GUNSMOKE

[Snarky Oracle!]

So many of the half-hour episodes just border on The Stupid -- there's frequently almost no story. Somebody gets shot in the Long Branch in every episode, usually in the first scene, and Marshal Dillon gives a posing speech about morality & toughness (which usually contradict), with somebody else dying, and the closing credits roll.

Nobody quite knows why that week's shooters are mad. Just that they are. And Matt offers up a philosophical explanation that usually doesn't make much sense, a speech for which he'd probably get beaten up in real life.

Occasionally, the installment is better. But the earliest ones lean towards being narratively rather pathetic.

The very first episode ever filmed is "Hack Prine" and you can tell it -- the acting is as wooden as the livery stable, and the studio sets are different. In fact, the entry is so stiff and clunky its airing was delayed by six months in the 1955-'56 season. (The B&W noir camerawork is quite nice, however).

The problem with these early GUNSMOKE episodes probably comes from the fact that radio scripts (which began in 1952) were used for the television show. And that doesn't always translate. Radio was a more intimate medium back then, and the audience had to visualize the action. When that action has to be realized on camera, the same script and its holes may not hold together. And often doesn't.

On the upside, outside of Dodge, everyone lives in a decrepit hovel (which seems realistic). And there are a collection of hovels the viewer finds acceptable... But by the time the series turns to color in its final decade, all you see is that damned house with that damned barn to its right, and we're supposed to pretend it's a different place each week.


"He had the biggest gun in The West, Chester. And I'll never forget him..."

 

[Snarky Oracle!]

I just saw a Season 1 episode with future super-producer Aaron Spelling (who started out as an actor) playing a mentally-challenged guitar-strumming fellow, Weed Pendle, who keeps getting roughed-up, his instrument smashed and his mule disrespected with paint, some of the menacing thugs trying to hang him for a murder in which he wasn't involved.

I guess for a late-'50s western, topics like mental retardation and the white man's decimation of "Indians" and recurrent treaty breaking -- were progressive in nature. Today, all that doesn't quite read... The early, half-hour GUNSMOKEs, the series at its ratings peak, just tend to come off as self-conscious and posing, almost like unfinished rough-cuts, the endings forced and arbitrary. Made more obvious by the scripts' attempts to make Marshal Dillon self-aware and introspective, Matt's brief, contemplative monologues something Jim Arness seemed to have some discomfort in playing.

In the '90s, the TVLAND cable network recurrently ran promos for GUNSMOKE referring to it as "the classic Aaron Spelling western" for years, although Spelling had nothing to do with the show other than his one episode appearance. And, apparently, no one ever told TVLAND of their error. Maybe I should have called somebody.