Over the past week I've been checking out sample episodes of
several 1950's TV westerns that I've never had the chance to see before
Encore's Western Channels made it a painfully simple push-button matter. Until
now the only one of these shows that I had been exposed to was the excellent
Have Gun, Will Travel because that show was championed years ago by a dear
friend, Jack Daves. From what I've seen so far HGWT remains the top of the heap
but I'm willing to see more. Many more! In my childhood I had seen a number of
the of the 1960's color westerns like The Big Valley and Bonanza in reruns but
most of the early half-hour format black & white shows are a blind spot
I've been itching to scratch for a while.
First up was Matt Dillon which turns out to be an alternate
titling of the first six seasons of Gunsmoke from 1955 to 1961. The show was
shown under this title in syndication for some reason and that seems to be the
version Encore has for broadcast. After 1961 the show switched to hour length
shows and then to color in 1966. I had caught some color episodes as a kid but
had not been too impressed then but I found the half hour variety more
interesting. That may be because in the ensuing years I've become a big fan of
the original radio version of Gunsmoke with Marshall Dillon played by the
awesome William Conrad. The black & white shows feel more like the radio
show and therefore seem more to my taste. As an added bonus one of the guest
stars in the first Matt Dillon episode I saw (Cow Doctor) was the young Tommy Kirk proving that he was one hell of an actor - possibly from birth! This show was made in 1956 and Kirk hit the
big time that year playing one of the Hardy Boys for Disney and his career was
off and running.
Next up was The Life & Legend of Wyatt Earp which does
its best to standardize and formalize the events of the Earp family of lawmen
into easily digestible chunks of occasional brushes with the Clanton gang.
Without any knowledge of the historical reality of the situation I suspect the
show could be taken as pretty good on its merits and I enjoyed it on that
level. But the simplification of the ongoing conflicts between the two groups
seems a little too clean for me to watch more than a couple of episodes. The
cast is quite good though lead by Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt and solid character
actor John Anderson as Virgil Earp.
3 comments:
Some of my favorites are The Rifleman, The Virginian, Wanted Dead or Alive and The Rebel. I need to see HGWT because I really like Richard Boone.
I have seen The Rifleman and liked it and I have a Wanted Dead or Alive on deck. Don't know The Rebel. I'll have to seek it out.
The Rebel has Nick Adams in it. Metv plays it every Saturday as part of an all day Western marathon. I don't know if you get Metv and/or the schedules are the same.
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