Incident of the Captive Dec 16, 1960
Incident of the Buffalo Soldier Jan 6, 1961
Incident of the Broken Word Jan 20, 1961
Incident at the Top of the World Jan 27, 1961
On trend of famous series is that often their best years are the second and third years, when the writers have figured out what makes the show work and what doesn't but they still have fresh story ideas and the original cast is still in place. For both Wagon Train and Rawhide, I find that I'm liking the second and third year episodes more than the first.
Another trend is that lesser or clichéd characters will tend to be given more attention in episodes and their characters are made stronger or at least more interesting. The next Wagon Train I will review is called 'Chuck Wooster, Wagon Master' and the first Rawhide I'm doing here is about Mushy, Wishbone's assistant. He does the introduction to the show and it's all about him as his formidable mother, (played by Mercedes McCambridge, no less), comes to 'rescue' him from the trail drive, a rough existence he's obviously not equipped for. She may be right. He tries his hand at being a drover to prove he belongs and winds up falling off his horse. The drovers decide to set up a situation to make Mushy, (real name "Harkness Mushgrove III"), look like a hero: some guys would kidnap Mom and Mushy would go to the rescue. Except Mom was in a stagecoach that had been robbed and could recognize one of the robbers. So they take over the kidnapping and Mushy, thinking that they are going to purposely lose the resulting fight to him, becomes unusually heroic. There's a similar Gunsmoke episode "Marshall Proudfoot" with Chester as the hero. I think the Rawhide people hoped Mushy would become their equivalent of Chester but it never happened, in part because James Murdock was no Dennis Weaver. Instead Mushy reminds me more of "Ruby" in Upstairs Downstairs, where Mrs. Bridges, like Wishbone, never seems to have anything good about her assistant but feels a motherly sense of protection whenever anyone else treats her poorly. Wishbone does the same for Mushy.
Incident of the Buffalo Soldier is probably the best Rawhide episode I've seen so far. It features Woody Strode, an actor and man of great presence and dignity but also capable of very intelligence and knowing performances. He plays an ex-slave who found the army a new kind of slavery. His rebelliousness has held his career back. He gets into a fight with a fellow "buffalo soldier" and kills the man with his own knife and steals Rowdy Yate's horse to escape. Rowdy has been at the fort delivering cattle the Army has bought to give to the Kiowa Indians for food - and something to hunt. Woody outwardly expresses contempt for the Indians - as he does for everyone, but seems to have some sympathy for their plight. The Army patrol that is after him has orders to shoot to kill. Rowdy wants to get there first and does. At this time it becomes similar to the excellent Have Gun Will Travel "The Outlaw" in which Paladin has to bring in Charles Bronson. Paladin falls over a cliff and Bronson can now escape but finds that he can't leave the man he has come to respect behind. That's what happens here. When Strode softens and comes back to help Rowdy, it proves his undoing as he has to summon the patrol to help and hey shoot him. No happy ending was imposed, making this different from most TV shows and movies of the period.
This is Rowdy's best episode yet, allowing him to emerge from his "wet behind the years" persona. This may also have been at the actor's insistence or the producer's feeling that they had a star on their hands.
This was the height of Strode's stardom, coming between his turn as a Roman slave forced to fight Spartacus and another Army sergeant accused of murder in 'Sergeant Rutlidge'. This is fully as good as either.
The Broken Word is a tangled web. Favor has agreed with a local rancher, played by, of all people EG Marshall, (soon to be playing Lawrence Preston on "The Defenders"), to buy 200 head of cattle. The problem is, he has less than 200 head because his cattle are dying of anthrax, which has already killed 20 of them and also his ranch hand. Ol' EG doesn't want Favor to know this because he wants the money favor will pay him, $1200.00: $6 a head, so he can fulfill his promise to take his pretty young wife, (Gloria Talbot) to live in a St. Louis mansion with servants and pretty dresses, etc. That would be $27,558.71 today, (the ranch hand's gravestone says he died in 1869). Living as he described seems like a pipe dream but that's what this guy does: dream and commit crimes to try to make his dreams come true. When the doctor, played, ironically, by a Perry Mason judge, Morris Ankrum, discovers the disease, Marshall kills him to silence him, knowing that by agreeing to sell the cattle already makes him guilty of murder.
