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Date Posted: 21:46:38 07/18/12 Wed
Author: SWC
Subject: Part 3

This is Part 3 of "The Glory Era of the TV Western: 1965-69" This is about the other western series that premeirred in this period, which didn't fight under the category of ranching shows or shows about wanderers.

THE WILD WILD WEST

James Bond was ruling the movies and now his impact spread to TV, replacing the western craze with the spy craze. The Man From Uncle had been a big hit in 1964 and so a producer named Michael Garrison came up with the idea of “James West”, a secret agent who traveled the west with his partner, master of disguise Artemis Gordon. The traveled in a fancy railroad car with lots of fancy gadgets to fight a menagerie of bad guys. Combining the imagination of the spy stories with a background of the Victorian era west took a lot of imagination but the writers had plenty of it. Robert Conrad was a strong, athletic action hero and Ross Martin a clever master of disguises and dialects. Martin called his role a “a show-off’s showcase”. Often he was so well disguised you didn’t realize it was him until he chose to reveal himself. The best character actors on TV had a ball playing the warped villains. Their arch enemy, Dr. Miguelito, (“Little Michael”) Loveless, was played by the talented dwarf, Michael Dunn. I think he’s the best arch-villain I’ve ever seen, better than Moriarity or Wo Fat.

The opening credit sequence was treat in itself, showing James West facing and defeating a series of threats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxaOP-dA6Sg&feature=related

Here is the opening pilot/premiere episodes, (sorry for the bad sound- it’s better in part 2, which you see to the right):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxVkzjvB4Pw

Conrad worked so closely with the stunt crew that they became friends and played touch football between shots. I’ve noticed a pattern that halfway through the show, West would get set upon by three guys and, after an extended fight, get captured. Toward the end of the show he would take on three guys and this time win the fight before proceeding to confront the villain. I think the three bad guys were likely the same three guys in every episode. Conrad liked to do his own stunts and it almost cost him badly. At 8:25 of this episode, he swings from a chandelier and was supposed to fall on a table. But the table isn’t there and he falls to the floor which left him with a concussion. That prematurely ended the filming for the third season. The episode was later redone, (the shot of Conrad rolling on the floor was done months after the shot that preceded it), and shown in season 4.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zStTYAICDWc

But the best episode is “The Night of the Man-Eating House”, (all the episodes were “The Night of…something”). This is like something out of the Twlight Zone, which Hurd Hatfield, famous for starring in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945). Here he’s living in a house that cries whenever anything bad happens to him and takes steps to protect him. The ending is an homage to the great British horror film “Dead of Night”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhYMMbaqKUs&feature=relmfu
Note that in the new opening credit sequence, West doesn’t punch the lady- he kisses her, a nod to complaints that the show was “too violent”. The Sheriff in this episode is played by William Tallman, Hamilton Burger on “Perry Mason”, which had just finished production the previous spring. It was one of the last things he did before dying of lung cancer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmjRkpge-jk

In 1999 a terrible film was made based on this series with Will Smith. Ignore it and go with the original.

F TROOP

This was the ’official’ western spoof, in the way that “Get Smart” was the official spy spoof and Hogan’s Heroes and McHale’s Navy were the war spoofs. To me it wasn’t as funny as a comedy episode of Bonanza or Gunsmoke. It was pure slapstick with one-dimensional characters played by borscht-belt comic types. I think humor is funnier with well-rounded characters in realistic settings. Dramatic episodes make you care about the characters: comic episodes make you like them. Most of the best laughs we have in life are about people we like and care about. F-Troop was just a clichéd romp.

Here’s the premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqxINF1UvIE

THE LEGEND OF JESSE JAMES

This is the show that should have had “The Virginian’s” driving theme. Jesse was a legendary guy on the run all the time. This show swallowed the “Robin Hood of the West” story whole: Jesse and Frank James only became outlaws when the mean railroad company took their mother’s land and killed her when they possessed it, getting the corrupt law behind them. Everything they stole was given to other victims of the railroad. Chris Jones, a James Dean wannabe, played Jesse and Alana Case played Frank, the same role Henry Fonda, his co-star in “The Deputy” had played in the 1940 movie about the James gang. Jones, (real name Billy Frank Jones), would later improbably show up in David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter as the shell-shocked British officer romancing Sarah Miles. Lean was so disappointed in his performance- he actually shoved Jones toward Miles during their love scenes to get him going- he had his voice dubbed by another actor. After that, his career fizzled. The IMDB describes him as “a victim of the Sunset Strip drug culture.” But once upon a time he was Jesse James!

The Premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn52r2navng
I still think Alan Case was imitating Henry Fonda in his movements and delivery. Fonda and James Dean would have made a good Frank and Jesse James. This is the next best thing. The episode is actually pretty good. The ending is ironic considering the demise of “The Dakotas”, (see my previous post on the 1961-64 period).

A couple of trailers for Ryan’s Daughter are on this page:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0427756/
I actually thought Jones somewhat resembled Peter O’Toole in this film.

LAREDO

Neville Brand, Peter Brown and William Smith played three Texas Rangers working for Captain Parmelee, (Philip Carey), in a rollicking action-packed series that was hardly nourishing to your brain but might raise your pulse. I remember it mostly for the driving theme music, which was enough to wake up the neighbors for a block around. It entertained people enough to last for two seasons before they ran out of IQ points.

