Alias Smith and Jones

We open with a spoilerific teaser and I am at a loss to understand why, because the opening scene, when we finally get to it, is an absolute delight and grabs the attention far better than the teaser.
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This episode could have been subtitled Men Suck. Even by early 70s standards. Including, I am sorry to say, the Kid, who really needs to work on his madonna-whore complex.
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For an episode where the shooting schedule kept the main actors apart working on separate episodes, this one has a lot of virtues. We don’t see much of the Kid – frankly, we see more shots of the TNT in the wagon he’s driving – but the opening scene (after the teaser) where he and Heyes toss a coin to see which of them will guide a team of archaeologists to Devil’s Hole, and which will get himself blown to kingdom come trying to deliver TNT over bumpy roads, is as cute as a button. After careful watching, I don’t think Heyes cheats on the coin toss. He may use his own coin, but he lets the Kid look at it first and he lets him call heads or tails, and while the Kid may not know what an archaeologist is, I’m pretty sure he isn’t dumb enough to always call heads. And to be doubly fair to the Kid, the episode makes it clear that only one person in the whole town does know what archeologist means, the doctor, who’s a hobby archaeologist himself. Even the main character claiming to be an archaeologist has only a very shaky grasp of what it entails, according to the doc.

Having won the toss, Heyes goes and applies to a Mr Norman Alexander, an Englishman, for the job as guide. He draws a map that proves he knows the territory and then has to shoot a tin can to prove he can handle a gun, the other requirement for the job. His bullet knocks the can into the air, whereupon he shoots it again. He and Mr Alexander bend over the can, which sure enough has two holes in it. Heyes grins smugly. This is a great episode for Heyes smiles, we get a whole array of different ones from fake to heartfelt, smiles for manipulating people and smiles of sheer zest-for-life glee. And it’s nice to have evidence that he’s perfectly competent with a gun, much as the Kid is perfectly competent at poker.

Shortly afterwards, Heyes gets a summons from the sheriff. One of the strengths of this episode is that nothing and no one is quite what they seem, and in this case, for all that the sheriff has just been reading Heyes’s wanted poster, it turns out he actually wants to do Mr Smith a favour. He advises him not to take the guide job because the archaeologists aren’t really archaeologists and one person on the team faked an illness for purposes that are hard to discern. Heyes spends the whole scene with a hilarious expression of innocence on his face, and is terribly polite, but can’t be talked out of his $30 a day, not even by such a representative of authority as a sheriff.

The team of ostensible archaeologists consists of Mr Alexander – he of the sketchy knowledge of his subject - Mr and Mrs Finney, an ill-matched couple on their honeymoon, and a Mr Parker, who has no distinguishing features whatsoever. We subsequently learn that he is a man with enough appreciation of natural beauty not to shoot a mountain goat, but stupid enough to think of firing a gun when he’s being watched by terrifically dangerous outlaws. This is as far as his characterisation goes. I think it’s fair to say that Mr Parker is a bit of a cipher.

Heyes leads the party into the countryside around Devil’s Hole and the gang show themselves ostentatiously on a mountain ridge. Heyes offers to go and negotiate with them and is offered a fat bonus for his pains. He rides up to Kyle, who asks him how he dare show his face after the mess he got them into with Big Jim. I suppose I’m just going to have to live with the way the show is 100% committed to the Devil’s Hole gang being lovely boys who would never kill anyone, yet also wants the audience to believe that they’re dangerous outlaws who could turn on Heyes at any moment. Sure enough, ha ha, it was just a joke, we’ll leave your party alone, Heyes, you did us a favour getting rid of Big Jim (I did chuckle at the one outlaw who says “His ideas was too grandioose”). Kyle even asks after the Kid, so cut to poor Curry having a terrible time, what with the steep hills and the heavy wagon and the really terrible brakes. And that one shot of the box labelled TNT, over and over again. I won’t mention the Kid again, all his scenes are the same.

The whole not-knowing-who-anyone-really-is thing really makes the episode. I’m particularly taken with Finney, who I couldn’t figure out at all the first time I watched this. Him and his weird relationship with his wife, who he is so completely unVictorian about. And my goodness, does Heyes meet his match in Julia “Finney”! She plays the sweet innocent to perfection, while flinging herself at him from the moment they meet. Oh Joshua, will you accompany me down to the river alone in the dark? Just let me take my stockings off in front of you. Just let me hold your hand while I do so. Oh dear, I seem to have slipped, just help me out in my sopping wet clothes that are now clinging to me, would you? There isn’t a single moment you could put your finger on and say “She’s doing that deliberately!” but it all adds up to a thoroughly well-executed seduction. Grace Turner, watch and learn!

Julia even finagles things so the next day she and Mr Smith split up from the rest of the party and ride off on their own. Heyes is clearly VERY smitten with her, but he also takes the opportunity to ask her some searching questions about the things that don’t add up in her story. She admits that she and Finney aren’t married, so obviously that makes it morally entirely okay when she and Heyes then snog passionately. Although the way the camera cuts away to the flowing river, I suspect we’re meant to assume it was more than just a bit of tonsil hockey. Water is a perennial symbol of female sexuality in ASJ.

