"Fair Game" (1960), a half-hour episode of the western series, "The Rebel," has enough elements in common with Quentin Tarantino's new film, THE HATEFUL EIGHT (2015), to make me think that Tarantino must have seen this episode at some point in his long history of feverish viewing and filed it away to use as a jumping-off point for his three-hour western drama about a brewing conflict among eight motley characters who become stranded in a saloon during a blizzard and get mixed up in a welter of hidden agendas. "Fair Game" takes place at a stagecoach way station as a group of passengers headed for Laredo spend the night before a scheduled departure in the morning. One of the passengers is a bounty hunter and another is his prisoner, a beautiful woman in handcuffs named Cynthia Kenyon and played by Patricia Medina. Johnny Yuma (Nick Adams), the rebel of the title, has lost the use of his horse and is eager to get to Laredo for a job. Two stage employees are on hand as well as two other passengers, a gambler, played by James Drury (future star of "The Virginian"), and a drummer (salesman), played by Stacy Harris. When one of the group is poisoned after being first to drink from a bucket of water put out by the station master, suspicion falls on the others and Yuma takes charge to make sure there are no more misdeeds and find out who's at the bottom of it.
It's a tidy little tale of suspense and it takes one sixth of the time as Tarantino's film, which offers, of course, a much more intricate plot and a much greater degree of spectacle, violence and bloodshed. This episode was directed by Irvin Kershner, who made his name 20 years later with the second Star Wars film, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.