dougbrode

The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Story of G.I. Joe, A Walk in the Sun, Pork Chop Hill, Paths of Glory, Saving Private Ryan, From Here to Eternity, Flags of Our Fathers - make no mistake about it, The Outpost will be included alongside each of them whenever the great 'modern' (post-1900) war films are listed and discussed. Like the others, the new Rod Lurie movie balances the anti-war sensibility that any sane person shares with all of humanity with a rousing/worthy tribute to those individual people and 'bands of brothers' (Shakespeare, Henry V) who, as Tennyson said, do not have the option of 'wondering why' they are catapulted into in hell on earth, only that they must 'do or die.' An Alamo like depiction of an actual battle during our never ending war in Afghanistan, Lurie's film (based on a non-fiction book by Jake Tapper of CNN) does not so much document the fighting as it thrusts you into the epicenter of this human storm, the highest compliment any movie on any subject can ever be awarded. Though completed (and originally scheduled for release) in 1919 (long-delayed), we can only hope that The Outpost will be considered for Academy Award nominations for the 2021 Oscars. If it is, watch it sweep the Academy Awards - including a long overdue one for the under-appreciated director! DOUGLAS BRODE, Author: From Hell to Hollywood: An Encyclopedia of World War II Films (Volume I and II).

To call Rod Lurie's Straw Dogs a remake of the famed (infamous!) 1971 Sam Peckinpah controversial classic of that name is to do the new film a great injustice as well as to under-rate what has been accomplished here. Lurie's narrative follows the same basic storyline, originally presented in the pulp novel The Siege at Trencher's Farm, about an upscale couple besieged in their rural home by rednecks. All similarity ends there, particularly as to the anti-feminist bias in Peckinpah's movie, most of all as the much discussed rape scene is concerned. Without wanting to give too much away, Lurie has actually managed what might have seemed the impossible by transforming this into a pro-feminist fable, and the manner in which he has done so will be of interest to serious cinema buffs, even as the film will play beautifully to the mass audience that only wants to see an excellent action film, perfectly mounted. Lurie draws the best possible performances out of actors who have been appealing, if nothing more, before this. Here's a film that demands to be seen at the moment yet will also prove of long-lasting value. For anyone who has not noticed before, Lurie has replaced Oliver Stone as our most important creator of socially-conscious films.

Almost a year ago, I saw the first half of this movie at a special screening for students at a major university. They were held spellbound by the superb storytelling, the fascinating characters, and the manner in which writer-director Rod Lurie was able to include complex themes about journalism, sports, and the relationship of personal integrity to both. When this movie reached its mid-point, and the lights went up so that a discussion could commence, I could feel the sense of shock among those who had attended that they were not going to see how 'things turned out' and would have to wait a year. My guess? They will all be first in line to see the film this coming Friday when it opens nationally. I know I will be! here's about the highest compliment I can pay the film and its maker: On the one hand, this is very much a contemporary film, once that addresses all the issues that are most important to thinking people, those who still try to live a moral life in what appears to be an amoral world, in a way that touches very deep at what the best movies have always been all about. At the same time, it hones to the rules of classical cinema, the great tradition of narrative storytelling that most of today's movie makers don't appear to understand. In particular, Lurie's approach reminds me of Frank Capra: His work, like Capra's, is always political, whether it's that great indie film THE CONTENDER or the superb COMMANDER IN CHIEF on TV, the show that may well have paved the way in popular culture for Americans to openly embrace a female president some two years from now. More important, though, Lurie doesn't merely make politics the subject of many of his films and TV shows, which in and of itself does not necessarily qualify a film as truly 'political.' In the tradition of Capra, who made IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT as political (if by implication) as MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON, Rod Lurie is able to give a political sensibility to a seeming action film like THE LAST CASTLE or a human drama, with sports/journalism background, like THE CHAMP. This is about politics in the broadest and deepest sense - the politics of life itself. The plot seems simple enough: an aspiring journalist (Josh Hartnett) discovers a washed up boxer (Samuel L. Jackson) and decides to do them both a favor by resurrecting the champ and also making a Pulitzer level writer out of himself. But all is not as it seems. I would die before I'd give away the mid-movie twist, but I can tell you this: it's the best since THE CRYING GAME (though this one does NOT entail anyone's sexual identity!!!). This was the point where I had to stop watching. I can't wait to see what happens and will report back just as soon as I've seen the entire movie with a further commentary. IN the meantime, here's proof that the summer blockbusters are (thankfully) receding and that it's time for intelligent people to go back to the movies. If you're one of them (You know who you are!), this is the one to see.

