User Reviews

OUTLAWS – "Thirty a Month" – 1960 This is the first episode of the 1960- 1962 western series, OUTLAWS. The series is set in the Oklahoma Territory. Barton MacLane is in charge of a pair of Marshals who police the area. Don Collier and Jock Gaynor play the Deputy Marshals.

Collier and Gaynor have just returned to town to report to MacLane. They have been on a fruitless chase for the manager of the local bank. The man had pilfered the bank funds and vanished.

Also hitting town, are the hands off a just completed cattle drive with their pay burning a hole in their pockets. One of the men, Steve Forrest, heads straight to the bank. He is finished with the life of a hand. He has been saving his pay for the last 10 years. He intends to buy a ranch and raise cattle himself.

Forrest finds the bank padlocked and a closed sign on the door. He asks a passing man what is going on. Forrest is devastated when he hears the news about the manager. He heads off to talk to the law. "Nothing we can do till, or if we catch the man." Collier tells Forrest. "We just got back from 3 days on his trail with no luck." Forrest hangs his head and wanders out and down the street.

Three of Forrest's fellow cowpunchers, Gary Walberg, Warren Oates and Robert Culp are living it up at the saloon. Booze, girls and some poor gambling skills soon have all their pay gone. All three end up in the town jail on drunk and disorderly.

Released the next morning, the three head for the stables. They see Forrest sitting under a tree staring at the ground. They ask Forrest if he needs hands for his new ranch. Forrest tells them about the manager and the stolen funds. " I don't want to spend another 10 years to save up four thousand dollars. There must be a way to do it." The 4 men all sit and wish aloud for better times. The oldest, Walberg, recalls his days years before when he rode for a bit with the Dalton boys robbing trains etc.

Needless to say the old light-bulb goes on in Forrest's head. They should all pull a payroll robbery of a train. Walberg and Oates are game though Culp is a tad reluctant. The other three finally talk him into joining the enterprise.

They know the regular Friday train carries a payroll on it. They plan on stopping the train at a small station outside of town. They stop the train and hold the engine crew under guard. Forrest forces the conductor to call the payroll guard to open the freight car door. He does, but has a rifle handy, which he pulls on Forrest. Forrest drills the man right through the head.

He then tells the conductor to open the safe. It turns out though that only the guard knew the combination. The four-some now decide to blow open the safe.

Oates is not at all happy with how things are now going. A robbery, OK, but murder? He grabs Culp and suggests that Culp, Walberg and himself beat the feet. Culp says it is too late as murder has been done.

The blast rips open one of the safe doors. All that is there is a bag of coins. The paper money is still locked inside. Bad luck on top of bad luck as they used all their explosives. They take the coins and ride off. A days hard ride later they stop at a small town general store. They need food and supplies.

The owner, Dub Taylor, senses something is wrong and says so. Forrest belts him and grabs up the supply sack. They race for their horses to scurry out of town. Taylor however gives Oates both barrels of a shotgun before Oates is out of range. Everything continues to go downhill as far as the robbers are concerned. The townsfolk hear of the robbery and the $5,000 reward offered by the railroad for the capture of the bandits. First, a wire is sent to the Marshal's office. Then a posse rides out to "collect" the reward.

The posse loses interest in catching the bandits when two of them are shot dead. The brisk exchange of gunfire also results in the death of robber Walberg. Collecting the dead, the posse heads home. They meet Marshal's Collier and Gaynor on the road and point them the right way.

The badly wounded Oates is slowing the remaining trio down. Collier and Gaynor quickly catch up which results in another exchange of rounds. This time Forrest catches a round. Culp is bent over Oates as he mumbles, "I thought it would be fun to be an outlaw." Oates then dies.

Culp yells out to the Lawmen that he gives up. The wounded Forrest staggers off in the other direction. He looks out over the countryside and says, "All I wanted was a piece of land." Then he drops to the ground, dead.

After burying Oates and Forrest, Culp says to Collier, "All we got was $120 in coins for the four of us. $30 each, the same as we make working cattle every month."

Great episode with an outstanding guest star cast. Change the era to 1948-55 and make it about truckers or such, and it would be a cracker-jack noir. (B/W)

What a treasure "Thirty a Month" turned out to be, lurking inconspicuously as the 150th episode on Mill Creek's 150-episode Essential TV Westerns DVD box set. Anything with Steve Forrest, Robert Culp, and Warren Oates individually is worth watching, but to have all three titanic talents together in one episode of a 1960 Western series is a treat indeed.

