• Directed by John Korty
• Written by James M. Miller, based on the books by Zenna Henderson
• Starring
  • Kim Darby
  • William Shatner
  • Diane Varsi
  • Dan O’Herlihy
  • Laurie Walters
• Produced by Gerald I. Isenberg
• Executive produced by Francis Ford Coppola

Zenna Henderson wrote a series of short stories about “the People” from 1952 to 1975, most of which first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The People were an extraterrestrial race physically identical to humans who had escaped their dying planet, the Home, in huge questing colony ships. The ship that approached Earth around 1900 hit the atmosphere too fast and broke up; survivors in lifepods crashlanded, some in clumps, others singly. The short stories concern small groups of the People or single, bewildered children of survivors, trying to find out if there are any more like them and trying to live on Earth without arousing the suspicion or fear of the natives. Blessed with the standard panoply of psychic and telekinetic powers, plus a strong racial memory that allows each of them to remember the Home generations afterward, the people are gentle and loving and could easily have degenerated into hippyish “Age of Aquarius” malarkey in the hands of another writer. Henderson avoided that pitfall by concentrating her stories around very adolescent concerns (and I don’t mean that as a pejorative), usually concentrating on young People separated from their kind who know they are different and who are seeking to find others of their own kind. The setup may be standard issue scifi, but Henderson wrote with a quiet poetry and an insight into the human condition (and the People are very, very human) that turned even the most overworked of situations into a gem of storytelling.

Pilgrimage: The Book of the People was a 1961 collection of the first batch of “People” stories, with a connective framing device running between them (a second book, The People: No Different Flesh, was put together in like fashion in 1967). Framing device or no, each book is still a collection of self-contained short stories, and thus not really suitable for adaptation into a discrete feature film or TV-movie. But that’s what was attempted in 1972, to disappointing but not surprising results.

The TV-movie of The People is largely based on a single short story from the first collection, “Pottage,” with some characters and character names cobbled together from other stories. Forgive the spoilers if, as is likely, you haven’t read the story. “Pottage” is a story of a Group of the People (yes, those words are always capitalized) who had a bad experience with mob violence soon after they came to Earth. Not knowing if there were any other survivors, they hunkered their heads down and hid their gifts, becoming quite possibly the most repressed and miserable community in the world. It isn’t until a young outsider schoolteacher (teachers and classrooms often figure heavily in these stories, as Henderson herself was a career schoolteacher), who’s had contact with the People before, comes to town that she helps them to live again — first the children, then their parents.

“Hi, I’m the new teacher. I brought my own pickles.”

In other words, it’s kind of an anomalous People story, as normally a Group of them is cautious yet joyful, and free-spirited when away from the prying eyes of the world. To base a movie on this story and call it “The People” as if it represented the body of work as a whole (and even though they’re separate stories, they are indeed a single body of work) is like making a movie about a single excerpt from The Lord of the Rings and simply calling it “The Lord of the Rings” — something perhaps less representative of the whole than the “mines of Moria” chapters, but more so than the “Tom Bombadil” chapters.

Anyway. Our young teacher, Melodye Amerson (Kim Darby, best known as “Miri” from the classic Star Trek episode of the same name), escaping unspecified troubles and pressures in the big city, takes a job teaching in Bendo, an almost-ghost town so far off the beaten path that there isn’t even a paved road leading to it. She’s met at the bus stop by young woman Karen (Laurie Walters), and taken back to the house of her father, community leader Sol (Dan O’Herlihy). The men are all dour and stony-faced, as are the older women; the younger ones, like Karen, are always restrained and nervous, as if they don’t know whether they’ve given offense. And just so we don’t miss how colorless and circumscribed their lives are, everyone in Bendo dresses like the Amish by way of Little House on the Prairie.

Melodye governs a school of eight students, including “the Francher kid” (Chris Valentine, playing a character lifted from another story) and Bethie (Johanna Baer, a character from yet another story), who soon become two of her favorites. But as a whole, the schoolchildren are lifeless; they don’t sing, they don’t imagine, they don’t play games outside… they don’t even lift their feet when they walk, instead scuffling their shoes wherever they go. They just explain it as “their way,” noting that all the normal childish frivolity isn’t allowed.

“You know, since we’re both grups now…”

The two people Melodye meets who aren’t cut entirely from the same mold are:

• Valancy (Diane Varsi), who seems like some ethereal hippyish guru (she’s even wearing a white tunic when Melodye meets her), quiet but given to pronouncement delivered in a confident voice that says “inner peace” to some and “doped to the gills” to others. Yes, she’s transplanted from yet another story.
• Dr. Curtis (William Shatner), and Outsider doctor and part-time vet who comes through Bendo once in a while. Actually, he hangs around more than he has reason to, since the citizens of Bendo never seem to get sick; he’s trying to start some sort of study of the drinking water, wondering if there’s something in the environment to explain their uniform good health.