This was a spin-off from “The Virginian”. The characters were introduced in the “We’ve Lost a Train” episode of The Virginian, shown 4/21/65 and there later there was a cross-over episode involving Trampas called “Backtrack“. Both were released abroad in a combined format as a 1969 film called “Backtrack”. They also released another film which they called “Three Guns for Texas” consisting of three first season Laredo episodes, “Yahoo“, “Jinx“, and “No Bugles, One Drum”. Fortunately, the practice of releasing “movies” which were just compilations of episodes of TV series seems to have come to a halt.

Here is the premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5S8AwV_8w_0

THE IRON HORSE

Dale Robertson returned as a gambler, Ben Calhoun, who had won a railroad in a poker game, only to find out it was almost bankrupt and the creditors and investors were demanding their money. Ben had to figure out how to run a railroad and make it pay. Gary Collins was his chief engineer and Ellen McRae the love interest, (she showed up in the second season). Ellen later changed her name to Burstyn, just before becoming one of the major film actresses of the following decade.

One IMDB reviewer said “This one never got out of the station”. It did last for two seasons but there’s not much of it on U-Tube, just some scratchy black and while versions of the opening, (mostly in Spanish). Here is the longest:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d51xdkCmftY
Samuel Fuller is a noted movie writer and director and Charles Marquis Warren brought Gunsmoke and Rawhide to TV. I guess they didn’t have quite the magic touch here.

CIMARRON STRIP

I recall this show, a Gunsmoke-type show with a western marshal as it’s hero, for it’s opening with Stuart Whitman galloping down an endless desert ridge while the music continually rose, seeming to propel him along. Other shows had used this “riding” opening,, (Law of the Plainsman, Hondo, even Gunsmoke for a time). But I think this was the best one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8VpOQfI20E
(Some fans get a kick out of Whitman’s riding technique. He looks like he’s trying desperately not to fall off the horse. He does lean back in the saddle quite a bit. But it’s still a rousing beginning.)

Marshal Jim Crown was based in Cimarron City, on the border between Kansas and Oklahoma Territory. (He never seemed to encounter George Montgomery, start of the previous show set in that town.) Like The Virginian, (and, briefly, Wagon Train), this was a 90 minute show. In fact it was specifically built to compete with The Virginian, being on at the same time. The producer was Philip Leacock, who had been doing Gunsmoke and the director of the premiere was Vincent McEveety, who directed 45 Gunsmoke episodes. The ambitious project brought in big-name guest stars like Richard Boone, Telly Savalas, Robert DuVal and Andrew Duggan but sank under it’s own weight after one season. CBS later edited it down to 60 minutes for syndication so beware- if the episode isn’t 90 minutes, it’s been badly chopped up.

Here is the premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko1zXYOi034

CUSTER

Yes, in the late 60’s, an era of the counter-culture and left-wing protests, they decided to make a TV show with George Armstrong Custer as a hero. Custer has been alternately a hero and a villain in our culture depending on what we needed him to be. Usually, he’s a hero when we are in “war” mode and feel we need a military hero and a villain when we are anti-war and are down on the military. When we try to make a hero of him, usually there are other villains who create the problems he has to deal with, such as gun runners selling to Indians, people starting gold rushes into Indian territory, crooked politicians plotting against him, etc.

There’s actually some truth to this. The Army’s Indian wars were typically started by ambitious people who didn’t care what agreements had been made with the Native Americans and the soldiers were called in to win the conflicts others had started. And Custer wasn’t the only Army officer who had tasted glory in the Civil War who wanted to reclaim it fighting the Indians. But he could be a despicable human being. He ordered his men to capture old men, women and children at the Washita Massacre and “use them as human shields”. He claimed to have killed “103 warriors” when 2/3 of the Indian casualties were women and children. The encampment was that of Black Kettle a peaceful Cheyenne chief who had been the victim of the earlier Sand Creek massacre and waved an American flag to show he wasn’t an enemy. Custer also abandoned Major Joel Elliott and his troup of 20 men who were killed in a counter-attack. Captain Frederick Benteen was a friend of Elliott and many think his failure to come to Custer’s aid at the Little Big Horn was related to this incident. Another time Custer, who was a martinet to his own men, abandoned them in the field and returned to his main fort because he was homesick for his wife, Libby. Discipline was something he used to control others but not himself. He got court-martialed for that.

Those things don’t show up in any dramatic presentation intended to view Custer favorably, such as this short-lived, (17 episodes) TV series. Protests by Native American organizations were said to have been a reason for canceling the program. Wayne Maunder was Custer, (who had been a Major General in the Civil War but was a Lieutenant Colonel out west). Michael Dante played his antagonist, Crazy Horse and Robert Simon was his dubious superior, General Terry. The show is also known as “The Legend of Custer”. It’s clearly not the truth of Custer.

Here is the premiere:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_j9NTYMRAk
The entertainment value of this offering is actually pretty good but, as they say at the end “Tonight’s episode has been a fictional drama.” Indeed.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=F9p934YWMBU

Overall, despite a few odd shows listed in this post, I found the westerns of the late 60's to represent a more mature brand of storytelling than most of the shows that preceded them, with more complex personalities and relationships and stories with more grey areas between good and bad.

Unfortunately, westerns and rural comedies, who were, by the ratings the most popular shows we've ever had, tended to appeal to more rural and older audiences than the sponsors wanted so they were on their way out, (the complaints against violence were largely a cover for this: many of them were replaced by cop shows that were more violent than the westerns and certainly than the rural comedies. Nonetheless, the "Western craze" didn't toally die out. I will cover the attemtps to revive it in the 1970's in next months' post.

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