Even as all TV westerns were beginning to look and sound pretty much the same in 1958, here was one that dared to be different - perhaps too different, as it lasted only one season on ABC, in a late evening spot that attracted little attention. The premise was simple enough: immediately following the Civil War, two yankees - a no-nonsense officer (Kent Taylor, formerly TV's Boston Blackie and still sporting the same abrupt mustache) and a large, mean-looking but easygoing sergeant (Peter Whitney) team up with an elegant looking southerner (Jan Merlin) and head west together, looking for a fresh start. Ordinarily, a series like this would begin with a pilot which set the stage for how the three came together in the first place, though that was not the case here. We were more or less thrown into the situation and asked to fend for ourselves. What most qualified the show as an original was that, other than the opening shot of the three riding over a hill together while a narrator spoke in voice-over about this being the beginning of the legend that would lead, half a century later and miles away, to the charge on San Juan Hill, most of the series took place not in easily identifiable western settings - prairies, mountains, towns, deserts, etc. - but in thick swamps, where the trio appeared to have bogged down. It wasn't until nearly halfway through the season that they ever even wandered into a town that looked at all like those seen in other western TV shows of the time. This lent ROUGH RIDERS a unique aura, for the trio almost seemed like that couple in Twilight Zone - you know, the one that kept trying to drive or travel by train out of a small town but always ended up right back where they had begun? Supposedly these three were headed west, but week after week, we'd seen them pass the same bog, ride under the same moss covered tree, as if they had somehow become disconnected from all the other similar western series then taking place. none of the scripts particularly stood out as strong - all the shows seemed variations on the same theme, with character - and the relationships of the three characters - taking precedence. Until cancellation time, of course. Not that this was a whole lot better than most oaters on the small screen at that time - but is sure was different!

I was maybe seven years old . . . we had one of the first TV sets on the block . . . and I heard a promo for a new series called TERRY AND THE PIRATES. There wasn't much for a kid to watch in 1952, so being a big fan of TREASURE ISLAND, I literally began doing a dance . . . until my father explained that these weren't "those kind of pirates . . . but modern ones . . . after WWII" . . . when the East was alive with turmoil. Sounded way too political for me, but I figured I'd give it a chance. Two minutes in, I was hooked. Big time. There was Terry, the typical American he-man hero, flying planes for a none too trustworthy Asian owner of a seedy airline. And Terry's sidekick Hot-Shot Charlie, who reminded me of Mickey Rooney. Or a road company version thereof. But what made the show click was the villainess . . . The Dragon Lady. It was love at first sight. Most of my buddies had a crush on Burma, the slightly soiled American blonde night club singer who resembled Marilyn Monroe. Or a road company version thereof. Not me. It was the evil, if irresistibly so, Dragon Lady from day one. She slithered about in silk skirts. One year later I'd discover the Catwoman in BATMAN comics, and Dragon Lady would have some real competition when it came to my fantasy dreams of gorgeous bad girls. For a brief while, the Dragon Lady ruled supreme. She'd be up to her nefarious crimes and always slip away at the last moment, to strike again. The following week, I'd be there waiting to watch. In the old days, TERRY ran Sunday afternoons in New York on the old Dumont Channel 5. A ginger ale company sponsored the show and gave away free TERRY comics with a sixpack. THE DRAGON LADY STRIKES BACK was my all time favorite. Does a copy still exist anywhere in the world? I'm sure I'm not the only collector who would love to get ahold of it again! Several years later, when LAWMAN premiered on ABC, the publicity said young star Peter Brown was the son of the woman who had played The Dragon Lady. I never believed them.

There are a few distinctions to this film, one being that it is the only movie ever to have been directed by Edmond O'Brien, the 1940s leading man who, a decade later, put on a great deal of weight and turned into a top character actor, even winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Once was enough as a director, though, for this crime thriller appears to be an imitation of the film noirs that O'Brien starred in (most notably, D.O.A.) earlier in his career, and that genre had all but disappeared from the screen by the early 1960s, only to be revived again toward the end of the century and at the beginning of the next, via neo-noir - which even included a disastrous remake of DOA with Dennis Quaid. But I digress . . . one of the other distinctions is the re-teaming of Jeffrey Hunter and David Janssen, who had worked together very well a year and a half earlier in a far better and more ambitious film, Hell to Eternity, a big scale WWII action flick. In between, Hunter had played the part of Jesus in King of Kings and, after that, he seemed desperate to do anything to try and distance himself from the image of purity he incarnated there. That included second rate 'programmers' (as studio B movies used to be called) in which, at the very least, he could remind audiences of the differing roles he was capable of playing. Hunter blew his last big chance for success, incidentally, when a few years later he listened to the lady in his life when she told him NOT to do Star Trek! Anyway, the third reason to take a look at this flick (don't go out of your way, mind you) is to catch Stella Stevens displaying her range of talents and reminding us that, in addition to a ditzy-glitzy blonde in comedy roles, she could do a femme fatale just fine. She may have third billing behind the boys, but this is her show all the way, and whenever she's on screen, sparks fly - as they do nowhere else in this minor movie.

