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Date Posted: 08:45:35 06/03/12 Sun
Author: SWC
Subject: The Glory Era: 1959
Hollywood trotted out 14 more western series in 1959. As a whole they were a bit better than the previous year, with two enduring classics and a handful of others that you may recall. There will also be some you don’t remember because they weren’t around very long. The trend of giving the hero some kind of a gimmick continued, including one guy who wore mirrors in his hat to shine the sun into the eyes of opposing gunmen.
The Alaskans
Roger Moore was briefly a Warner’s contract player in the late 50’s before he went back to England to become “The Saint”. One of his assignments was this short-lived series in which he co-starred with Jeff York and Dorothy Provine with Ray Danton and John Dehner as the villains. They were all part of the 1898 Alaska Gold Rush. The only thing on U-Tube about the show is this odd collection of introductions and credits plus commercials. The poster said “.Would have uploaded the whole episode, but it isn’t that good.” I guess that says it all. At least you get the Kingston Trio singing about 7-UP, along with surely the worst of the Warner Brothers’ musical themes. Nobody had “The Fever” for this one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBUiKu_DqKM
Black Saddle
Several years before playing the rough, gruff Nick Barkley on “The Big Valley”, Peter Breck played a western lawyer who rode around on a horse with the titular accoutrement, so called because of the black law books he had in his saddlebag. Interestingly Breck’s character, Clay Culhane, hangs up his gun to become a lawyer after all his brothers are killed in gunfights, (he had live brothers on “The Big Valley“- and Richard Long was the lawyer). Local lawmen aren’t sure he’s really turned over a new leaf. But apparently he got the degree that Sugarfoot and Elfego Baca are working for. The character may have been inspired by John Wesley Hardin, one of the most notorious of the western gunmen, who, after serving a long prison sentence, passed the bar exam and became a lawyer. Most of the episodes have the title as “Client: (name of the main guest character)”. U-Tube doesn’t have the premiere, (“Client: Travers“) but it does have “Client: Peter Warren“:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgxn5g-mQko
The twist is that there isn’t one.
Bonanza
I think you’re familiar with this one.
The Deputy
Henry Fonda became the first major movie star to agree to do a TV series. He played a town Marshal who always seemed to be out of town. That’s because he’d agreed only to appear in every third episode. When he was out of town, his deputy, (played by Alan Case), a part-time lawman, (also a store-keeper), with pacifist tendencies tried to keep order. The show seemed inspired by a recent Fonda movie, “The Tin Star”,(1957), in which he played a bounty hunter helping Anthony Perkins learn to be a lawman and stand up to the bad guy, played by Neville Brand:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwqvn6qZLuE
(The whole movie- and it’s a good one- is available on U-Tube)
U-Tube doesn’t have the premiere but this is a very good episode, “The Hard Decision” :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nfWhkC6u_E
Dig the fancy guitar strumming in the song. Allen Case seems almost to be imitating Henry Fonda. Yes, the producer was Norman Lear. Everybody was doing westerns in those days. By the way, that wasn’t the actual theme for this show in the opening and closing credits of this clip. That can be heard in the clip shown under “Hotel De Paree” below.
Hotel de Paree
This one contains my favorite gimmick of all the ones that were starting to be used to try to get a western series to stand out from the rest. Earl Holliman plays a gunslinger named “Sundance”, (no, there’s no Butch Cassidy), who takes a liking to a couple of French ladies running a hotel in a small town in Colorado and winds up with a job as town Marshal. Besides being a fast gun, he had a series of mirrors attached to his hat that he used to direct the sun into the eyes of his opponents. On a cloudy day, he just relied on being fast and accurate, just like everybody else.
The only thing on U-Tube about this show is the opening credits, which appear at 5:10 of this compilation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5mQUMsDYMk
Most of the other 1959 westerns are there, too.
Johnny Ringo
Johnny Ringo was drunken ill-tempered bad guy who, except for a brief turn as a constable in Loyal Valley, Texas in 1876, operated on the dark side of the law. His body was found with a bullet through the head and his finger on the trigger of his gun, which had one round expended. There have been claims for various gunmen, including Doc Holiday, to have killed him but he seems to have done himself in after a dissolute life.
This has little to do with the 1959 TV series, created by Aaron Spelling in one of his earliest projects for Dick Powell’s production company. Here Johnny has given up his gun slinging ways to become Sheriff in a small Arizona town, (of course, he would have had to have been sheriff of the country: a town has a marshal). Don Durant played the newly minted lawman. He also had a gimmick: a six shooter that had an extra barrel that fired a shotgun shell.
