The Brazen Bell (1962) User Reviews (6)

With some help from Oscar

[bkoganbing · 8/10 · 12 February 2020]

George C. Scott guest stars in this dynamic Virginian episode. In it Scott essays a most complex role of a new school teacher come to Medicine Bow and he has a hostage crisis to deal with.

Two escaped prisoners, Royal Dano and John Davis Chandler take the kids hostage in the school house, among them Roberta Shore.

Oscar Wilde plays a part in this episode. You'll have to watch to see what his role is.

Scott does some reverse role playing here at first, but with a little help from Wilde, bit by bit we see the Scott we're used to.

A must for fans of George C. Scott.

Utterly memorable

[VetteRanger · 9/10 · 14 January 2023]

Great casting again, this time bringing in George C Scott and Royal Dano ... great name that. LOL

At this point, Royal Dano was probably a better-known star than George C Scott, whose star really began to rise several years later. Scott, however, was always a talented actor who could turn any role into something unforgettable.

He does so here, as a schoolteacher whose classroom is taken over by escaped convicts who hold the children hostage against means to continue their escape and reach Canada.

Scott and Dano play off of each other, one desperate and one fearful, and it's an episode which always enters my mind when I think of The Virginian.

Great acting

[deswind-15062 · 10/10 · 27 January 2022]

This episode has great acting including the great actor Goerge C. Scott. It is entertaining but also informative. It was at a time when prisons had few humane conditions. Some of these problems persist today. Is it a perfect episode? Of course not. But consider the low status of television episodes today. These 90 minute long episodes every week deserve a lot of praise. Watch it and enjoy/learn from it.

George C Scott and Royal Dano makes this episode

[cpolster · 10/10 · 13 August 2022]

The performance of George C Scott in this episode as a school teacher makes this a watch again episode. Two escape convicts from prison, played by Royal Dano and John Davis Chandler take over the school to get supplies for their plan to go to Canada by holding the children hostage.

The literature recitation between Scott and Dano was interesting. I enjoyed seeing Scott for his speech and movements, it reminded me of his role in Patton. Scott and Dano's roles were top for this episode of a television show.

Starts Good, Becomes Absolutely Terrible

[samwa-27311 · 4/10 · 15 November 2020]

I have seen all episodes, through the first four seasons.

This one begins fine, but then, it begins to show extremely bad taste, even for 60s westerns.

The acting and script, for Scott's chateaxter, suddenly has many twists of unusual behavior and bizarre manners of delivery. Some facial expressions and reactions to tragedy, are impossible for the viewer to accept.

I could not believe it.

Then he waxes eloquenty, about a ridiculous passage, from an author, toward Royal Dano, again, impossible to accept.

The ending is absolutely one of the most violent, in any western.

It's scenes like that, that got the feds and parents, to get Westerns off the air.

Then after 75 minutes of building up the character of the School teacher, there is no conclusion about him whatsoever.

A bad episode.

Very lame and drawn out.

[qormi · 2/10 · 25 April 2023]

Despite starring George C. Scott, this episode was very disappointing. Perhaps Scott felt the same, because his name did not appear on the credits. Filled with wordy, overly long scenes, which was a weakness of this series in an attempt to stretch the weekly shows to 90 minutes. We even had Scott read an entire poem by Oscar Wilde, and it wasn't a short one. In one scene, a woman fleeing a hostage situation was shot in the back. We see her body on the ground, but... it's just an empty cloak, with no head, hands, or feet. Did the actress refuse to lie on the ground and there wasn't a stand in? Or did everyone go home and they staged it later? Quite odd. In light of today's unfortunate rash of school shootings, this was a textbook case of how not to deal with a school shooting situation, as the townspeople, although armed, chose to lie in wait for an hour instead of taking a shot at one of the two gunman who stood by an open window the entire time. Very cowardly, as in the recent Uvalde school shooting in Texas, the Parkland massacre in Florida, and the Columbine massacre in Colorado. In each case, the police huddled outside and did nothing until it was too late.