The Five Forty Eight

When Blake stepped out of the elevator, he saw her.


In the autumn of 1979, WNET in New York, one of the oldest and most successful public television stations in America, aired a trio of programs for its Great Performances series called 3 Cheever Stories. Three different directors and three different script-writers adapted the John Cheever stories "The Sorrows of Gin," "O Youth and Beauty," and "The Five-Forty-Eight." Despite their presentation on television, the three episodes are three films, shot on celluloid, conceived as stand-alone films, each one an hour in length. The stories were written in the 1950s, "a long-lost world," wrote Cheever in the preface of The Stories of John Cheever, "when the city of New York was filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat." The stories are dated, but in that sort of dating that never impedes the ongoing lives of their characters. They live and breathe, perhaps forever, through Cheever's prose. "The constants that I look for in this sometimes dated paraphernalia are a love of light and a determination to trace some moral chain of being."

Cheever was offered a chance to adapt the stories for television himself, but he declined. According to Ralph Tyler, in his New York Times notice of the programs, 'An attempt to mount some of his New Yorker magazine short stories on Broadway, under the title “Town House,” flopped in 1948. Each of his four novels has been optioned by Hollywood, including his 1977 best seller “Falconer,” but no film has yet appeared; the 1968 movie “The Swimmer,” based on one of his short stories, made no great box‐office splash despite scattered applause from the critics’ bleachers. Mr. Cheever, himself, has said: “It's my belief that no really first‐rate novel can be filmed. Literature goes to where the camera is not.”'(1) Cheever's objections aside, he wrote an original teleplay that was eventually produced as "The Shady Hill Kidnapping" in 1982 for WNET's American Playhouse.

The television adaptations, however, updated the three stories to the present - 1979 - which has had the strange effect, forty years later, of making them seem more dated than the stories themselves. Another problem is the films, though not quite feature-length, required some padding - additional material not in the stories. The best of the 3 Cheever Stories is The Five Forty Eight,(2) which was directed by James Ivory, scripted by Terrence McNally, and photographed by Andrzej Bartkowiak. The ambient aspect of film (which barely exists any more) that can ease the viewer into a sense of a character's life as it is lived, is used well by Ivory. For instance, Blake, an ad executive, spends some time in the film doing nothing but gazing through his office window at attractive women working in offices in the next building. One of them watches him watching her. At one point, Blake even mentions this to his wife when she calls to tell him that an old friend has had a heart attack, contributing to our sense of the creepy stage at which his marriage has arrived. This is Ivory's contribution - also that Blake has a stack of dirty magazines in his desk, which he keeps covered (a nice touch) with a copy of the Wall Street Journal.

Blake takes advantage of his secretary, Miss Dent, a damaged, emotionally needy young woman. Then, the very next day, he fires her, without explanation. Something to do with her history of eight months in a Catholic institution, but also because something that Blake meant so casually - having sex with her - is taken far too seriously by her. So, after trying to see him in his office - to no avail - she lays in wait for him with a pistol in her purse, rides with him on the train to Shady Hill, Cheever's beautifully imagined Westchester train stop where so many of his stories are set. They wait until the platform is deserted, then she takes him into the rough underbrush away from the station where no one will see, orders him at gunpoint onto his knees, then on his belly, and pushes his face in the mud with her foot. After waiting awhile for the gun to go off, but hearing nothing, Blake looks up and she has gone. "He got to his feet and picked up his hat from the ground where it had fallen [in the film, instead of his hat it's his briefcase] and walked home."

Cheever opens his story like a thriller - a man is being followed through the streets of Manhattan by a woman who may want to harm him. Ivory's film opens with the story's climax - a woman (Mary Beth Hurt) pointing a gun at a man (Laurence Luckinbill) and ordering him to lie down on the ground. But then the film reveals it was a nightmare that the man is having.(3) It puzzles me why the dream was used, since it suggests that Blake has such a guilty conscience for what he did to Miss Dent that his unconscious mind punishes him for it (which would be out of character) or that Blake can see the future.

But this film, on its own merits, is an overlooked gem. Laurence Luckinbill has the dubious swagger of a ladies man, his conceitedness, but he also shows us his fear of a scorned woman, his helplessness when the tables are turned on him and Miss Dent is in control. The look on his face on the platform, when he finds there's no way out, captures the pang of this beautiful Cheever sentence: "The last man looked at his watch, looked at the rain, and then walked off into it, and Blake saw him go as if they had some reason to say goodbye - not as we say goodbye to friends after a party but as we say goodbye when we are faced with an inexorable and unwanted parting of the spirit and the heart."

But the highest praise must go to Mary Beth Hurt, who gives Miss Dent a vital presence that Cheever, for all his art, only hints at. When Blake asks her if she might have a drink with him after work, we have a genuine sense of her loneliness when she boldly tells him, "I have some whiskey at my place." When Blake accompanies her to her apartment, we know from their first embrace how lost she is, and how a rotter like Blake is going to treat her. She suffers from her emotions because she doesn't know how to control them. Blake's world is one of façades, of polite inhumanity, and he is perfectly suited to it.

One is left wondering at the end of the film if Blake has learned anything from the lesson that Miss Dent has given him. She, however, has triumphed over an ultimately shallow egoist, and got the better of her own heart. "Oh, I ought to feel sorry for you," she tells him when they're alone in the coalyard. "Look at your poor face. But you don't know what I've been through. I'm afraid to go out in the daylight. I'm afraid the blue sky will fall down on me. I'm like poor Chicken-Licken. I only feel like myself when it begins to get dark. But still and all I'm better than you. I still have good dreams sometimes. I dream about picnics and heaven and tbe brotherhood of man, and about castles in the moonlight and a river with willow trees all along the edge of it and foreign cities, and after all I know more about love than you." Yes. She does.


(1) "How a Trio Of Cheever Stories Made It to TV" by Ralph Tyler, The New York Times, October 14, 1979.
(2) Cheever hyphenated the spelled-out numbers in the title. The film does not.
(3) Significantly, in Blake's dream we hear the gun go off just before he awakes.