One more version of the oft-filmed LAST OF THE MOHICANS, this one was shot in color and has what might be described as an 'interesting' cast. The big surprise, perhaps, is the Jon Hall does not play the scout Hawkeye, though at about the same time he attempted to make the changeover from sarong-star, most often opposite Dorothy Lamour, into a western hero, having played the legendary scout Kit Carson in a relatively big budget production from Edward Small. Instead, he's Duncan, the up-tight British officer who vies with Hawkeye during the French and Indian war. Michael O'Shea plays Hawkeye, and what's most intriguing about the film is that he does it as a character role, coming much closer to the "Natty Bumppo" of James Fenimore Cooper's books than is usually the case with Hollywood, where Hawkeye almost invariably is turned into a conventional hero figure, tall, dark and handsome. The pace is sometimes sluggish, though the film remains of interest in terms of the way in which it sometimes closely follows and at other moments departs from the source. Most offbeat of all is the casting of Buster Crabbe, usually a hero of outer space (Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers) or the old west (Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp in B movies) as the evil Magua, a Huron who betrays Alice and Cora Munro - certainly the biggest stretch of Crabbe's career.

A quarter century before the YOUNG RIDERS show premiered, this little known syndicated series employed the pony express as the background for its western dramas. Perhaps the reason that the show, unlike RIDERS, failed to succeed has to do with the fact that very little time was given over to the actual business of riding for the famed (if, historically speaking, short-lived) company. Apparently, the writers couldn't imagine how they might come up with a weekly drama about a young man riding along at a fast clip, and barely stopping at a way station for a new horse before heading on again. Instead, they took an approach that have proved highly successful for Dale Robertson in NBC's TALES OF WELLS FARGO, which likewise spent precious little time with the stagecoach drivers and instead focused on a detective working for the company, which allowed for far more gunplay and romance. In PONY EXPRESS, the unknown Bill Cord played a similar role, a hero named Tom Clyde who showed up at the express way stations to solve mysteries and the like. Coming toward the end of the western craze, and without a network slot, the show was not picked up by enough local stations to make the creation of a second season worthwhile. One interesting note: Dick Jones, who had played the sidekick to Jock Mahoney on RANGE RIDER and then headlined his own Gene Autry-produced kiddie western, BUFFALO BILL, JR., appeared in one episode as a kind of young sidekick to the hero. The only problem was that Jones had begun to visibly age, and no longer had that scrappy teenager look of his earlier work, even though he was cast in just such a part. At any rate, despite the fact that he rode off into the sunset alongside the hero at the episode's end, Jones didn't show up on PONY EXPRESS again.

In 1955, the golden age of live drama was quickly giving way to filmed series, mostly escapist fare, with the western dominating. Here was one of the few - and at best modestly successful - attempts to bridge the gap. Worthington Miner was a highly regarded producer who was known for the seriousness of his programs. It wasn't likely that he would do an ordinary western. And he didn't. Frontier was the second important anthology western series, with a continuing host ("The Old Ranger" on Death Valley Days) and a promise that each individual episode was at least inspired by something factual. Death Valley Days ran, of course, for more than a decade, with numerous other hosts taking over including, for a well-remembered two-year stint, Ronald Reagan. Frontier lasted only one season, and pretty much served as a foil to Death Valley Days, the latter stressing patriotic themes and upbeat endings. Not Frontier. Each week, the show opened and closed with a caravan of covered wagons heading off into the distance (Death Valley did, in fact, similarly begin with a single Boraxo wagon trudging along). Walter Coy (best remembered as John Wayne's doomed brother in the early sequences of The Searchers) would begin with, "This is the way it happened . . . movin' west" and then close with "That's the way it happened . . . movin' west." The shows were consistently downbeat. For instance: When they did the story of the Alamo, the focus was on the one deserter, not the heroes who died fighting. That episode was called "The Texians," and focused on the impact that the deserter has on a family when he stops at their isolated farm. In real life, the deserter's name was Rose, the family Zuber. No flag waving allowed on this series. Walter Coy not only narrated but showed up once in a while as star of individual episodes.

Am I the only person who considers Bonanza to be the WORST TV western ever? (Then again, please note that I consider DANCES WITH WOLVES to be the worst western movie ever!) Maybe I'm crazy and the rest of the world is right. Maybe I'm like John the Baptist, a voice crying out in the wilderness, trying to tell the truth when everyone else refuses to listen. All I know is that, while I may be the biggest TV western buff who ever lived, even as a kid I smelled a rat in Bonanaza. Though it was one of the first color westerns shown on a network, the color looked so washed out I'd rather it had been in black and white. It was supposed to be a kind of epic on a big scale, but most of the scenes could have been shot in my back yard, at least during the opening seasons. I thought that the comedy interplay between Hoss and Little Joe was embarrassing, not funny, and that Lorne Greene came off as pompous and pretentious rather than convincingly patriarchal. Adam I kind of liked, though he disappeared fast. Everything struck me as corny and sentimental. And as for it being in any way 'original,' the first episode I ever tried to watch (when it was still on Saturday evenings at 7:30, eastern time) was a total rip off of the great movie western High Noon. How much more I liked The Big Valley, in which there was a great deal of believable conflict between the brothers. Or better still High Chapparal, one of the most underrated of TV westerns, with on-location shooting in Old Tucson that really did give it an authentic western look and epic scale, and had Leif Ericson as a father figure who was flawed and fallible and as such human and believable in a way Pa Cartwright never was - for me, at least.

