User Reviews

A few familiar names and faces from the big screen are in this Rawhide episode. Lon Chaney, Jr., Alan Marshal, and Marie Windsor are in the cast of this Rawhide story about a Confederate veteran colonel Marshal who has built a replica of his mansion in Virginia, but dreams about leading a filibustering expedition to Panama which at that time was a part of Colombia.

Marshal is really quite off his rocker but has a good line which he uses on Eric Fleming's drovers most of them Confederate veterans. Marie Windsor is his wife and she uses her charms to help him along. She and Gil Favor have history back when she was the finest entertainer in the finest saloon in New Orleans.

She's most effective in dealing with Lon Chaney, Jr., who has recycled his Lennie Small character. He's even got an orphan calf as a pet to take the place of those rabbits.

There's a bit poignancy with the death of Ralph Reed a young kid from Boston who drowns trying to cross a river.

A bit of the old South with a touch of Of Mice And Men are the ingredients for this Rawhide episode.

One of 1959's earliest episodes, "Incident on the Edge of Madness" guest stars longtime Western heavy Lon Chaney as Jesse Childress, an uneducated cowhand who decides to switch from Gil Favor's hard working outfit to forming a new Confederacy on behalf of Panama, led by Favor's former Confederate Colonel, Warren Millett (Alan Marshal). The unloved Childress, who is caring for a newborn calf of no use to the herd, also becomes infatuated with Millett's wife Narcie (Marie Windsor), the main inducement for several cowhands hoping for something better, but Favor remembers what kind of man the Colonel was, trying to dissuade more men from deserting him. Things get out of hand when Millett attempts to convince Favor, his former Lieutenant, who is trying to forget the recent conflict, to help him pay for his new army by robbing a stagecoach. Eventually, Childress himself rebels against the duplicitous Narcie, and puts her crazed husband out of his misery. Clint Eastwood's Rowdy has even less to do here than Paul Brinegar's Wishbone. Lovely Marie Windsor had a vast number of TV credits, and had played villain John Carradine's wife in a 1957 episode of CHEYENNE, "Decision at Gunsight." Among his many TV Westerns, Chaney would return for a second RAWHIDE, "Incident at Spider Rock," in 1963.