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| Ken Curtis and James Arness estimate the damages in "Vengeance." |
Directed by Gunnar Hellstrom and written by Clyde Ware, "Cattle Barons" is a tense showdown between landowners Forrest Tucker and Robert J. Wilke; it's first-rate until it builds to an overlong fist-fight involving just about every character in the show in the middle of Dodge's main street.
Bernard McEveety/Calvin Clements' "The Prodigal" features an excellent Lew Ayres as the doddering grandfather of a young gunman determined to learn the identity of the man who shot his father in the back, which is a secret guarded under law. Also written by Calvin Clements, Richard C. Safarian's two-parter "Vengeance" stars James Stacy at his peak as a former carnival trick-shooter out to avenge himself against steely-eyed landowner John Ireland, whose men killed his father and brother for relieving the pain of one of his wounded calves. This superb episode also features a truly fine, touching early supporting appearance by Kim Darby, an authoritative minor part for Paul Fix, and rural menace from Royal Dano and Victor French. Then Robert Totten returns to the director's chair for Ron Bishop's script "A Hat," with an amazing, over the edge performance by Chill Wills as an aging gunman whose son is killed in self-defense by a mountain man who finds the protection of Matt Dillon, thus putting all of Dodge into imminent danger.
It's remarkable how often the same story elements and situations come into play, but there is never any sense of redundancy in the storylines. The only trouble with these early color episodes is that CBS really wanted to sell color television sets, so the color is BATMAN-lurid and sometimes hard to look past. I never imagined that Marshall Dillon's one and only shirt was lavender all these years! There's even some lavender lighting in the exteriors, and the green felt tabletops in the Long Branch Saloon look like enormous lime lollipops.
And then there's episode 12: "Death Train," written by Ken Trevey and directed by Gunnar Hellström. When a train passes through Dodge City carrying the luxury train car "Nimrod," one of its passengers (Dana Wynter), sneaks away from her millionaire husband (Morgan Woodward, an arrogant man who believes his position makes him invulnerable and above the law) and his hired hand (Norman Alden, looking a lot like Dennis Hopper in EASY RIDER, made two years later) to covertly notify Doc (Milburn Stone) that their butler is deathly ill. Doc follows her to the train and quickly confirms the mottled passenger as having spotted fever, a form of plague, and declares a quarantine. At Marshall Matt Dillon's order, the "Nimrod" is uncoupled from the main train, allowing the other cars to continue on unencumbered. Doc and Matt do their best to keep the word stifled, but it spreads through town anyway, given additional fearsome fervor by an evangelist determined to put the fear of God into the locals. Soon enough, frightened locals circle the train and when their attempts to build a barrier around it fail, they decide to try burning it down to purify the contagion.
The more GUNSMOKE episodes I see, the more Dodge City itself - beyond the main characters - seems rife with bad seeds and dangerous drifters who have to be regularly taught lessons about racism, violence, lust, alcoholism, and so forth. It carries a regular message (or reminder) that there are certain things that civilized people just won't, or shouldn't, stand for. As such, it's a very socially constructive program. We don't really have much of this now, and it's showing in the way we interact with each other in public. Watching this particular episode was a lot like holding up a mirror to the world we find ourselves in today, and it showed me that this is nothing new, that people have always been like this, at their most dangerous when they are scared; but what they had then that we don't have today is a genuine leader to stand up our worst instincts and show people the folly of their own fears, which are as endangering to them as they are to others. The mob in this episode initially wants to send the train on, which would carry its contagion to other states; then they want to burn it down, which would remove the barrier of the train itself from deadly contagion - these are not carefully considered solutions. They have no logic, no science to back them up; the prevailing thought is "get this away from me, and to hell with anyone else." The point made here, and in so many other episodes, is that guns, torches, mob violence, and ignoring or disavowing medical knowledge are not acceptable solutions to any problem. I makes me think we need to bring a stronger educational, precautionary bent back into our entertainment, and take heroism away from costumed freaks and return it to the exceptional common man. It may seem a backward step, but this country's in tatters and TV is where most people learn things.
(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.