Sometimes the magic happens, sometimes it doesn't. Consider this basic plot for a TV series: Back in the roaring twenties, a a tough but honest cop gathers around him an elite force and sets out to stop organized crime in a major American city. Sound familiar? Sure . . . it's The Untouchables, which premiered in 1959 on ABC with Robert Stack as Eliot Ness. Also, though, it's The Lawless Years, which began that same autumn week on 'another network.' James Gregory played Barney Ruditsky, a New York City (The Untouchables was based in Chicago) cop who likewise puts together a task force to take on the mob. But the magic didn't quite happen, because very few people watched, even as The Untouchables became an instantaneous hit. Maybe it's that the fine character actor Gregory (catch him as Angela Lasnbury's pathetic husband in THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE - no, not the abysmal remake, the original!) didn't exude the charisma and sex appeal of a born star like Stack. Maybe the members of his team weren't as interesting and/or diverse. Maybe they didn't have as strong character actors playing as intriguing villains (like Neville Brand and Bruce Gordon as Al Capone and Frank Nitti on the ABC show). Certainly, they did try to capture the tenor of the times and the atmosphere, including excellent music by Max Steiner, was terrific. Maybe it was the lack of Walter Winchell as the narrator, or the fact that at half an hour they couldn't develop as interesting situations. Any way you cut it, this show - which survived for two years - is one of those forgotten exercises in crime drama on the small screen.

Had George Montgomery played his cards right, he could have had a place in TV history as the first-ever star of an adult western. When Desilu began planning their series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, they had Montgomery in mind for the lead. As a veteran of countless B westerns that played theatres in the early fifties, he certainly seemed to be the most likely person to star in a TV show at that moment when the 'small' western was about to explode onto the 'small' screen, and filmed westerns would, more and more, be of the 'big' variety with Wayne, Stewart, etc. Perhaps surprisingly, Montgomery turned them down (the role of course went to Hugh O'Brian) and continued to make B western movies, though the choices soon became fewer and further between. In 1958, he was finally ready to go the small screen route. NBC mounted what was meant to be a 'super-western' - a predecessor of The Virginian, more or less - with a huge cast, a bigger than average budget, and a large scope. Montgomery played the mayor of the title town in Oklahoma, founded by his father. The original idea was that he'd star in one-third of the hour long episodes but also narrate (and perhaps do a cameo in) the others. One third of the shows would star handsome young John Smith as the town lawman, and the others would focus on Audrey Totter, a veteran of B movies (mostly westerns) as the show's answer to Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke. Only problem was, the writers couldn't figure out what to do with her, at least not in lead roles, so they became rare - so much so that Totter, unhappy about being reduced from a star to a bit player, walked away from the series. Meanwhile, the show - though a good one - was suffering in the ratings opposite Have Gun, Will Travel and Gunsmoke - among the top rated western shows - over at CBS on Saturday nights. (With its homey feel, Cimarron City would have been far better placed on Sunday evenings. Heck, it even had Dan 'Bonanza' Blocker in the cast as 'Tiny' Budinger!) All at once it alternated between the two male leads, who became ever more conventional and less interesting as the town's politics were played down in favor of routine western action. The most memorable episode of all was called Twelve Guns, a mini-epic with Nick Adams effectively cast as a Billy the Kid style tough kid who rides into town with a gang and virtually takes over. By the end of that first season, though, Cimarron City was a goner - too bad NBC didn't do with it what they would do with Bonanza a few years later, shifting from a Saturday night slot (where the ratings on both those shows were mediocre) over to Sunday, where this one - like that one - might have flourished.

As TV westerns about the great plains were becoming redundant in the late 1950s, the networks experimented with variations on the them. One such idea was the 'northern,' set up in th eland of the midnight sun. Seemed like a strong idea, and the John Wayne movie North to Alaska was certainly a hit at the box office - though, then again, Wayne didn't have many flops, whatever he happened to be in. Not so with the TV versions. ABC/Warner Brothers tried this format with The Alaskans, starring Roger Moore (fresh from a British series, Ivanhoe), Jeff York (recycling his gruff mountain man role from Disney's The Saga of Andy Burnett), and Dorothy Provine, the only one of Warner's blondes who seemed right for period pictures. The show lasted one season - Provine went on to a year and a half on The Roaring Twenties, Moore to Maverick (he replaced James Garner, sharing top-billing with Jack Kelly as the British cousin "Beau"), and Jeff York . . . well, he didn't work a whole lot after that. But wait a minute . . . this is supposed to be about Klondike! So over at NBC, on Monday nights, yet another Alaskan western was kicked off, this one with Ralph Taeger, who looked a little like Clint Walker by had none of the charisma, as a the big shouldered, big hearted hero, and James Coburn, in one of his very first leads, as a giddy con man. Also aboard were two lovely veterans of B movies, Mari Blanchard (brunette) and Joi Lansing (blonde) as two very buxom females trying to survive in the shabby gold rush towns. Sam Peckinpah directed some of the episodes, so they are not without interest, but the show never caught on with the public. So NBC had an epiphany - Surfside Six and Hawaiian Eye were both big hits over at ABC. So how about taking the two male stars of Klondike and shifting them to a modern sunny locale? All of a sudden, Klondike was gone and Acapulco (starring Taeger and Coburn) was there in its place. Heavily advertised, with the heroes basking on the beach amid a half dozen bathing beauties, it couldn't miss . . . but it did . . . and the ratings were so much lower than those of Klondike that NBC threw in the towel after about eight weeks.

