I'm almost afraid to review this one because as we see with other reviews, the episode seems divisive. It has more user reviews than most of the other episodes from this series, and it is interesting to me how it's struck a chord with so many people.
I am not going to give it a perfect score of 10, and I will explain why in the section below. I really did want to give it a 9, but some unevenness in the way the scenes flowed (or didn't flow) into each other prevented me from scoring it a 9. I think an 8 is still a good score, and in many respects I did like and appreciate the attempt to create an episode centered on pioneer women.
Okay, some of the problems I had with how it turned out...I think it's too ambitious with too many characters and stories, and as a result, we are not able to ever concentrate on one of them very long. It's clear to me that writer Jean Holloway actually had ideas for multiple episodes.
It would have been better in my opinion if Virginia Christine's character, for instance, had her own episode. She just leaves with her husband at the 18-minute mark and we are told later she probably was killed. Also, the young bride who rode off and ended up dead because of an accident probably needed her own episode, because we really don't see her conflict enough and her husband now a widower seems to vanish from the story as soon as she's dead. There is not even a scene where McCullough goes back to tell him that his wife's gone.
Likewise, I felt that there was much more the writing could have tapped into with Beulah Bondi's character. Why was she really going on this second late-in-life journey to the west? It was said she'd gone west as a young woman. How did she end up east again. What happened to her husband. Why did she seem to be traveling alone. Etc. Bondi's character starts as the main focus but then gets backgrounded when the emphasis suddenly switches to Jan Clayton's character in the second half.
As for Clayton, she's wonderful in this episode...but there is really no foreshadowing that she will go mad and even be the type of woman who'd set fire to a wagon. If she'd been given more screen time in the beginning, besides just playing the piano, we would have understood her better so that her later actions don't come out of left field.
As I said, there seem to be too many guest characters and plots in this episode all competing for screen time and viewer attention. Then the writer has to try to shoehorn Charlie and Bill into the action, but seems to be at a loss for how to genuinely include them so we get some throwaway comic relief with Charlie eavesdropping when Bondi tells the kids about Robin Hood and Maid Marian, with Bill scolding Charlie to get dinner ready.
I did not have a problem with McCullough basically taking Major Adams' role in this episode. I rather liked his interactions with Jan Clayton's character. Perhaps because Robert Horton's passion was musical theater, the main reason he quit the series later, and since Ms. Clayton was a star of musical theater on Broadway, their interactions seem genuine on screen.
Overall, I think the intentions behind this episode were good...but I feel writer Jean Holloway was attempting to do something a bit too ambitious with all these characters...and if each woman had been given her own episode over the course of a given season...or at the very least, this had been expanded into a two-part special, we would have gone more in-depth with some of the characters and all their stories would have been told fully.
Incidentally, long-time Paramount director Mitchell Leisen directed this episode of Wagon Train. He was known as a director of women's films. And he had previously directed Beulah Bondi in REMEMBER THE NIGHT (1940) where she had played Fred MacMurray's mother.
2 out of 2 found this helpful.
Was this review helpful? Sign in to vote.
Permalink