Having wangled some alone time, Heyes and Julia go into a cave (to search for dead seven-foot-tall-Indians! Get your mind out of the gutter!) And at this point I must make a digression on the subject of Heyes’s hat. For the entirety of their time in Devil’s Hole country, he hasn’t been wearing it, not even when riding. Now, as they enter the cave, it’s suddenly back, only now it has what the internet tells me are called “stampede strings”, tied almost as tightly under his chin as Clint Weaver’s weird fashionista ones in the previous episode. When they exit the cave, he’s still following the Weaver style, but then they ride off and his hat blows off. He manages to catch it (or rather, Pete Duel does, because this was clearly unscripted) and has it in his hand for the rest of the scene. After that, it’s no hat again for all the scenes in Devil’s Hole, then stampede strings again (this time worn loosely, not Weaver-fashion) for all the scenes back in town, including the reunion with the Kid. And from then on, it’s stampede strings all the way. I like to think the moment when the hat blows off was the final straw for the production team and the hat was sent off mid-shoot to get its strings attached, meaning several scenes had to be played bare-headed while they waited for it to come back. I’m not complaining. They certainly made a virtue of necessity, because Heyes is utterly gorgeous with his hair on display.

Back to the cave, hat and all. Heyes and Julia find a skeleton, Julia lets out a little shriek. Catch me going any further into a dark cave after that, even if Heyes took my hand, but Julia is willing. They find another skeleton and Julia lets out another little shriek. This skeleton is really tall and Heyes LIES DOWN NEXT TO IT so Julia can check just how tall it is. This is such a bizarre scene. I don’t care about the Indians or how tall they were or whether their hair was red or not. Also, I’m pretty sure it’s bog bodies whose hair turns red, not random skeletons in caves, but what do I know, I’m yet another person who isn’t an archaeologist.

As they exit the cave, we hear a shot. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that we immediately know it’s Parker who’s dead and Alexander who shot him because we saw Alexander making a bungled attempt earlier. I can’t help feeling it would have been more exciting if we hadn’t had this information, but them’s the breaks. Everyone converges on the spot the shot came from and they find Parker stone dead. And I know he had the personality of a paper napkin, but I think it’s really weird that Julia suggests they should bury him in the cave with the Indians. You can tell from Heyes’s “WTF?!” expression that he agrees with me. It IS weird, right? He carries right on thinking it’s weird because when Julia subsequently says she’s frightened and she’s going to stay “as close to you as I can,” he shows none of his previous enthusiasm.

Heyes puts on his leader’s hat (well, he doesn’t, because it’s off getting its stampede strings attached, but you know what I mean), and tells everyone they’re all going back to town, no arguments, because either Finney or Alexander shot Parker. Personally, he suspects Alexander because he was so quick to pin the blame on the Devil’s Hole gang, but of course he doesn’t say this out loud. Shortly afterwards, shots ring out again. This time, Finney has shot Alexander! But then it transpires that the reason Finney has an Irish accent is because he’s from Scotland Yard and he’s been sticking close to Alexander, who has stolen some diamonds, in an effort to recover the jewels. Alexander, whose real name is Ashdowne, killed Parker because they were physically similar and then planted his own ID on the body so Scotland Yard would think he was dead and stop hunting for him. And thus the mystery of the title is revealed. Oh, and Alexander invited Finney along so he’d have an eye-witness to confirm that Ashdowne really was dead and buried.

Back in town, Heyes says a fond goodbye to Julia, but this time there’s no kissing - well she kisses him, but he doesn't return it - and he makes it quite clear he has no intention of ever seeing her again. Good thing you found out about the cray-cray when you did, huh, Heyes? After she’s gone, Finney, who has been looking funny at Heyes throughout the episode, tells him being a policeman makes him a good judge of character and he can tell when a man isn’t quite what he says he is, nudge nudge, wink wink, know what I mean? Heyes says it’s a good thing Finney has to go back and look for the jewels and Finney agrees. They part on terms of mutual respect and liking, which I think is really sweet. I liked Finney, he kept me guessing to the end.

The Kid arrives back in town, utterly frazzled by his adventures with the TNT, but still in one piece. His nerves, however, are so shot to pieces that when Heyes tells him he didn’t get paid for the guide job and offers him a free punch, the Kid decks him. It happens off-screen, but judging by the sound effects, the Kid packs one hell of a wallop. Luckily, Heyes is the forgiving type. Or perhaps he isn’t, perhaps he nurses his grudge all the way to Ten Days to Tenstrike. After all, revenge is a dish best served cold.