Kurt Neumann gets screen credit for directing Mohawk, but I'd estimate that about one third of the film was shot by John Ford. Not that Pappy was around at all while this abysmal excuse for a B eastern/western was made, mind you. A little more than fifteen years earlier, he had directed a film on the same subject, the majestic Drums Along the Mohawk, for 20th Century Fox, with Henry Fonda in the lead. Somehow, some way, the producers of Mohawk got the rights to use the magnificent action scenes - attack on a frontier fort, a lone man running through the woods to get reinforcements while pursued by three Indians - within the context of their cheapo-cheapo production, which essentially is to westerns what Robot Monster is to sci-fi: As awful as it is, if you catch it in the right mood, you may find it to be so bad that it's entertaining. The plot, totally anachronistic as compared to Ford's ultra-authenticity, has Scott Brady (later Shotgun Slade on TV) as a loverboy (though a solid actor, he wasn't cut out for such a part). He's a painter who talks gorgeous Hollywood starlets (er . . . make them frontier lasses) into taking off most of their clothes for one of his portraits. Lori Nelson (pert blonde), Allison Hayes (star of The Fifty Foot Woman - the original, that is), and Rita Gam (as a Mohawk babe) all fall for him, and his character has more in common with Hugh Hefner than Henry Fonda in Ford's film. The point is, most of Mohawk was shot on a studio set in about three days, with a frontier fort that is mostly a big painting the actors stand in front of. Then someone screams something on the order of "The Mohawks are coming!" and, whoooosh - we cut to stock footage from Ford's film that is on a grand scale. The entire chase of Fonda is included, only when it comes time for a close-up, there is Brady's face instead of Hank's. It's that kind of a movie. Remember, you were warned.

Here's yet another of those westerns turned out in 1960 that tried to break the mold of the formulaic TV western genre, had only a mild recepetion during its first year, was then turned into a far more routine show during the second season, but still was cancelled at the end of that second year. Barton MacLane, a veteran of many old time westerns and other action films, played a tough U.S. Marshal tracking down outlaws in the badlands with the help of deputy Don Collier, a youngster then who would appear in many westerns. Sounds pretty familiar? Here was the difference - instead of telling the story from the lawmens' point of view, this was told as the outlaws saw it. That is, MacLane and his posse were always seen at a distance, almost as threatening characters. In one particularly memorable essay, James Coburn (youngster too at the time) played Culley, a confused young outlaw who wanted to go straight but didn't know what to do, who stops on his run from the law to help a blinded elderly man (Henry Hull, brilliant as always). The 'heroes' were on screen for maybe five minutes and you resented them when they arrested Coburn. For the second season, MacLane remained in the lead, they gave him a more conventionally handsome young deputy, and the stories were now told from his point of view - just like Lawman and pretty much every other western on TV at the time.

Here was an attempt to do something truly original amid the formulaic westerns that dominated TV in the late fifties. Ordinarily, the hero would be a stellar person, out to do the right thing. In the opening episode of Hotel de Paree, the Sundance Kid (Earl Holliman) is released from jail after serving three years for killing the man who owned the title establishment in Colorado. He returns to that town as soon as he's released, planning to harass the widow and daughter of the man. Not exactly your normal opener, right? Then he did come to like them both and, instead of killing them, stuck around to protect them from the wild boys who roamed through this section of the west. Sundance became close friends with Aaron (Strother Martin), an eccentric storekeeper and a preview of the many characters Martin would play in Sam Peckinpah movies. Always, there was the hint that Sundance was romantically involved with either the attractive mother (Jeanette Nolan) or her budding daughter Judi Meredith), though the writers wisely chose to leave that up to our imagination - or even allow us to think, if we wished, that he was engaged in a menage-a-trois with BOTH of them! The whole thing was far too brilliantly weird for TV viewers of the time, so NBC toyed with stripping away everything that was most interesting about the show, renaming it The Sundance Kid for its second season, and having Holliman roam the west pretty much like every other TV cowboy hero. Supposedly, that was all set - but at the last moment the show was canceled. Perhaps we ought to consider that a blessing - because we can at least remember the unique show this really was rather than have to recall the routine one it might have become.