This was another show that had it’s pilot as an episode of Powell’s “Zane Grey Theater”, “The Loner”. U-Tube doesn’t have that nor the premiere. But it does have the last episode, with guest star Robert Culp. Don Durant had been the guest star on the last “Trackdown”, the previous spring.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoJwmOEcJpk
Laramie
This show had one of the loveliest musical themes of any TV series. It just has a warmth to it that I find very appealing. It was not one of the shows my parents, (and thus I) watched in those days- I’ve just heard the theme since. Those who did watch it said that it had quite an edge to it in the beginning, especially Robert Fuller as a moody gunman, but that it became softer and more sentimental, (and more popular) as the show progressed.
John Smith, (real name Robert Van Orden: I guess he figured the most common name imaginable would get him more attention), played Slim Sherman, who is left with his younger brother to manage their father’s ranch when he’s killed in a gunfight. Andy Sherman was played by Bobby Crawford, Johnny‘s, (“The Rifleman”), look-alike older, (by 2 years), and less talented brother. They supplemented their income, (and the story lines) by getting a government contract to be a relay station on a stage line. They were assisted by a handyman named Jonesy, (Hoagy Carmichael, of all people), and later by housekeeper Daisy Cooper, (Spring Byington). Robert Fuller played a drifter with a fast gun they persuaded to settle down with them and help them run the place. Crawford and Carmichael were later written out of the series and Crawford was replaced by another kid actor, Dennis Holmes.
The premiere, “Stage Stop”, comes in five parts. Here is part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMO4CW3ck_8
Here is the theme done by a full orchestra:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UijWLerVULk
Law of the Plainsman
Michael Ansara, after playing Cochise in Broken Arrow, was introduced as Sam Buckhart, a Harvard-educated Indian who returned to his homeland as, at first a deputy town Marshal and then eventually a US Marshal. This was spun off into a series. U-Tube doesn’t have the Rifleman episode, (he actually appears in two of them), but here is the premiere of the series:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNAMdxcxcl8
This is in three parts and ends abruptly without the closing credits. I suspect a wrap-up scene is also missing. The motif of the hero riding across the plains in the opening credits would be used again, most memorably in “The Cimarron Strip”. I don’t normally like the performances of children from this era- too stiff or too cute. Johnny Crawford in “The Rifleman” is a huge exception and Gina Gillespie in this is another. She became a regular and was probably intended as Crawford’s counterpart since this was a spin-off of The Rifleman. She was apparently much in demand at the time, (35 credits from 1958-1966), but did not elect to continue in the acting profession as an adult. The IMDB has a comment on her: “What a great brat!”. Probably the highlight of her career was playing the young Joan Crawford in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane”.
The Man from Blackhawk
In another search for something different the hero of this series was an insurance investigator in the old west, (did they have them?). He, (Robert Rockwell), works for the Blackhawk Insurance Company. Thus, he’s “The Man From Blackhawk”.
This one disappeared after only 23 episodes, they usually had 36 in those days) and the only evidence of it on U-Tube is the opening credit sequence which can be seen in the link under “Hotel de Paree”. hen the bad guys struck in those days they didn’t call for an insurance man.
Rawhide
One of the truly legendary western series with a theme song written by famous movie composer Dimitri Tiomkin, (supposedly he thought he was writing for a series starring Errol Flynn, not Eric Fleming), and made famous by Frankie Laine. It was similar in some ways to Wagon Train except it was going north from Texas rather than west to California and the “passengers” were cows, not people. This created the one weakness of the series: in order to tell stories regarding humans, they had to meet people along the way and interact with them in ways the crew of a trail drive would hardly have time to do. Wagon Train’s episodes were called “The _____ Story”. Rawhide’s were “Incident at _____“. The difference between those words: “story” and “incident” illustrates the problem the writers had. But if you could accept the awkward involvement of the characters in some of the incidents, you saw some of the best stories ever done for western series.
Eric Fleming was a strong lead. Clint Eastwood was the wet-behind-the-ears Rowdy Yates. Eastwood was kind of wet-behind-the-ears himself and I think he may have learned his tight-lipped acting style from Fleming. Charles Marquis Warren was the producer, as he was for Gunsmoke when it began. Warren came up with those monologues Matt Dillon did while walking through Boot Hill they used in the first couple of seasons. He had Gil Favor do the same thing from his horse in the early Rawhides.