We open with two men in a bank. Unfortunately, neither of them are Heyes and Curry. One is a rotund elderly man with a bald head and mutton-chop sideburns so vast that even Harry Flashman would consider them ostentatious. He’s the bank owner. The other is a nondescript little clerk who is putting in his candidacy for the Darwin Award. The clerk has realised that the owner, Mr Mutton Chops – sorry, Binford - has been embezzling money from the bank and figures that the middle of the night, when there are only the two of them around, is the perfect time to confront the thief and threaten to report him. Then he turns his back on him. This doesn’t seem like a promising survival strategy to me, but since this is ASJ, I figure he’ll be okay. Oops, my bad! Binford straight up shoots the guy. I’m shocked. This is a lot more murder than I was expecting In an opening scene.

Binford takes a bunch of money out of the safe, whacks himself over the head with an iron jemmy that just happens to be lying around inside the bank in case any robbers need to crowbar something open, and blows up the safe. His cunning plan is to cover his embezzlement by saying Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry robbed the bank and he managed to get a really good look at them.

This is obviously a highly undesirable state of affairs for our two heroes (I wonder if anybody has ever tried to frame them like this before? Maybe they didn’t care back when it added to their fame. Ooh, maybe the only reason people thought they were the most successful outlaws in the history of the West because so many other people carried out robberies in their name? That would explain why Heyes doesn’t live up to his reputation in the pilot). The boys decide, given their success in the Great Shell Game, that a con is the way to clear their name, so they go and enlist Soapy, who helps them out again because they previously did him a favour – this time the favour saved him from twenty years in prison, so I guess he really does owe the boys big time.

As I have mentioned before, I love a good con. Unfortunately, this isn’t one. It doesn’t help that we’re told up front that it’s a con, so there’s no mystery about exactly what our wannabe con artists are up to. Heyes and the Kid roll up at Binford’s bank disguised as miners and ask to store several rough diamonds they’ve just found in their diamond field. Binford gets all excited at the prospect of cheating these two yokels out of their claim. He proposes they sell him the diamond field for practically nothing, there’s bit of haggling and they agree. Honestly, this is a terrible con. Binford keeps trying to cheat the boys and they keep finding out but still agree to go along with his scheme. They even have to remind him to set up a consortium so he can raise the money. This isn’t reeling in a mark, this is jumping him in a dark alley, shouting “Oy, guv, wanna buy a diamond field?”

Binford does at least send the diamonds off to a swanky New York dealer to be valued, but this is another of the con’s weaknesses, because the boys have to rely on a dealer they have no influence over misvaluing the diamonds at more than ten times their actual worth. Soapy may well be right that no one in the country can accurately assess uncut diamonds, but “can’t accurately assess” is not the same as “will wildly overvalue”.

As part of the general buttering up, Binford invites the boys back to the hotel suite where he’s installed his mistress, Betsy, so she can charm them. Betsy is an unabashedly mercenary young woman who switches sides the way other people change hats and who isn’t quite as air-headed as she pretends to be. Heyes tries flirting with her, but she’s only got eyes for the Kid.

Ah well, if the plot is going to be full of holes, I shall have to get my pleasures elsewhere. And pleasures there are. One is the Kid’s scene when he swaggers over to chat up Betsy the next day, full of self-confidence after the way she was making eyes at him, only to get the brush-off. Cut to Bexy snogging a random cowboy in her room. I do like Betsy. Admittedly she shows a total lack of empathy towards the poor murdered bank clerk, but just as Heyes and the Kid have been sticking it to capitalism, Betsy is sticking it to the patriarchy. The Kid invites himself in, gets rid of the cowboy with the most unconvincing fast draw we’ve seen from him yet, and then tries to persuade Betsy to be their inside woman. He offers her €10,000 for this, which surely exceeds the minimum wage for this kind of work by a factor of about a thousand. That’s the price on your own head, Kid! I’m not sure of the remaining details because I’m so distracted by the hideousness of Betsy’s wallpaper. I realise this is the 1970s, but surely someone could have figured out how fussy it was going to look on screen?

The diamond dealership very unprofessionally stake their reputation on the rough diamonds being worth $100,000. Binford still isn’t quite sure, though. He wants to visit the diamond field himself. He takes Betsy along, plus a mining engineer to check out whether the field is legit. Weirdly, it hasn’t occurred to the boys that he might do this. They just have to hope the engineer isn’t very good at his job. Luckily for the con, he turns out not to be. Really, this episode is 50 years ahead of its time in its total lack of faith in experts.

Betsy, Binford and the engineer go crazy over all the diamonds they find. Heyes and Curry watch them, revelling in the madness like the little chaos gremlins they are. The Kid has to turn away to smother his laughter, while Heyes just blatantly stands there with a massive grin on his face, relishing how successfully he’s fucking with these people’s heads. If I wasn’t already totally smitten with these two, I would be now.

Plot follows. Binford gives the boys an advance of $50,000, which he has once again lifted from his own bank. I have to wonder who these people are who continue storing their money in a bank that’s just been robbed. Perhaps Binford invested some of his ill-gotten gains in a better safe? Once he’s handed over the money, Heyes tells him their real names. He even, completely unnecessarily, tells him about the amnesty. This was supposed to be between you, Lom and the governor, Heyes! Was your nickname at school Blabbermouth? He also tells Binford that they’ll give him the money back in exchange for clearing their names. I’m a little concerned by this – after all, Binford’s a murderer. Justice for the bank clerk!