On the other end of things, Favor has a drover, played by Dick York, (four years prior to 'Bewitched' but shortly after he would have hurt his back filing 'They Came to Cordura' in 1959), who refuses to drink alcohol even when Wishbone is treating him for an injury. We later learn that York stopped drinking when, having lost contact with reality through drink, he shot and - he thinks - killed his finance. He bolted after doing that and has been on the move ever since. In one of those convenient television ironies, he did not kill his lady love - just left her using a cane - and she married EG! People mocked her and mocked him for marrying someone so much younger and that's his motivation for getting her happiness and the both of them living in high society, even if it involves a series of murders. Dick comes by the ranch when he learns she is there but she refuses to leave EG for him. He then goes to the local town to drink away his sorrows, (another broken promise - to himself). He winds up in a fight and wounds himself. EG takes him to the town doctor - who has already killed - and then tells the sheriff that Dick must have done it. The sheriff jails Dick but wonders why the doctor's body was so cold. EG then decides kill the sheriff and have Dick blamed for it. At this point, he runs out of silk for his web. You have to make the best of reality, not try to rearrange it to create a fantasy.
The Top of the World is where Robert Culp is when he takes his morphine, which he started using to recover from serious war wounds. He used to be a drover, (did they have cattle drives before the war?), and his doctor thinks it would be therapeutic for him to return to that profession. He's presently on three pills a day and is trying to get down to one. He gets Favor to sign him on but not tell the other men what his problem is. He winds up getting one man injured but save his life. The man's replacement, (played by the excellent Paul Carr), is the callow son of a man who was killed fighting along side Culp in the war: he sort of hero worships him. Culp, determined to get over his addiction, gives Carr his pills and tells him not to give him one no matter what. The next day, Culp begs Carr for one and Carr follows orders and refuses him. The desperate Culp shoots him dead. The cattle bolt and Culp, (predictably), dies a hero's death trying to stop the stampede. It's a very good character study.
Favor makes a good speech describing what Culp has gone through and you wonder if his own experiences having his face undergo plastic surgery after war service might have given the words an extra depth to Eric Fleming.
On trend of famous series is that often their best years are the second and third years, when the writers have figured out what makes the show work and what doesn't but they still have fresh story ideas and the original cast is still in place. For both Wagon Train and Rawhide, I find that I'm liking the second and third year episodes more than the first.
Another trend is that lesser or clichéd characters will tend to be given more attention in episodes and their characters are made stronger or at least more interesting. The next Wagon Train I will review is called 'Chuck Wooster, Wagon Master' and the first Rawhide I'm doing here is about Mushy, Wishbone's assistant. He does the introduction to the show and it's all about him as his formidable mother, (played by Mercedes McCambridge, no less), comes to 'rescue' him from the trail drive, a rough existence he's obviously not equipped for. She may be right. He tries his hand at being a drover to prove he belongs and winds up falling off his horse. The drovers decide to set up a situation to make Mushy, (real name "Harkness Mushgrove III"), look like a hero: some guys would kidnap Mom and Mushy would go to the rescue. Except Mom was in a stagecoach that had been robbed and could recognize one of the robbers. So they take over the kidnapping and Mushy, thinking that they are going to purposely lose the resulting fight to him, becomes unusually heroic. There's a similar Gunsmoke episode "Marshall Proudfoot" with Chester as the hero. I think the Rawhide people hoped Mushy would become their equivalent of Chester but it never happened, in part because James Murdock was no Dennis Weaver. Instead Mushy reminds me more of "Ruby" in Upstairs Downstairs, where Mrs. Bridges, like Wishbone, never seems to have anything good about her assistant but feels a motherly sense of protection whenever anyone else treats her poorly. Wishbone does the same for Mushy.
