This is likely my favorite installment of GUNSMOKE out of it 636 episodes and 20 seasons.
Filmed entirely in the Mojave Desert, the story focuses on an outlaw that Marshal Dillon is transferring, Charlie Noon (James Best), and the Indian woman (Miram Colon) and her caucasian stepson (cute-as-a-button Ronny Howard, fresh off of ANDY GRIFFITH) whom Dillon and Noon pick up and carry along with them after the boy and his mother's house is burned and the father killed by comanches. The foursome soon find themselves tracked by the braves who want the woman back and believe, erroneously, that Charlie Noon is the man who'd originally taken her from the tribe.
Directed by Vincent McEveety and written by Jim Byrnes (perhaps GUNSMOKE's best one-two punch) and scored hauntingly by John Parker (whose smouldering, native American-influenced work here far surpasses the irritating, jazzy junk he would churn out during the later seasons of DALLAS) the heat and tension are palpable. The entry feels like a movie, not just another TV-episode, and epitomizes what GUNSMOKE could be at its most polished rawness, the tone gritty, steaming and desolate.
And the episode even won an Emmy award for sound editing!
It's just great --- it does everything right. 10/10.
Filmed entirely in the Mojave Desert, the story focuses on an outlaw that Marshal Dillon is transferring, Charlie Noon (James Best), and the Indian woman (Miram Colon) and her caucasian stepson (cute-as-a-button Ronny Howard, fresh off of ANDY GRIFFITH) whom Dillon and Noon pick up and carry along with them after the boy and his mother's house is burned and the father killed by comanches. The foursome soon find themselves tracked by the braves who want the woman back and believe, erroneously, that Charlie Noon is the man who'd originally taken her from the tribe.
Directed by Vincent McEveety and written by Jim Byrnes (perhaps GUNSMOKE's best one-two punch) and scored hauntingly by John Parker (whose smouldering, native American-influenced work here far surpasses the irritating, jazzy junk he would churn out during the later seasons of DALLAS) the heat and tension are palpable. The entry feels like a movie, not just another TV-episode, and epitomizes what GUNSMOKE could be at its most polished rawness, the tone gritty, steaming and desolate.
And the episode even won an Emmy award for sound editing!
It's just great --- it does everything right. 10/10.