Lom Trevors shows up, very fortuitously given that the boys didn’t think of asking him to come, to investigate whether they really were behind the bank robbery. He and Heyes hide in a room just off the Kid’s hotel room and wait for Betsy to come and see the Kid, which she does as soon as she reads in the newspaper that Binford has retracted his identification of the bank robbers. The Kid gets Betsy to admit that Binford killed the bank clerk, whereupon Lom pops out from behind the door just long enough to say, “See you in court”, then grabs the bag with the $50,000 and departs. Betsy, thinking furiously, realises Smith and Jones must actually be Heyes and Curry, then changes her mind when she realises they’ve just handed $50,000 over to a sheriff. Heyes then reprises his little impression from Wrong Train to Brimstone and tells Betsy that they are in fact Hotchkiss and Rembacker, Federal Agents. Betsy exits the room, evidently still unsure what the hell to believe, and the boys once again revel in their mindfuckery.

In the final scene we learn from Soapy’s newspaper that Binford has confessed to the murder (hooray!) but probably won’t be hanged (boo!).

And that’s it. Bit of a nothing episode all round, really, but at least not actively bad.

This episode? Sucks.

Complaining about the punishing shooting schedule, Pete Duel once said, “Ben and I are in every damn shot.” Well, not in this episode they aren’t. I hope Pete Duel enjoyed his time off, because I am about to pay a very heavy price for it.

We open (after the teaser) with a mysterious woman in a hat the size of a florist’s shop in search of Joshua Smith. She trails him from town to town in a carriage driven by six black horses that never need sleep and a coachman who can see in the dark, FINALLY catching up with him in somewhere called Garden City. The hotel receptionist won’t admit that a Mr Smith is staying there, even when offered a bribe, but the mysterious woman tricks him by saying he’s her brother. The receptionist tells her, like every other receptionist she’s asked so far, to try the poker game at the saloon. We get it, writers, Heyes likes to play poker .

The woman heads off, then turns back to say, “It’s been such a long time since I saw my brother – what does he look like?” Ok, this is a pretty funny line, but it makes absolutely no sense in the context of the story she subsequently tells Heyes, namely that Lom Trevors wants him to take her to Devil’s Hole to find her husband, who has run away for reasons too complicated to bother going into here. I mean, if there was even a grain of truth to this story, surely Lom would have given her a description of Smith/Heyes? I also notice she says “Lom Trevor” rather than Trevors, which I regard as suspicious. Heyes is deeply sceptical that Lom would give away their whereabouts (trust your instincts, Heyes!) but eventually accedes to her request, for three rather muddled motives, namely (1) He rather fancies her (the pre-Devil’s Hole writerly hints that he fancies her go absolutely nowhere and I don’t know why they bothered to include them); (2) as a favour to Lom; (3) she waves a big bundle of cash under his nose. I can’t decide, on the available evidence, whether the backstory is that Lom really did tell her how to find Heyes (but why? Especially given that the story about her husband fleeing turns out to be a barefaced lie and Lom would surely have known that) or whether she’s lying about Lom (but in that case, how did she know Heyes was using the moniker Joshua Smith and how did she know where to find him?). On the whole, I prefer to think she’s lying about Lom and just not worry about how she figured out who and where Heyes was. I don’t care about her anyway. She’s a horrible character with no redeeming qualities.

There then follows a scene with both Heyes and the Kid (thank heavens for small mercies!) which is equally muddled. Since Heyes has unwisely decided to take this woman – oh, her name is Mrs Philips – to Devil’s Hole, obviously the Kid would normally go with him. But Heyes wants him to stay behind so he can shoot the next episode – er, I mean, because some Colonel is due to contact them about a job. The Kid says the Colonel is already late and probably a no-show. Heyes says they need the money. But Mrs Philips has just given you $1000! Money you aren’t going to get to spend if you get shot by all the lawmen the Kid says are watching the trails to Devil’s Hole. Heyes still refuses to take the Kid, saying this’ll be the easiest $1000 they ever made, but then he suddenly gets all mournful and gives the Kid the $1000 to look after in a way that’s clearly intended to signal he might not make it back. Make up your mind, Heyes! Either it’s dangerous and the Kid should go with you, or it’s not and you don’t get to look all tragic. Who wrote this shite, anyway? The one bright spot is the Kid’s line “Heyes, there’s only one thing been keeping you alive all this time. Me.” On the evidence of this scene, I believe him.

Next we have to endure a montage of Heyes and Mrs Philips riding to Devil’s Hole, set to some dreadful 70s love song. The damn thing goes on for almost FOUR MINUTES and the awful voiceover dialogue that accompanies it could be interpreted as flirtatious/getting-to-know-each-other-better if Heyes’s lines weren’t delivered so flatly (whether this is because Duel resented having to come back from his time off to do the voiceover or whether the atrociousness of the dialogue had sent him into internal exile, we will never know. TBH, I get the impression he was in internal exile for most of this episode. As, indeed, am I).