In the premiere episode they have to take over a prison wagon, (a typically unlikely scenario for a trail drive). At one point they have to cross a river that could flood the wagon. One of the prisoners says “Drowning isn’t the most pleasant death“. Fleming, (as Gil Favor), says “I sure wouldn’t want anybody to die unpleasant”. Seven years later Eric Fleming was in a canoe in the Amazon making a movie when it capsized in a heavy current and he drowned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBDIb36rv7M
The Rebel
Nick Adams got his big shot with this series. The premise was simple: a confederate soldier didn’t find much left when the war was over and roamed the west looking for- and sometimes dealing out- some kind of justice. Adams seemed to me to resemble Steve McQueen and I often got them confused. Ironically,. Adams had been the guest star, (with Michael Landon), on the premiere episode of “Wanted Dead or Alive”. But now he had his own series. He, too had a shot gun, a sawed-off one. In black and white TV, to my young, (I would have been about 6).
U-Tube has this nicely re-mastered episode from the second season.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwwT43Dhu3M
It’s missing the famous theme song by Johnny Cash, which can be heard here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXzbmPARO9k
Riverboat
This was an interesting series about a Mississippi Riverboat called the “Enterprise”. It didn’t have any phasers or proton torpedoes. The stories more resembled “Adventures in Paradise” than “Star Trek“- it was about the passengers and the various adventures they had in their journeys up and down the great river. The one problem was that the two stars, Darren McGavin and Burt Reynolds didn’t get along. One version of it was that McGavin had studied acting much more than Reynolds and considered him an amateur. Another is that McGavin felt threatened by the young and handsome Reynolds and sought every opportunity to unnerve him or upstage him. I may be reading too much into it but in the opening credits Darren seems a lot more enthusiastic than Burt does. Burt later joked that he won the Emmy for “best performance by a man shouting down a tube”. Later, when Burt had his own show, “Hawk”, McGavin was proposed as a guest star and Burt threatened to walk off the show if he was hired. Here is the one episode I found on U-Tube, the third one, with another future star, Robert Vaughn, who is excellent here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUwyyjTUykw&feature=related
The musical score was composed by Elmer Bernstein, who the next year produced one of the most famous musical scores of all time for a movie that also had Robert Vaughn in it: “The Magnificent Seven“. This story was written by Gene Coon, who later wrote stories for that other Enterprise.
Shotgun Slade
A rival for the Man from Blackhawk was the syndicated Shotgun Slade, a western detective who hired himself out to insurance companies, banks and Well Fargo. He also hired his shotgun “a unique, custom-made two-in-one double barreled shotgun he preferred to a normal six-gun.” The upper barrel shot a shotgun shell, the lower one a rifle bullet. Brady played his character more as a Mickey Spillane private eye type than a traditional western hero. An IMDB reviewer described this as “high camp”.
This was criticized as the most violent western series but managed to last for three years. The show had an unexpectedly jazzy score which caused it to be compared to, of all things, 77 Sunset Strip, and was noted for having some usual guest stars, including Ernie Kovacs, Johnny Cash, Pappy Boyington, Crazylegs Hirsch and several members of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Here is the Ernie Kovacs episode. The guy who posted it suggested it was something he did to pay off the IRS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8Xv7XYPFFg
Sorry for the lack of pixels. This was the pilot for the show which was shown as the second episode. Wikipedia suggests that Ernie’s experiences doing this show may have inspired this famous bit for his comedy show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEEhtKdUEtU
Wichita Town
Joel McCrea followed in Henry Fonda’s footsteps, agreeing to appear in Wichita Town as Marshal Mike Dunbar, a mentor to his young deputies Ben Matheson and Rico Rodriguez. Mike had arrived in Wichita ramrodding a cattle drive and decided to stay, setting up a ranch of his own. The town needed a Marshal so he got that job as well. Ben, who doubled as a foreman at the ranch, was played by McCrea’s own son, Jody. As with the Deputy, the series was based roughly on one of McCrea’s films, “Wichita”, in which he’d played Wyatt Earp.