Of all the many westerns that Warner Bros. had on ABC during the late fifties, this was the least successful. More correctly, the ONLY show of this type that didn't succeed for the studio and the network. By the time it arrived on the air, ABC was already airing Cheyenne, Bronco, Sugarfoot, Maverick, and Lawman, all of which had long, healthy runs. Colt .45 premiered in a late evening Friday spot, opposite strong competition on the other two networks. Wayde Preston played a big, rugged fellow who traveled the west, bringing sample guns to stores that could then order them from the Colt firearms company back east. Secretly, though, he was a government agent, and each town he went into not only had a store desiring to order pistols but also some villain who needed to be taught a lesson. One particularly memorable episode featured a mild-mannered small fellow who had read about knights and hid a breastplate under his coat, so that he could shoot it out with gunfighters, allow them to fire at his heart, then (protected by the metal) blow the guy away. When he picked on Chris Colt, though, he made a mistake, for the hero had figured out the guy's strategy and put a bullet right between his eyes. Like Clint Walker over at Cheyenne, Preston was a troublesome actor - he wanted better scripts and more money - and, since the ratings weren't all that great, the show was cancelled. Both the network and studio had second thoughts, though, and brought Colt .45 back for another try, this time on Sunday nights, and it fared better, despite being loaded down with reruns. When the new episodes did appear, Preston sported a mustache that made him look more authentically western, though this was a rarity on TV at the time. Once again, he and the studio clashed, so before long he was gone, with Donald May replacing him as his cousin, Sam Colt, Jr. There was an episode in which Preston turned the job over to May, but in a bizarre move, it wasn't aired as the first of the May episodes but the last - so audiences had no idea why there was a new guy on the series until the series was about to end! By that time, it was on Tuesday nights, and everyone involved in this (and for that matter most TV westerns) had run out of new ideas. So what they did for the final half-season was to imitate a Republic-produced series from earlier in the decade, Stories Of the Century - by having May meet one real-life gunfighter (Billy the Kid, Jesse James, etc.) on his travels. Ultimately, though, it was the first WB/ABC western to "go" - cancelled in summer, 1960. That fall, a Maverick episode had Bart (Jack Kelly) running into the stars of all the other Warner/ABC westerns in a single episode . . . but when he arrived at the home of Chris Colt, there was only a dusty gun hanging from a peg, and the man was gone. Though nobody perhaps knew it at the time, this served as a symbol for the fate of most all such westerns, which would reach the end of the trail within the next two to three years.

This show was one of the rarest of rarities - a summer replacement series that proved so popular it was picked up the following year to replace one of the fall season's first casualties, with new episodes being filmed. It actually had an extremely long run, despite the fact that only 39 episodes (ordinarily a single season) were shot, because it could be played either as an evening western or as a kiddie show on Saturday morning. This had to do with an interesting innovation - whereas most westerns (ever since the classic movie SHANE) had a little boy in a supporting role, this was the first TV series to actually tell the story of the old west from a child's point of view. Luckily, they had a fine young actor in Tommy Nolan, who lived in the small town of Buckskin with his Mom. As she ran a boarding house, all sorts of odd and interesting characters passed by, and each of their story's was depicted as to its impact on the child as he gradually grew up. In a way, it resembled the original LASSIE (with Jeff, not Timmy), only shifted back in time and taken from the midwest to the north west. And without Lassie, of course. There was a solid, decent town marshal, but again, we only saw him as the child saw him. There was a warmth to this show that was missing from many of the other TV westerns of that time. And while it never made a big splash, it does hold a nice nostalgic place in the memories of those who remember catching it.

Here was another of those western series that NBC tried out for a summer run to see if it was worth bringing back as a replacement in January for one of their fall season shows that failed to catch on. But Tate never returned, and the thirteen episodes that were shot did not go into widespread syndication, so this rates as something of a one summer wonder. By the time Tate appeared, TV was glutted with guns for hire, Paladin the most popular of all over at CBS on Saturday night's Have Gun Will Travel series. He of course dressed all in black leather. On Tate, the anti-hero also had black leather, but merely as a heavy stump covering for the arm that he had lost during the War Between the States. Yep, a one-armed hero in a western, which must have broken considerable ground for hire-the-handicapped back then. Tate never had to wait long for a job, but like Paladin (this was, after all, TV) he never did anything cold-blooded, and was picky enough to only take money from people who deserved to win in the end. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show was that the hero was played by The Marlboro Man, which is why - even though this was David MacLean's first official acting job - he looked awfully familiar to western fans. And smokers. And, yes, MacLean did die of lung cancer.

The Wrangler is one of the least known of all TV westerns from the mid to late fifties, and with good reason: it only lasted six episodes. Not that this was a normal series which got canceled owing to low ratings. Rather, it premiered in the summertime, for back in 1960, rather than show endless reruns as is the case now, a popular show would very often take 'a breather,' at which point the network would replace it for a month and a half with new episodes of a show they had not yet decided to carry during the regular season, trying it out to see if it picked up much interest with the public. Apparently, Wrangler did not, because following its six week run as a replacement for the highly popular Tennessee Ernie Ford musical show, it disappeared without a sight. Never really rerun, even, because there simply weren't enough episodes in the can for syndication. In the can, though, may be the wrong term. For this was one of a number of experiments done at this time as the networks tested out the concept of taping rather than filming dramas. The strong point was that it would give them a sense of immediacy that, they hoped, would approximate live TV, with all its inherent anything can happen potential for surprise. The weak was that there was no cinemtographer, no control of the image in terms of lighting, angles, etc. leaving such a show in a rather crude presentation. Rod Serling, incidentally, was forced by CBS that same year to do several Twilight Zone episodes with videotape, and he always claimed that it was neither fish nor fowl - not truly spontaneous or completely finished. He was right, and that held as true for Wrangler over at NBC as his own CBS Friday night show. Besides, the taping would certainly have had a better chance to succeed on Zone, with its intimate stories, than in a western, where the audience expected crackerjack and carefully timed action scenes. There weren't many on Wrangler, owing to the clumsiness of taping. After a short while, all the networks gave up on this idea, except for those highly intimate afternoon soaps. Never again, though, for a western. One other thing that made Wrangler interesting is that the show was true to its title. A wrangler is a cowhand who specializes in caring for horses, and that was indeed Pitcairn's job. Focusing on such a specialist, rather than a jack of all trades like the hero of Cheyenne and numerous other shows, lent Wrangler some distinction.