Things could perk up a bit when we finally get to Devil’s Hole. We get to meet Heyes’s old boss! The other men anticipate tension between him and Heyes! We could potentially learn something about Heyes’s past! Fat chance. “Big Jim” Santana turns out to be a completely one-dimensional character played by a completely one-dimensional actor. Big Jim’s honest! He’s gentlemanly! He believes in mutual trust! He likes and respects Heyes! There is absolutely zero tension or friction or, well, anything, between him and Heyes. Their scenes together lack any kind of chemistry or spark of interest. It’s all flat, fat, flat. They do punch each other right at the beginning – ok, that’s another Heyes punch, he does it more often than I remembered – and that bit is actually pretty funny, but once it’s over, we never reach these heights again.

The only exciting moment comes when Mrs Philips is presented with Matt Hamilton, the man she claims is her husband, and she whips out her pistol and shoots him. Way to go, Mrs P! I can respect that! Unfortunately, because she has two X chromosomes, one shot misses and the other is only a flesh wound, so the “husband” survives. Mrs P then admits that, yeah, she lied, he isn’t her husband, instead he seduced and abandoned her 17-year-old daughter, who had his baby and then killed herself. I am duly shocked by this tragic tale. Heyes, however, having been lied to all the way to Devil’s Hole, doesn’t believe a word of it. Big Jim is unsure. They question Hamilton, who says Mrs P doesn’t even have a daughter. The two of them had an affair, then he got bored and took off with 25,000 dollars’ worth of her jewellery. Hamilton is played as such an obvious baddie that it really doesn’t matter whether he merely nicked a few jewels or actually drove someone to suicide, he clearly deserves to be shot. And since he isn’t even dead, who cares about the ethics?

Well, Big Jim does. Temporarily, at least. Because so far we haven’t had enough scenes featuring NEITHER of our heroes, he sends Heyes back to Garden City to retrieve a photo of Mrs P’s daughter that she claims to have in her hotel safe. Produce the photo and he’ll believe Mrs P. We then have to sit through long tedious scenes of Big Jim and Mrs P falling in love. There’s no earthly reason we should believe she’s genuinely falling for him since everything else she’s said so far has been a lie, but given the way the story pans out, the writers sure seem to think this is LURVE.

I can’t stand it any longer and hit fast forward. Heyes finally comes back. Without, to his total lack of surprise, having found any photo of any daughter. Mrs P has been proven beyond a doubt to be a snake, and possibly a bit of a psychopath, given how blithely she tosses tales of trauma around and how carelessly she uses (and shoots) people. Big Jim is now thinking with his dick and basically goes “So what?” Heyes then convinces Big Jim to retire from outlawing instead of pulling one last job and the three of them hastily sneak out of Devil’s Hole before the mutiny Hamilton has been fomenting can succeed.

Mrs P and Big Jim wait for her stagecoach back to San Francisco. Mrs P complains about what a liar Matt Hamilton was (“He had it coming, he had it coming, he only had himself to blame”) and then adds, “I guess that makes me a liar too, because I never had a daughter.” You GUESS that makes you a liar? Lady, as far as I can tell every word out of your mouth has been a lie. You lie the way other people breathe. But I suppose it isn’t Mrs P's fault that the writers can't think their way out of a paper bag, let alone an ethical dilemma. Big Jim seems to have the same attitude. Instead of taking to his heels, he decides to go to San Francisco with her. He’d better not ever risk dumping her, is all I can say.

Heyes tells the Kid that now they’ve got a powerful friend in San Francisco, should they ever need one, but on the evidence of this episode I can’t see Big Jim and his snake of a wife organising a piss-up in a brewery to help anyone else. And speaking of less-than-helpful friends, that's quite a bone they've got to pick with Lom Trevors.

In this episode, Kid Curry comes out of Heyes’s shadow and gets to be the lead. This wasn’t so much a creative decision as a logistical necessity. TV in the 1970s was serious flying-by-the-seat of your pants stuff, with new episodes being written and shot only a couple of weeks before they aired (which I guess is a reasonable excuse for the sometimes terrible quality of the writing). According to the ASJ book, each episode took 8 days to shoot but the show aired every 7 days, meaning that in the absence of a time machine, and even with everyone working flat-out and non-stop for 4 months straight, the schedule wasn’t going to work. The solution was to write stories that only focused on one of the leading actors, so that two episodes could be shot simultaneously, with Ben Murphy working on The Girl in Boxcar #3 while Pete Duel was doing his scenes in The Great Shell Game. And thus the Kid gets his turn in the limelight.( Read more... )