OUTLAWS aired on NBC from 1960-62. Based on the high quality writing and acting, I wish Timeless Media Group/Shout Factory would corral all 50 episodes for a DVD release. The show is set in Oklahoma Territory circa the 1870s and ostensibly stars United States Marshal Frank Caine and his two deputies, Will Foreman and Heck Martin. The regular cast of OUTLAWS, however, is relegated to the bleachers. Barton MacLane as Caine gets only a couple short scenes while Don Collier and Jock Gaynor as the deputies are allotted a little more screen time, but are still playing second fiddle to the outlaws of the title.

Trail boss Rance Hollister returns from another successful cattle drive and informs his boss he'll be leaving his employ. It took him ten years, but he's managed to save $4,000 and will now fulfill his dream of buying a spread of land in a beautiful Oklahoma valley. Rance strides to the bank and finds it closed, soon learning it was robbed with little chance of the money ever being recovered. In a moment, Rance sees his ten years of thrift and privation come to naught. And he snaps like a dry twig.

His three trail hands, meanwhile, are whooping it up in a saloon and invariably end up broke and in a brawl. After being dressed down by Marshal Caine, they meet up with Rance, who is brooding in the forest. Rance shares his story and his plans to rob a train. After some persuasion, Brazos (Walberg) and Billy (Oates) throw in with him, with Sam (Culp) only reluctantly signing on. Things go from bad to worse and the show closes just as it opened, with a prayer of intercession over the graves of fallen friends.

Forrest, Culp, and Oates are all excellent as they always were. Each brought something to his role that made his character fuller and three dimensional, especially Oates as the wounded and dying Billy. The big surprise was Gary Walberg as Brazos. Walberg, best known as the poker playing Speed on THE ODD COUPLE and Lt. Frank Monahan on QUINCY, M.E., is convincingly made up to play an old coot and blowhard who boasts of having rode with the Dalton Gang. At first glance I thought it was Ross Martin presaging his WILD, WILD WEST disguises. Walberg has a couple exceptional scenes: one where he tries in vain to convince Culp that Rance is insane and so they should abandon him, and a second when Brazos is wounded and abandoned and musters the courage for a "last stand" against the trigger-happy posse. His muttered soliloquy in the face of death is well delivered and well acted.

Are outlaws born or made? No easy answer is given in this episode. Rance was the only real outlaw. Brazos and Billy just tagged along for the anticipated joyride. Culp acknowledges later that the prospect of easy money eroded his initial resistance. Nobody factored murder into the bargain. Would Rance have gone bad had his $4,000 been awaiting him in the bank? Maybe not, but he was a flawed character regardless of circumstances. Rance didn't pass on whooping it up in town and "buying ladies drinks" (nudge, nudge) after cattle drives out of moral uprightness; he admits he planned to do all that once he had his spread. When at Ruby's he notices Squires is missing, Rance knows instinctively that Squires is double crossing them to the law. He could think like a criminal. And he stiffs Ruby of the $40, a small price for saving Billy's life and harboring fugitives. Rance was going to shoot the wounded Billy like an animal just because he couldn't travel. These were shortcomings already in the man that were only made manifest by circumstances.

Conversely, Sam is the genuinely compassionate one, the repentant one. His loyalty to Billy outweighed everything, even his fear of being gunned down by Rance. Sam was loyal to Rance as well, rebuffing Brazos' recommendation that they cut n' run from Rance after the murder of the guard. Sam intervened to save the unconscious train conductor when Rance left him in the train car to be blown up with dynamite, and he stopped Rance from killing Billy. Robert Culp did an outstanding job as Sam, playing him as a man tormented and torn. The prayer he utters over the graves at the end is profound and a perfect ending. My prayer was that justice would be tempered with mercy when Sam stood trial (and that the conductor testifies on his behalf).

Also in the cast was Howard McNear as that grateful conductor. McNear was winding down playing Doc Adams on the GUNSMOKE radio program and a year away from playing Floyd on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW. Clinton Sundberg is also excellent as an oily double crosser. Great direction is evident when after the storekeeper reads the report on the fugitives the camera pans to and lingers on Sundberg's face, his trembling lips rereading the report as his mind is concocting the con job. An apoplectic Dub Taylor played the storekeeper and sure brought enthusiasm to his role. Claire Carleton as Ruby Starr, a hard-bitten woman of the West, was another highlight.

It was almost anticlimactic when Deputies Foreman and Martin rode up at the end. By the time they arrived justice had mostly already dealt its winning hand. A nice touch that some may find corny was the biblical allusion to Moses, with Rance allowed to gaze upon the "Promised Land" but not enter it. One almost feels sorry for him. Almost.