he refers to the finger as "he", as if it were an entity separate to himself (which it is in danger of becoming). He might be correct in thinking that his little finger is something he could technically live without (although parting with it is still going to cause him a wad of pain and a heap of blood loss), which doesn't make it something he can afford to part with. Unlike a car, or any amount of money, his pinky is not an item he could ever reasonably hope to ever replace. The loss of a finger means living with a permanently mutilated body, an omnipresent reminder of the man's total and ever-lasting domination over him, the humiliation physical as much as emotional. Keeping in mind that the finger is also a phallic symbol, it amounts to an effective castration of the budding young cadet.
The latter half of the story takes place within the man's hotel room, where the bet gets underway, and this is where the dramatisation really comes into its own, in making a far bigger, more suspenseful meal of the gamble itself. As in Dahl's story, Rawlsden is tasked with calling out the pertinent number for each successful light Tommy makes, but unlike Dahl's story, which ploughs through the numbers in rapid succession, the ToTU episode is keen to stop and linger on the unbearable intervals in between each light, where it looks as if the outcome could swing either way. Michael Tuchner's direction centres on a barrage of queasy close-ups, cutting between the fumbling motions of Tommy's fingers, as they seem barely able to hold the lighter straight, much less work it, the undisguised flickers of disappointment on the man's face every time a flame materialises, and that terrible blade hovering directly above Tommy's outstretched finger. It seems only fitting that Tommy should express a vulnerability not afforded to the cadet of the original story as the action is underway - there is a moment where Cathy has had her fill of the tension and threatens to go her way, but Tommy pleads with her stay, unable to finish what he's started without her moral support. By now he clearly regrets his decision to play, but knows that he's ventured too far in, with no recourse remaining but to keep on going and hope for the best. His reliance on Cathy to see him through is yet another foreshadowing of the story's resolution, with its readjustment of the male-female power dynamic and sharp undercutting of the mindless bravado that's led him to his unenviable position.
The ToTU episode ends much like the original story, with a mysterious woman (Katy Jurado) entering the hotel room and intervening, getting the man to relinquish his knife and bringing an end to the bet just after Tommy has lit his eighth flame. We might even have mixed emotions about this outcome. Obviously we are relieved that the Tommy has been exempted from having to go through with the gruesome ordeal in full. On another level, we may consider it most unsporting of Dahl to call the whole thing off when Tommy was within reasonable reach of victory - certainly, our morbid curiosity itches to know if he could have succeeded without the unanticipated interruption. Perhaps there was equally a part of us that even wanted to see a little finger chopping, just to confirm once and for all if the man would really go through with his horrifying threat (though that particular desire might still be satisfied...). The woman informs the group that the man (who answers to the name of Carlos) is a serial gambler, with a psychotic obsession for getting people to wager their little fingers. According to the statistics she provides, he's played this particular game on at least 58 different occasions in his native country, and lost only 11 cars - that gives him an 81% success rate, which admittedly didn't bode well for Tommy getting to the end of his streak unmutilated. The authorities had recently caught wind of Carlos' unpalatable behaviours and were looking to commit him to a psychiatric hospital, hence why they decided to flee to Jamaica; if we remember the man's prior remark about being forced into his present whereabouts, it seems logical to conclude that she is the wife to whom he'd referred (also a reasonable assumption in Dahl's story, but there the nature of their relationship wasn't hinted quite so openly). She then explains that the deal was moot anyway, since the car belongs to herself and isn't Carlos' to wager - Carlos doesn't have anything to bet with, in fact, as she gained control of everything of his some time ago, although she admits that she had to do so the hard way. Rawlsden places the car keys on the table and she retrieves them - with the revelation, in the final shot, that she's missing both the pinky and the ring finger on her left hand. (She has done slightly better than her literary counterpart, who was also short of the middle finger.)
The closing image of the woman's remaining fingers triumphantly brandishing her trophy, in the form of those keys, along with the joint reveal of their gruelling cost to herself, confirms our worst suspicions while also flipping our assessment of the situation entirely on its head. It does not surprise us that the man would really have been malicious enough to sever the finger of anybody who could not fulfil the conditions of his wager (perhaps the greater ambiguity was always regarding whether or not he would have let a victor take his expensive car). But this confirmation of his macabre nature also serves to undermine the impression he had been building, all throughout the story, of an expert manipulator who was firmly in control. This woman has already beaten him at his own game, by adhering to his rules. She bears the irreversible scars of someone over whom he has, ostensibly, gained total mastery, and gained it on repeated occasions, and yet she is, by virtue of her multiple missing fingers, a survivor. She has recovered from her every wound and summoned the will to face the man again, her mutilated digits symbols not of her erstwhile losing status, but of her incredible resilience and endurance. It is arguable that the man and woman are equally matched in the toxicity of their respective gambling addictions, but she is clearly the stronger of the two, and has gambled with the seeming purpose of disarming her opponent, by taking away anything he could potentially gamble with (while Cathy, by contrast, remains an overall more passive character, it is a nice touch that she is shown unfastening Tommy's hand at the end, putting the means of redemption in the hands of both female characters). Despite the squeamish horrors of the final reveal, she carries herself with a muted dignity that cuts through the empty posturing on Carlos and Tommy's respective ends. It is, of course, of great interest that she and the man, in spite of their antagonistic dealings, are implied to be marital/romantic partners, with the insinuation that their ghoulish ritual has represented an unconventional means of negotiating the dynamics of their union, although the point Dahl is making is open to interpretation. Is it a wry comment on the compromises that any relationship requires, or a more serious statement on the arduousness of overcoming the traumas inflicted by an abusive relationship? Either way, there can be little question that she's earned herself a Jaguar.
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