aliassmithjones | Episode 8: A Fistful of Diamonds

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.