I almost fell off my chair at the opening shot (after the teaser) of this episode, which shows Curry and Heyes galloping across a distant hill against an early evening sky. This is also the very last shot in Pete Duel’s very last episode “The Men Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” and it had struck me in that context as the perfect ending (as perfect as could be under the very imperfect circumstances, anyway). It’s a long take, the two of them gallop side by side away from the camera and up a hill, then at the top of the frame they turn right and gallop across the screen towards an unknown future. Heyes even has to clamp his hand on his hat to stop it from blowing off, a time-honoured ASJ tradition, and the Kid’s bedroll comes loose and bounces frantically up and down like an inflatable sausage. And now it turns out that at least part of the shot was stolen from episode 3! I had to pause briefly to check whether it really is the same long-distance shot, but I needn’t have bothered because the rest of it, with them galloping away up the hill and the Kid’s bedroll coming loose, also crops up as the final shot in “Exit to Wickenburg.” The experience left me feeling a little strange, as if the ending of the final episode had been cheapened by some kind of weird sacrilege. I suppose it just goes to show that you – or at least I – can’t entirely separate ASJ from Pete Duel’s death. I would feel a lot better about the recycling if someone on the production team had deliberately edited in that shot after completion to create an elegiac ending, but there’s no mention of it in the ASJ book and I note that in the preceding scenes Heyes and Curry are wearing their season 1 coats, presumably to establish continuity with the closing shot, so I fear it was just the show being cheap.

Anyway, once the initial shock had passed (how DARE they ruin my ending???), I enjoyed the rest. Heyes gets to be brilliant at cards again, this time spotting a card sharp in action (he knows the guy who wins can’t have the hand he claims to, and he also knows how the trick works). Rather than confronting the cheats, the boys very sensibly go and check in with the owner of the saloon to see if they’re working for the house, because they’ve learned from bitter experience that it’s not worth kicking up a fuss if the house is behind it (another connection to the final episode! There Heyes does accuse the house of cheating, but this time with the back-up up of the Bannerman Detective Agency). The owner turns out to be a nice young woman called Mary Cunningham, who seems rather overwhelmed by the whole owning a saloon business, but gives the boys her blessing to expose the card sharps. They handle the whole thing very neatly, with no need for violence or bloodshed, and Mrs Cunningham (she’s a widow) is so impressed that she offers them the job of co-managers of the saloon. I actually think this would have been the perfect job for the boys post-amnesty. No hard physical labour, plenty of drinks on the house, and a chance to utilise Heyes’s skill with cards and the Kid’s with a gun. No safe-cracking, but you can’t have everything, and Heyes turns out to be good at book-keeping, too, not to mention handling personnel. They’d be in demand anywhere, and I imagine they’d get enough opportunities to play poker themselves that after a few years they could buy their own saloon, a la Danny Bilson, and live happily ever after.

This is a good episode for the Kid. We get to see his shooting skills as he blasts away at some beer bottles set up right next to Heyes, whose faith in the Kid’s accuracy is so great that he doesn’t flinch at all as a bottle explodes beside him, though he does grumble a bit. Mary Cunningham’s little boy then asks the Kid to teach him to fast-draw but Curry refuses, on the grounds that sooner or later everyone, even him, will meet someone who’s faster than they are. This is another on-going bit of characterisation for the Kid, that while he has total confidence in his own abilities with a gun, it hasn’t made him arrogant or competitive, and he’s always aware, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this could be the time he’s outdrawn. Unlike Heyes, he seems to accept this as the price of living up to his own values; Heyes is a lot more afraid of death, though it doesn’t stop him from stepping up when the occasion demands it.

But I’m getting ahead of the episode. The morning after the boys have dealt with yet another card sharp, Mary Cunningham sacks them out of the blue and refuses to say why, though she does give them a whole month’s wages. Both Heyes and Curry act like perfect gentlemen throughout the sacking, and Heyes even says they’d rather have an explanation than the money (told you they weren’t really interested in money). Mary Cunningham expects them to leave town, but they decide to stick around and find out what’s really going on, as they don’t believe for a moment that that nice Mrs Cunningham who likes them so much no longer needs them. Well, that’s not quite true - Heyes does makes a half-hearted effort to say it’s not their problem and they should leave (“Remember, trouble’s one thing we gotta stay away from”), but the moment the Kid asks if he isn’t curious about what’s really going on, Heyes seizes on the excuse and says why yes, yes he is, curious enough to stick around. He’s kind of doing the Kid a favour here as well, because the Kid likes the Cunninghams and wants to help them (he’s a lot more straightforward than Heyes and suffers less from internal conflicts).

The boys get construction work – both of them turn out to have two left thumbs, possibly because they’re not really concentrating on the job – and a fellow called Finrock shows up and gives them a “friendly” warning. He says he knows their names aren’t Smith and Jones and if they don’t get out of town, he’ll set the sheriff on them. After he’s gone, Heyes deduces that Finrock may know they aren’t Smith and Jones, but he doesn’t know who they really are, otherwise he’d have turned them in already. So someone else must have told him.

Of course, they don’t leave, and the very next evening they get ambushed on the street. Heyes gets hit over the head with a gun and he veeeeerrry slowly drops to his knees and topples over, like a slow motion film of a tower being dynamited. It’s very funny. The ambushers wake them up outside town (“Can you hear me? And you can understand what I’m saying?”) and repeat the warning to get out of town.