This short lived western, which appeared at a time when the airwaves were so glutted with cowboy shows that some had to fall through the cracks, has developed something of a cult reputation as being one of the really good ones that somehow got away. In truth, much of it was standard stuff, with the decent minded lawman (Joel McCrea) and his young deputy (Jody McCrea), pretty much the same formula as you could find over at ABC with Lawman (Wichita Town was on NBC). There was a nice feel for the cowtown, however, and several intriguing elements that are worth noting. For one thing, though the father and son team of the McCreas were featured, they didn't play father and son, though they were an older and younger man in a father-son style relationship. Second, though the characters' names were fictional, they were supposed to be Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson. (Young Jody's character's name was even "Ben Masters," allowing for a hint at the historicity they had to suggest rather than admit owing to the fact that Hugh O'Brian and Alan Dinehart had already done the story of that friendship over at ABC on The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. Perhaps that helps explain why Wichita Town never caught on - there was a sense of deja vu to it all, which doesn't mean that it wasn't good, only that it arrived a little late in the TV western game. Apparently, McCrea had wanted to play Earp on TV. One of his best B+ westerns of the mid-fifties was Wichita Town, in which he played Earp and Keith Larson (later in such TV westerns as Brave Eagle and Northwest Passage) was young Masterson. That film opened in theatres only months before the ABC Earp/Masterson series premiered. So McCrea backed off and then gave it a noble try with this one-season wonder. If hardly a classic of its type, this was a highly watchable variation on what then was an all too common theme, with McCrea bringing a certain substance to the role that most of the young cowboy stars then on the air couldn't come close to.

In the early fifties, the once omnipotent form of the B western was drawing to an end, largely because TV could supply such stuff on a daily basis - for free. If you wanted to see an A western, in color and with scope screen starring 'the big boys' (Wayne, Stewart, Fonda, etc.), you had to pay - and people did, going to the theatres in droves for films like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (Lancaster and Douglas in that one). But fewer and fewer were willing to shell out money to catch a little black and white item, which is why those few remaining B western stars, like Audie Murphy, began to appear in full color B+ pictures. All of this is a prelude to The Last Musketeer (nothing to do with Dumas, believe me), a mild, brief (67 mins.), mostly ordinary oater except for some big action scenes at the end, involving wagons full of water trying to pass through oil-fired flames on the prairie. They've been started by villain James Anderson, who may have had the meanest looking face in B western films. He wants to starve out the other ranchers by drying up their water supplies, only Slim (Slim Pickens) falls through a hole in the earth and discovers an underwater lake. With the help of cattle buyer Rex Allen (one of the last of the singing cowboys, with a fine Arizona accented voice, and the last B cowboy star to use his own name in the guise of a fictional character, like Autry and Rogers), Slim saves the day. The film has at best ordinary scripting and below average acting (even the ordinarily reliable Pickens is a bit over the top, particularly when he tries to sing), first rate music by Allen and a nice ensemble of the Sons of the Pioneers type, a charming low key quality by Allen, and spectacularly staged action - always what the audience for a B western wanted in the first place. Also, an enigmatic, offbeat beauty named Mary Ellen Kaye as a hardriding cowgirl. Minor league fun, to be sure, and only for B western completists. But if you are one, this isn't a half bad way to kill a little more than an hour. Watching it, though, you become very much aware of why even the kids stopped attending such stuff and stayed home to watch The Lone Ranger, Range Rider, and Buffalo Bill, Jr.

Character actor Nick Adams was an unlikely choice for the lead on an action TV series, particularly a western, where the genre was dominated by large fellows like Clint Walker and James Arness. The diminutive Adams played Johnny Yuma, a Confederate veteran who after the Civil War wanders the west. But whereas virtually all of the other cowboys who did precisely that on a nearly endless number of shows were simply looking for work, romance, or adventure, Yuma was trying to 'find himself.' He was a writer, and "Johnny Yuma's Journal" always remained a focal point of the series. More interesting still was that the title had three meanings: One one level, Johnny was indeed a rebel in that he was among the defeated Southerners; on another, he was being played by Nick Adams, who had co-starred with James Dean in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and ABC made a great deal of the fact that, in an era of adult westerns, this was the first "teenage western" - though Adams was over thirty when he filmed the show, the idea was to bring a James Dean type character to television, if in the context of a western to avoid any possible controversy. Finally, there was at least a hint of Camus's THE STRANGER, a certain existential quailty to the character and the stark situations in which he found himself, that made this show vaguely philosophical, intentionally or otherwise. Much of the action took place at night, allowing this a certain noir sensibility not in evidence on any other western of the era. One wonderful element was the theme song, performed by the inimicable Johnny Cash: "Johnny Yuma, was a rebel; he roamed through the west." The show was a huge hit, particularly with teenagers, but ended up getting canceled when ABC entered into a hostile relationship with the company that produced The Rebel and cut off their nose to spite their face by canceling one of their top rated shows. Unlike most canceled series, which went immediately into syndication, the Rebel was picked up by NBC as a midseason replacement, though all those episodes were reruns. This move may have been an attempt to keep Nick Adams 'live' in the public consciousness, as they premiered his new series, Saints and Sinners (about a newspaperman) in the fall of 1962, though that series was a flop.

