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Date Posted: 21:37:18 07/18/12 Wed
Author: SWC
Subject: Part 2

This is Part 2 of "The Glory Era of TV Westerns: 1965-69"
This one is about the wanderers who traveled the west, searching for something:

THE LONER

This is something of a “cult” series: a western created by Rod Serling, no less. Lloyd Bridges was still another western wanderer, a disillusioned former Union cavalry officer wandering the west, (He never seemed to encounter Nick Adams’ “Rebel“). Supposedly Bridges became disenchanted with the number of gunfights on the show, (Serling had withdrawn after a dozen episodes, because CBS demanded more “action“ in the scripts). At least that was one story given for it’s demise, to be replaced by a game show. Hopefully, that wasn’t too violent. Virtually all the episodes are on U-Tube. Here is the premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K6CCy90YSU

BRANDED

“The Rifleman” was still a highly rated show when Chuck Connor’s wife convinced him to abandon it for a more modern show, “Arrest and Trial”, a sort of 60’s version of Law and Order, which lasted only a year. He went back to westerns with “Branded”, in which he played a disgraced Army officer convicted of cowardice, cashiered the army and presented with his broken sword as a symbol of his status. He spent the show wandering the west, (along with the heroes of many another TV series), trying to find evidence to prove his innocence. No, he wasn’t looking for a one-armed man. He was looking for a witness to support his claim that he was knocked out early in the battle that wiped out the rest of his men. This one had another catchy tune for it’s theme. But like “Arrest and Trial”, it lasted only a year. The next year Chuck was “Cowboy in Africa”. That one also lasted a year. Maybe he should have stuck with “The Rifleman”.

Here’s the premiere, “Survival”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-_ZffPgUI


A MAN CALLED SHENANDOAH

Robert Horton had left Wagon Train because he wanted to sing in stage musicals. By 1965, he was back in a small screen western, playing still another wandering hero, this one with amnesia. He lost a fight and got left for dead in the desert. Now he wants to find out who he is. He decided to call himself “Shenandoah” and got to sing that song over the credits. Actually, I remember this as a pretty good show and one of my father’s favorites, (He always liked Flint McCullough).

Here is the premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ZJ2FGzBZE

THE ROUNDERS

Henry Fonda and Glen Ford had teamed up for a gentle 1965 western comedy called “The Rounders” about two modern cowboys who go around breaking horses for various ranchers and getting involved with one scrape after another. An attempt was made to make a TV series out of the show with Ron Hayes in the Glen Ford role and John Wayne’s son Patrick in the Henry Fonda role. Chill Wills played a rancher who always seems to get the better of the cowboys in both the film and TV series, which, without Fonda and Ford, lasted only 17 episodes.

U-Tube just has the opening credits of the TV series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICeiDcTox5U
It gives you a pretty good idea of what the show must have been like.

THE GUNS OF WILL SONNETT

Walter Brennan, who had been in many of the classic Hollywood Westerns over the years, (The Westerner, My Darling Clementine, Red River, Rio Bravo), switched to TV with “The Real McCoys”, then showed up in this late 60’s western where he plays a tough old westerner who accompanies his grandson, (Dack Rambo) and a search for his father, who is supposed to be a notorious gunman. It’s another “wanderer” series. Brennan’s character quoted scripture like Paladin did Shakespeare:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061259/board/flat/188059113?p=1
When his martial capabilities were questioned, he used the tag line “No brag, just fact”.
There was a “Citizen Kane” aspect to the show as James Sonnett, (Jason Evers, when we actually got to see him), could have been the star of his own show. They kept hearing what he had done, good and bad, as his went on his own travels through the west and the image of the character was created by what others said of him. The show was probably the last half hour drama, a format that had been common before this on TV. Half hour shows since have tended to be comedies.

It was a good show and Brennan was a fine character actor but he was also a bit of a character who turned a lot of people off when, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, the very right wing Brennan danced a jig on set in celebration.

The pilot/premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQBSoOioHZk

THE OUTCASTS

The success of “I Spy” made it inevitable that there would be a western paring black and white heroes. The difference was that these guys didn’t like each other. The show probably owed more to Stanley Kramer’s 1958 film, “The Defiant Ones”:, where Tony Curtis and Sydney Poitier played two convicts chained to each other who hated each other because of their bigotry but who had to work together to survive.

The West was a place for outcasts, people who wanted to start over. Confederates who had lost everything and ex-slaves who never had anything certainly qualified. I’ve read that perhaps 40% of cowboys were black and there was an entire black regiment of solders. But you rarely see them represented on the movie or TV screens. With this series, that was beginning to change. Don Murray played a former plantation owner and confederate officer who needed a job and found that the only one he could get was assisting a bounty hunter, (they had assistants?) who was a former slave on his plantation. Small world and their small perceptions of each other caused them to be in constant conflict with each other.

I couldn’t find full episodes but here are some interesting clips:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awL9CBq4hGQ

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