Once again, though, the boys decide to stick around. They find out who attacked them, lasso the guy off his horse, and Heyes derives considerable from satisfaction from interrogating him exactly the way he interrogated them (“Can you hear me? And you can understand what I’m saying?”). The guy tells them it was Mary Cunningham who ordered both Finrock to warn them and him to attack them, as she really, really wants them to leave town.

Confronted about this, Mary Cunningham resorts to crying a lot and refuses to tell them anything. Heyes is too much of a gentleman to properly bully a crying woman, and the Kid likes Mary, so they give up and leave (Heyes is SO NICE to Mary Cunningham under the circumstances, no wonder I liked him as a kid. He has a gentle side to him that doesn’t come out all that often, but when it does, it’s really lovely).

When they go back to their hotel room, they find Finrock waiting for them with a gun. He’s still claiming to be friendly, but the gloves are off now. If they don’t leave, someone will have them killed.

Faced with an immoveable object in Mary Cunningham and an irresistible force in Finrock’s death threat, the boys decide discretion is the better part of valour. But the Kid has been doing some thinking. Heyes isn’t keen on this muscling-in on in his area of expertise, but he hears the Kid out. His partner reckons it wasn’t Mary Cunningham who hired Finrock and set the ambushers on them. This is the Kid’s big idea? I think anyone with half an eye could have figured that out. Heyes is very polite and doesn’t criticise his buddy’s intellectual prowess out loud, but he does ask if he has any idea who ELSE it might have been. The Kid’s powers of thought don’t extend that far. Heyes kindly says it’s important to know when you’re beat. But the next morning, as they’re saddling up to leave, his eye falls on the SLOANE Land Agency sign and he has an idea. He tells the Kid he didn’t sleep well the night before, thinking about who really might have hired Finrock and co. (aha! The first appearance of the “Heyes gets insomnia when his brain is fizzing” trope), but it now strikes him as weird that Sloane owns half this town and yet they’ve never once seen the guy (“Now a man as important as this Mr Sloane, all he’d have to do is come walkin’ down the street and all the bowin’ and scrapin’ would whip up a fair-sized dust storm”).

So they drop in on Sloane’s office and his secretary lets them in (a second female character with lines! This is unprecedented in the series so far! And sadly will not prove to be much of a precedent for subsequent episodes). Heyes, by this point, has figured out that whoever hired Finrock must be someone they know pretty well (well enough to know they weren’t Smith and Jones and yet not want to set the sheriff on them), so he’s rather taken aback when Mr Sloane turns out to be a complete stranger. Since that idea was a bust, they go to the saloon bar to get one last drink for the road, where they fortuitously spot “Mr Sloane” leaving his office and the barman tells them that isn’t Sloane, it’s his bookkeeper (Mr Sloane has quality minions, both Finrock and the bookkeeper are clearly men of multiple talents).

Presumably the boys get the address from the bartender, because nightfall sees them sneaking into the real Mr Sloane’s big fancy house. They burst into his drawing room, guns at the ready, and this time Heyes’s theory is proven correct, Sloane IS someone they know, or rather Heyes does – it’s Jim Plummer, leader of the first gang Heyes ever rode with, and who Heyes hasn’t seen since Plummer absconded with the loot from a robbery ten years ago. Plummer has evidently been softened by his life of respectable ease, because he’s helpless as a baby in the face of Heyes and Curry, but I conclude that his talent for picking quality minions hasn’t declined since the day he decided to give a chance to a young Hannibal Heyes.

Heyes threatens to let what’s left of the gang know of Plummer’s whereabouts, unless he buys Mary Cunningham’s saloon for the amount he cheated them out of, so $30,000. The boys don’t ask for a cent for themselves, even though there’s no way Plummer could ever have let the law know about the blackmail. I guess those two outlaws really don’t care that much about money.

This is a GOOD episode. It’s got funny dialogue, good dialogue, some good characters played by decent actors, TWO women with lines and a tight little story that showcases Heyes’s brains and the Kid’s moral character (of the “two pretty good bad men” I think even Heyes would agree that Curry is the good-er bad man). The Kid doesn’t get that many lines, but he does get to both shoot and think. And his saddle roll doesn’t quite fall off when they both ride off up the hill at the end. I call that a win.

I realise there hasn't been any activity here for absolutely ages, but as someone who's just rediscovered the series and gone back through all the old posts, I figure someone else might do the same at some future point and might like to find some more recent episode reviews.