Melodye is quickly frustrated when her best “free style” teaching efforts are stymied, not by the parents but by the children themselves. But things start to crack when Francher confides in her that he’d like to “make music,” even though such things are forbidden. She gives him a harmonica she brought, and he takes to it instantly, playing and improvising tunes with perfect skill. When they think the teacher’s not around, the other children remark that Francher’s music helps them remember the Home, and their overheard description of it causes strange gears to turn in Melodye’s head.

The gears start turning faster when, during an argument with Francher over facts about her that he couldn’t possibly know, he suddenly points and lifts her in the air, leaving her there until old Sol comes along and un-lifts her back to Earth.

“Mister Glowfinger (wa waaah wah), pretty girl, beware of his hand of glow…”

Unfortunately, that’s the halfway mark and, as much as I hate harping on the differences between the original story and this adaptation, it spoils the structure for the rest. In the original, Melodye has alread met one of the People previously, so the comments about Home and Remembering and such ring a bell with her; she pushes to discover if these are, indeed, more of the People, until at last their powers are revealed. In this adaptation in which the existence of other Groups is never mentioned and Melodye comes into Bendo with no pre-existing knowledge of the People, there has to be an incident which brings her to understand, or at least suspect, the difference in the people of Bendo. So the lifting incident was inserted. But then, because the plot structure of the movie hews mechanically to that of “Pottage,” Melodye isn’t given an occasion to react to what she knows. There are no later scene with her and Sol, even though she boards at his house, because the writer (presumably) didn’t know what to do with those two characters after Sol had extended a glowing hand and brought Melodye to Earth.

That’s one of the main problems with the movie: The parts, cobbled together from various stories of the People, don’t mesh. The Francher character in the stories is a lost member of the People raised as an orphan in a small town where he’s considered a delinquent; his inclusion here necessitates the shearing of his entire character except for his love of music and his name — “the Francher kid” — which makes no sense if he’s not an orphan. Valancy in the stories is a powerful and kind Old One (a term of authority, not age) in a joyful and well-adjusted Group; how could she still be a force for understanding and compassion in the TV-movie if she’s been raised in the repressive society of Bendo? When Melodye’s scenes are written as analogues to the ones in the story, she’s an Outsider in the know who tries to lead the children gently to accept their own heritage; in all of the scenes original to the script, she’s a rationalist who can’t deal with what she sees in Bendo, which is mostly props dangling on invisible fishing lines. The pieces are not of a piece, and the stitched-together nature of the film is especially apparent if one is aware of the clarity and harmony of the original stories.

Wow. And I thought he had a bad hairpiece last week.

Perhaps a great actress could have made a coherent whole of the character of Melodye, but Kim Darby is simply too shallow an actress to deal with the part she’s given. I mentioned that she played Miri in the original Star Trek episode; I hadn’t checked out the cast list for The People before I watched it, but I recognized her, even with the blonde haystack hair and the loss of baby fat, from the way her mouth hangs open whenever she’s thinking or listening. I can’t tell if Diane Varsi is a competent actress from her performance as Valancy, as the script gives her nothing but vapid, watered-down hippy bliss-ninny platitudes to say. There are some competent actors on hand, of course — William Shatner and Dan O’Herlihy are consummate professionals — but neither are on hand enough to prove it. Shatner especially, despite his second-slot billing, is only around for a short couple of scenes at the start and a short couple of scenes at the end in which medical necessity forces the People to use their gifts to save one of their own.

And let’s be honest: The film looks terrible, and that’s not just because I watched a bootleg recorded from a faded print. Even with all but two of the characters wearing anachronistic costumes, there’s a scummy ’70s pall over everything the camera touches, common to many TV-movies of the era.

The People’s way of doing the hokey-pokey: You put nothing in. You put nothing out. You put nothing in. You shake nothing all about. It is forbidden.

Despite their power, Henderson’s stories are fast fading from influence in science fiction readership, and I lament that. But I can’t find any regret that this TV-movie has fared even worse, and hope that it stays that way.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 0
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 3
  • William Shatner, of course
  • Kim Darby (Melodye), as noted, played Miri in the classic Star Trek episode of the same name
  • Mark Bramhall (one of the uncredited Bendo residents) played “Gul Nador” in the TNG episode “Parallels,”and “Vulcan Elder” in the 2009 Star Trek movie