All U-tube has of it is the opening of the premiere show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2jaYQgEcn4
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Re: The Glory Era: 1959 [ "The Man From Blackhawk" (Insurance Company)] -- Joe H., 12:07:50 06/03/12 Sun [1]
"The Man From Blackhawk" Insurance Company? I've never heard of that before. To check out that youtube video for "Hotel de Paree" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_de_Paree starring Earl Holliman at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5mQUMsDYMk that you wrote about, thanks SWC; with credits for this Blackhawk at __:__ minutes compared to the opening credits for Hotel de Paree, which appear at 5:10 of this compilation, of back to Robert Rockwell as "Sam Logan" for "Blackhawk" over at imdb for his name and title at: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0734352/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052487/ respectfully.
Plus see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Rockwell "In the very first episode of The Adventures of Superman, he played Superman's father Jor-El. He was also seen a number of times on the television anthology series The Loretta Young Show (1958), playing Loretta Young's husband." & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_From_Blackhawk "In The Man From Blackhawk, Rockwell played Sam Logan, an insurance investigator from the Blackhawk Insurance Company. Logan would scour the West investigating claims, verifying the accuracy of them and seeking to root out fraud and dishonesty." Of I also liked George Peppard as the Insurance Bounty Hunter in "Banacek ".
In the meantime, this Western Insurance Investigator of "Blackhawk" reminds me of J.D. Cannon as Harry Briscoe in "Alias Smith and Jones" when Heyes suggested that Harry , The Bannerman Detective Agency's finest tell them that he sells insurance to farmers. (;-) http://aliassmithandjonesfanfic.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=282&Itemid=84
- - Joe, currently interested in how a Sheriff Sale bidder here in N.H. can get Title Insurance when there is a KNOWN defect in the proceedings, of my alert to the agent and underwriter putting a monkey wrench or sabot into their business of NOT being able to sell a security in the real estate market and so this fraud being investigate by State authorities, of to compare to the defect in other ways as can make you money as in this case, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-31/woman-who-couldn-t-be-intimidated-by-citigroup-wins-31-million.html or maybe given some cement boots, etc. as like in this other case: "Michael Savage on Mysterious Assassination of John Wheeler III - Aired January 4, 2011 " at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86PXVEzgnBo&feature=related of 16:07 minutes with 9,028 visits, about: this John Parsons Wheeler, 66, a former Vietnam Combat veteran - turned pacifist who was last seen in the city block of where the U.S. Attorney's Office was, but for what reason? as maybe connected to his murder, as speculated to be either that of some cyber war, or I think it might have been that he was a Whistle- blower as for somebody he was investigating for the S.E.C. of getting too close for the comfort of that individual who did not want to lose his liberty for any amount of time, of who decided that Wheeler's time was up instead.
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Re: [ Another "Blackhawk" web-page: ] -- Joe H., 14:11:49 06/03/12 Sun [1]
Here's an interesting report about the show:
"Do You Remember? . . . by Boyd Magers
http://www.westernclippings.com/remember/manfromblackhawk_doyouremember.shtml
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Re: [ "Blackhawk was too hawk*] -- Joe H., 14:44:20 06/03/12 Sun [1]
SWC, I do see a 15-second clip of the opening credits of when the black hawk turns into a man over at: "MAN FROM BLACKHAWK opening credits ABC western" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8pklNLXYC8 seen only 39 times so far.
Plus check out the violence and what replaced it on Friday nights: "This aired on ABC's 1959-'60 Friday night schedule at 8:30pm(et), for Miles Laboratories [Alka-Seltzer, One-a-Day] and R.J. Reynolds [Winston]. However, because there were complaints about the violence seen in the series, the co-sponsors decided to drop the series in favor of "THE FLINTSTONES" (in the same time period) the following season."
Yabba Dabba Doo! . . . Doo! (;-)
A BIG Dinosaur one at that!
- - Joe
* as in "Hawk" from "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century". (;-)
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Re: [ Video clips of all 37 episodes "coming soon".] -- Joe H., 14:55:34 06/03/12 Sun [1]
I see that this place of: http://www.ovguide.com/tv_season/the-man-from-blackhawk-season-1-76637 has all 37 episodes.
Episode #1 is at: http://www.ovguide.com/tv_episode/the-man-from-blackhawk-season-1-episode-1-logans-policy-205005
with "Clips coming soon..." but at what price?
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Re: [ "Blackhawk was too hawk*] -- SWC, 11:30:50 06/04/12 Mon [1]
The insurance man was too violent?
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Re: [ "Blackhawk was too hawk*] -- Joe H., 13:44:58 06/05/12 Tue [1]
LOL.
An offer the customer "can't" refuse? (;-)
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