A few weeks ago I happened to watch an interview on Youtube with Quentin Tarantino and Leonardo DiCaprio in which Tarantino talks about how aspects of DiCaprio’s character in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood were based on Pete Duel of Alias Smith and Jones fame. I hadn’t thought about ASJ in years, but I used to watch reruns on the BBC as a young teenager and had a massive crush on Pete Duel as Hannibal Heyes, so after watching the Tarantino interview I did some digging and discovered that all the ASJ episodes are available online at the Internet Archive. And so I sat myself down to watch the pilot and was almost knocked out of my seat by a lightning bolt of recognition – that black hat, pushed jauntily to the back of his head! That oversized grey coat! That voice! It was as if all the intervening years had burned away and my teenage self was staring greedily at the screen out of my eyes.
After that I had to I watch all the episodes – no, that’s not quite true. I’m a Pete Duel purist. As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one true Hannibal Heyes. I know this is unkind to Roger Davis, who seems to be a lovely person, but as far as I’m concerned none of his episodes exist. I watched all the real episodes, and since I seem to have gone and got all fannish about a series that ended over fifty years ago, I figured I might as well write some reviews.
So I’ll start at the beginning, go on until I reach the end, and then stop. The opening voiceover, “Into the West came many men…” is great. You don’t notice what an info-dump it is because it’s done with such humour and lightness. Unfortunately, things go a bit downhill from there. I really wouldn’t recommend anyone new to the show to start with the pilot, because a lot of it is very tedious, and the only important piece of information, the amnesty deal, is recapped at the start of all subsequent episodes anyway. I spent quite a bit of time thinking “I don’t remember it being this boring.” A lot of the blame lies with the Devil’s Hole gang - a bunch of “walk-offs” if ever there were – who sorely try my patience. There’s comedy and then there’s unfunny caricature, and the Devil’s Hole gang barely even rise to the level of the latter. For one thing, they’re all so incredibly stupid. Their IQs aren’t just subterranean, they form a sort of gravity well, dragging down the intelligence of anyone who comes within their radius. Why else would Heyes, whom the opening voiceover has just informed us is one of “the most successful outlaws in the history of the West” not realise that fording a river might make his dynamite damp?
Well, obviously it’s so that the nice little old lady, Birdie Pickett (there are so few women in ASJ that they all deserve to be mentioned by name) can tell Heyes and the Kid that they’re not cut out for the job, but it would have been nice if they hadn’t screwed up at something so fundamental to a job they’ve been doing very successfully for several years. And it also gives Wheat a reason to start challenging Heyes for the leadership, which I guess is mostly in there so we don’t worry about what’s going to happen to the gang once their leader quits (as if I CARED), but also has the virtue that we get to see the conflict-avoidant side of Heyes for the first time. He really doesn’t push back at all at Wheat (though he doesn’t stop the Kid pushing back, either – this will also turn out to be very in-character).

Heyes and the Kid have had enough of being chased by posses and decide they want to try to get amnesty. They go to Porterville to ask their old friend Lom Trevors, an outlaw who’s gone so straight he’s now a sheriff, to apply to the Governor of Wyoming on their behalf. While they’re there, much to Lom’s discomfort, Miss Porter (another woman! Hooray!), daughter of the bank owner and manager in his absence, asks Heyes and the Kid to check out how secure the bank is, and then offers them jobs. All these scenes reflect the show as I remember it, funny, charming and with great interactions between Heyes and the Kid.
And then once again we spend far too much time watching the Devil’s Hole gang show off the single brain cell they share between them. WHY are we spending any more time with them than absolutely necessary when we could be watching Heyes and Curry? Or even Curry and Miss Porter, or the boys and Lom. Instead we get what feels like hours of plot points about how the gang have got their guns back and are sitting in the saloon ostensibly playing poker but really are sekritly digging a tunnel all the way from the saloon to the bank. They may be stupid, but they sure can dig fast. And dispose of a shedload of earth without any visible means of doing so. And smuggle enormous planks of wood in through the saloon to shore up their tunnel without anyone spotting them. I guess they must have hidden talents. More to the point, if I detail every time the show ignores the laws of physics, or basic biology, or law, or logic in order to make the plot work, these reviews will be hundreds of pages long, so I hereby vow to ignore all such infelicities and focus only on vibes and characterisation. Let’s see if I can stick to it.
In summary, this episode is a succession of great actor moments floating around in a sea of story slop. There’s Heyes tossing the damp dynamite to the Kid and the Kid’s reaction. There’s the first of many scenes to come in which Heyes tries to argue the Kid out of standing up to a bully, and the Kid temporarily backs down for Heyes’s sake but then goes out and forces a confrontation anyway. There’s the boys trying to persuade Lom to ask the governor to give them amnesty (“Can we help it if we’re a little bit better at what we do?”) There’s Heyes’ near breakdown over being surrounded by so much money and not allowed to steal It, all done in the persona of a timid bank clerk persona (presumably he invents this character for the sheer joy of messing with the other clerk’s head – I mean, he’s already met Miss Porter and she knows what he’s actually like, he doesn’t need to impersonate a bank clerk to get the job). I always get a kick out of Heyes’s fake personae and it’s nice to see that crop up as an element of his characterisation this early on. And then there’s the wonderful scene with the money raining down and Heyes giving the Kid his hat back (Heyes is very touchy-feely in this episode and the Kid… isn’t, so that’s another bit of characterisation that’s present right from the beginning). There’s also lots and lots of pretty Heyes, which obviously I approve of, but the episode as a whole is definitely one for the completist rather than a must-see.