Incident of the Buffalo Soldier is probably the best Rawhide episode I've seen so far. It features Woody Strode, an actor and man of great presence and dignity but also capable of very intelligence and knowing performances. He plays an ex-slave who found the army a new kind of slavery. His rebelliousness has held his career back. He gets into a fight with a fellow "buffalo soldier" and kills the man with his own knife and steals Rowdy Yate's horse to escape. Rowdy has been at the fort delivering cattle the Army has bought to give to the Kiowa Indians for food - and something to hunt. Woody outwardly expresses contempt for the Indians - as he does for everyone, but seems to have some sympathy for their plight. The Army patrol that is after him has orders to shoot to kill. Rowdy wants to get there first and does. At this time it becomes similar to the excellent Have Gun Will Travel "The Outlaw" in which Paladin has to bring in Charles Bronson. Paladin falls over a cliff and Bronson can now escape but finds that he can't leave the man he has come to respect behind. That's what happens here. When Strode softens and comes back to help Rowdy, it proves his undoing as he has to summon the patrol to help and hey shoot him. No happy ending was imposed, making this different from most TV shows and movies of the period.
This is Rowdy's best episode yet, allowing him to emerge from his "wet behind the years" persona. This may also have been at the actor's insistence or the producer's feeling that they had a star on their hands.
This was the height of Strode's stardom, coming between his turn as a Roman slave forced to fight Spartacus and another Army sergeant accused of murder in 'Sergeant Rutlidge'. This is fully as good as either.
The Broken Word is a tangled web. Favor has agreed with a local rancher, played by, of all people EG Marshall, (soon to be playing Lawrence Preston on "The Defenders"), to buy 200 head of cattle. The problem is, he has less than 200 head because his cattle are dying of anthrax, which has already killed 20 of them and also his ranch hand. Ol' EG doesn't want Favor to know this because he wants the money favor will pay him, $1200.00: $6 a head, so he can fulfill his promise to take his pretty young wife, (Gloria Talbot) to live in a St. Louis mansion with servants and pretty dresses, etc. That would be $27,558.71 today, (the ranch hand's gravestone says he died in 1869). Living as he described seems like a pipe dream but that's what this guy does: dream and commit crimes to try to make his dreams come true. When the doctor, played, ironically, by a Perry Mason judge, Morris Ankrum, discovers the disease, Marshall kills him to silence him, knowing that by agreeing to sell the cattle already makes him guilty of murder.
On the other end of things, Favor has a drover, played by Dick York, (four years prior to 'Bewitched' but shortly after he would have hurt his back filing 'They Came to Cordura' in 1959), who refuses to drink alcohol even when Wishbone is treating him for an injury. We later learn that York stopped drinking when, having lost contact with reality through drink, he shot and - he thinks - killed his finance. He bolted after doing that and has been on the move ever since. In one of those convenient television ironies, he did not kill his lady love - just left her using a cane - and she married EG! People mocked her and mocked him for marrying someone so much younger and that's his motivation for getting her happiness and the both of them living in high society, even if it involves a series of murders. Dick comes by the ranch when he learns she is there but she refuses to leave EG for him. He then goes to the local town to drink away his sorrows, (another broken promise - to himself). He winds up in a fight and wounds himself. EG takes him to the town doctor - who has already killed - and then tells the sheriff that Dick must have done it. The sheriff jails Dick but wonders why the doctor's body was so cold. EG then decides kill the sheriff and have Dick blamed for it. At this point, he runs out of silk for his web. You have to make the best of reality, not try to rearrange it to create a fantasy.
The Top of the World is where Robert Culp is when he takes his morphine, which he started using to recover from serious war wounds. He used to be a drover, (did they have cattle drives before the war?), and his doctor thinks it would be therapeutic for him to return to that profession. He's presently on three pills a day and is trying to get down to one. He gets Favor to sign him on but not tell the other men what his problem is. He winds up getting one man injured but save his life. The man's replacement, (played by the excellent Paul Carr), is the callow son of a man who was killed fighting along side Culp in the war: he sort of hero worships him. Culp, determined to get over his addiction, gives Carr his pills and tells him not to give him one no matter what. The next day, Culp begs Carr for one and Carr follows orders and refuses him. The desperate Culp shoots him dead. The cattle bolt and Culp, (predictably), dies a hero's death trying to stop the stampede. It's a very good character study.
Favor makes a good speech describing what Culp has gone through and you wonder if his own experiences having his face undergo plastic surgery after war service might have given the words an extra depth to Eric Fleming.