Inside the apartment is a strange collection of characters. Burnett introduces the scene with a close-up of a man with a bandaged head, lying on the floor. Gene knocks, enters, and asks what has happened. A wide shot reveals four other people: a slender, flashily dressed man playing with a deck of cards and consulting a hand mirror; a sullen young woman and her little daughter; and a teen-aged boy picking his toes. According to Burnett’s screenplay (published in Klotman 1991), the man on the floor is named James and the woman is named Dolores, although we never hear these names. We eventually learn that they’re the nephew and niece of Silbo, the fellow playing cards. The boy’s exact identity is unclear, but he seems to be part of the dysfunctional family. He explains to Gene that James was hurt when “Adolph and Boulevard jumped on him.” Just then Stan arrives, winded from the long climb up the stairs. “What’s happenin’ ol’ dude?” the boy shouts in welcome. Silbo unsuccessfully tries to get the morose Dolores to join him in a card game. Gene tells Silbo, “All I got is ten dollars.” James, groggy from the head wound, complains of the noise and tries to go back to sleep. Burnett waits until this point to slowly zoom back and reveal that sitting on the floor next to James is an automobile engine atop a bunch of newspapers.
A large close-up shows Dolores, chin in her hand, quietly asking herself, “How did I ever get married to such a damn silly-ass family as this?” Before the zany situation can develop further, however, Burnett takes us outside with Dolores’s daughter, who has gone to meet Angela in the truck. As in an earlier episode, we have a brief glimpse of childhood innocence apart from the adult world. The two girls sit together, chew gum, and play with the gum wrapper. “How come you don’t come to school?” Stan’s daughter asks. “I have been sick,” the other little girl says. “You gotten far behind,” says Stan’s daughter.
Back in the apartment Dolores, seated in a chair and wearing a short skirt, rubs lotion on her ample, attractive legs. The wounded James leers from his position on the floor and tries to make a pass, which results in bickering and then an angry quarrel between the two. During this, Gene confers with Stan and announces to Silbo, “All I got is fifteen dollars.” He can barely be heard over the exchange of insults between James and Dolores, which escalates until James yells, “You just an all-day sucker, bitch,” at which point Dolores gets up and kicks him (like most of the sequence, this is framed in a close-up—we see Dolores’s face, but not where the kick lands). James cries out, Stan rushes to him, and Gene holds Dolores back. “Hey, Silbo,” Stan says. “Take care of your nephew here, man! . . . He’s bleeding!” In response, Silbo picks up his hand mirror and studies himself. “I’ve got more important things to do,” he says. “My hair’s falling out.” Then he half rises, disgusted with his niece and nephew, and accepts Gene’s offer of $15 for the motor.
The remainder of the episode concerns Stan and Gene’s grueling, reverse-Sisyphus attempt to get the engine down to the street and load it onto the pickup. Burnett devotes nine shots to the journey, negotiating the tricky space of a long stairway, creating a downward spiraling movement, and generating a fair amount of suspense. (The sequence was shot on two different stairways, making the trip down look especially complicated.) Given the world of this film, we fear disaster—and not the comic disaster of Stan and Ollie moving a piano. Burnett begins with a close, handheld view as the two men struggle to get the engine out of the building. They move through the apartment door, out a hall entrance to a stairway, and then start down. Good Samaritan Stan is predictably at the heavy end, moving backward along the rickety steps. They reach a landing, turn slightly, and encounter another flight of steps. Slowly they continue down, pause, turn, and face a third set of steps. Stan, wearing work gloves, is beginning to wince from the effort. “One more,” Gene says as they reach the bottom. They put the engine down for a moment’s rest, then pick it up and struggle toward the truck. Arriving, they heave the load up onto the flatbed, which lacks a gate, and Gene, who has no gloves, cries out because his finger is caught. He extracts the finger from the engine and winces, “Just leave it there. It’ll stay there.” Stan disagrees, and they shove the engine forward a bit. Still nursing his finger, Gene insists that they’ve done enough—no more pushing.
On the sound track there are ambient sounds of a passing airplane and kids at play. A low, street-level shot shows the two men walking up the hillside toward the doors of the truck. Dolores’s daughter gets out, and the two men get in, Gene taking the driver’s seat. He starts the truck, but when he puts it in gear it lurches, causing the engine to tumble off the flatbed and crash into the street. (The engine nearly hit Burnett and his camera when it rolled toward him as he lay on the ground for the street-level shot.) The truck stops and the two men get out, silently surveying the wreckage. Without speaking, they climb back in and drive off, to the poignant piano music of Scott Joplin’s “Solace.” Burnett ends the episode with Angela looking sadly out the back window as the truck moves away. From her point of view, we see the engine lying dead in the street, receding into the distance.
The sexual problems between Stan and his wife reach a crisis sometime later, when they’re alone at home, embracing and slowly dancing. For this sequence shot, Burnett originally used Dinah Washington’s sensual, hauntingly romantic rendition of “Unforgettable,” but he was unable to secure the rights for distribution; instead we hear Washington’s hit 1960 recording of Clyde Otis’s “This Bitter Earth,” which creates a sensual mood tinged with lament, pain, and sorrow. (“What good is love that no one shares? . . . My life is like the dust that hides the glow of a rose.”) The music is mixed in a style that makes it seem nondiegetic, yet it collaborates with the expressivity of the actors and the choreography. Stan and his wife are framed in profile, half silhouetted against a lighted window; at left, atop a table, are a lamp and a pair of preserved baby shoes. The actors only slightly change their position, and the camera doesn’t move. Stan, shirtless and wearing loose pants that almost expose his buttocks, stands slightly apart from his wife; she looks lovingly at him, but he doesn’t return the look. They slowly turn to the music so that his bare back is to the camera; she runs her hand along his back, puts her head on his shoulder, and moves close. As they continue to turn, we see that his hands are held loosely and his expression is zombie-like. She strokes his chest and moves a hand behind his neck. They turn again, and she seems to reach down into the front of his pants. Then she embraces him with both arms, kissing his neck and cheek. When the song ends, she kisses his chest, grasping him tightly, subtly grinding against him, on the verge of tears. He pushes her gently away and exits, leaving her alone.
Stan’s wife moves to the window and strikes a somewhat melodramatic pose of grief that suits the inherent musicality of the scene. Turning, she sits on the windowsill, and we’re given one of the film’s most unusual narrative devices, a brief internal monologue that also has musical or lyrical qualities. The monologue deals openly with themes that until this point have been treated only indirectly, revealing the wife’s deep memories of the rural South, an impoverished world she and her husband had left behind for the sake of opportunity, only to find alienation and struggle: “Memories that don’t seem mine, like half eaten cake: rabbit skins stretched on the back-yard fences; my grandmother; mother dear, mot dear, mot dear, dragging her shadow across the porch.” (An insert shows the wife picking up the baby shoes on the table.) “Standing bare-headed under the sun. . . . Cleaning red catfish with white rum.” As she embraces the shoes and walks off, the plaintive sounds of Rachmaninoff’s “Piano Concerto Number 4” form a sound bridge into a montage of sheep being herded to slaughter.
When Stan returns from work on a subsequent day, tension is conveyed by a silent tableau around the dinner table. He once again slumps in his chair, and his wife looks dejected. Stan Jr. stretches his arms, rises, slams his chair against the table, and walks out, barely noticed by his father. As Angela tries to clear away the dishes, Stan breaks the silence by glancing at his wife and asking, “So, what’d you do today?” She