Had this little film been made five or ten years earlier, it might have achieved minor classic status. Unfortunately, it allows us an image of a 1950s style rebel that showed up on screens in 1965, a year after the Beatle invasion and the hippie movement had begun. Bad timing! But not a bad movie, by any means. Celia Kaye, who was briefly hyped for stardom, plays a runaway girl searching for her biological father. On the road, she meets a Jack Kerouac/James Dean drifter, in a black leather jacket of course, played by Michael Parks, who was then being hyped as the new James Dean - unfortunately, Dean style acting had gone out of fashion a few years earlier. Too bad for Parks, because he really had a nice quality to his performances, if something about him seemed to belong to an earlier decade. He had his last big shot at potential stardom four years later playing a biker in Then Came Bronson, sort of TV's watered down answer to Easy Rider, but when it didn't click in the ratings, his career never recovered. Hollywood was looking for a new kind of late sixties/early seventies star; Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, etc. Anyway, back to Wild Seed: the relationship of the two leads, as they experience anecdotal misadventures, is truly touching and quite compelling, as you wait to see if friendship will bloom into romance. One of those films that almost never plays anywhere anymore, not even on Turner Movie Classics. Worth rediscovering, certainly!

Cheyenne was one of the original three (along with Gunsmoke and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp) 'adult' westerns to hit TV in the fall of 1955, kicking off a trend that would dominate all three networks for the next five or six years, until the once original concept turned to formula and all the fun went out of the genre owing to overexposure. In truth, there was no one quite like Clint Walker - to say that he was tall in the saddle is to understate the case. Like Fess Parker as Davy Crockett (on the same network, ABC) one year earlier, his huge physical stature but gentle country voice won him instant stardom and, adult western or no, the hero of every kid in America. Actually, Cheyenne wasn't a series in the true sense during its first season, but broadcast one out of every three weeks as part of an anthology called WARNER BROS. PRESENTS. The other two entries were King's Row with Robert Horton and Jack Kelly (soon to reappear on Wagon Train and Maverick) and Casablanca, a take off on the old Bogart movie of that name. Immediately, the ratings for Cheyenne went through the roof while the other two just sat there. By mid-season they were gone and Cheyenne was seen on reruns every week through the summer. Two things about that first season: though the show ran an hour, each episode was not a normal hour length installment (50 mins.) but between five and ten minutes less than that, owing to 'behind the scenes' previews of upcoming WB movies. Also, this was the only season when Cheyenne had a sidekick, played by L.Q. Jones, later a regular in the Sam Peckinpah stock company. One last thing about the opening season - the episodes were far more spectacular than any to follow, as WB actually did mini remakes of big budget western films, using the stock footage from them and simply replacing whoever had starred with Clint. So the feature film Charge at Feather River with Guy Madison became West of the River with Clint. The Indian charge is identical in both. Most of us didn't know anything about stock footage then and were under the impression (for a while) that WB was knocking out a major league western for TV every three weeks. When Cheyenne came back in 1956, it was a full hour, no sidekick, and ran every other week, alternating with CONFLICT, mostly composed of pilots for possible future WB shows. the next year, Conflict was gone and Sugarfoot with Will Hutchins became the rotating item with Cheyenne, this western also quickly becoming a hit. The following year, Cheyenne was on the air but Clint wasn't. He'd left WB in a salary dispute. So the weirdest thing happen - Cheyenne ran with no Cheyenne in sight, rather Ty Hardin as Bronco Lane. When Walker returned the following fall, Cheyenne shifted to Monday (often, it ran weekly now) with Bronco and Sugarfoot rotating on Tuesdays. By this time, the western was playing out, so both Sugarfoot and Bronco were absorbed into Cheyenne, the package now called "The Cheyenne Show," each of the three seen once every three weeks. In one episode, all three were together. Then Sugarfoot was dropped and Cheyenne and Bronco rotated. By this time, the heyday of the western was over. Warner Bros. replaced Cheyenne late in 1963 with another western, Badlands, which lasted less than half a year. And, in truth, during its final two or three seasons, Cheyenne was awfully routine, in terms of scripting, direction, etc. But that first season was a real winner, and the next two or three were strong too. Worth catching again at least those heyday episodes.