YUMA. Made for TV movie: ABC, 02 March 1971. Clint Walker, Barry Sullivan, Kathryn Hays, Edgar Buchanan, Morgan Woodward, Peter Mark Richman, Bruce Glover, Miguel Alejandro. Producer: Aaron Spelling. Director: Ted Post.

   The ending of this movie, to begin wrong end to, shows Marshal Dave Harmon (Clint Walker), widowed hotel owner Julie Williams (Kathryn Hays), and Andreas, the young Mexican boy befriended by the marshal (Miguel Alejandro), all frolicking together down at the local swimming hole.

   This incongruous bit of byplay illustrates more than anything else in this well done made-for-TV movie that it was also the pilot for a series that was never picked up. No movie meant for theaters would end in such a fashion!

   The beginning is much, much better, showing as it does Marshal Harmon’s first entrance into to the frontier town of Yuma, Arizona, as he makes his way on horseback through a crowded maze of cowpokes on horses, full-team wagons, one horse buggies, women in bonnets and petticoats and arms full of purchases – the busiest western street I can remember seeing in a long long time.

   Only to be met by a stagecoach emptied of its passengers, and driven and overturned by two drunken cowboys. Confronted by the town’s new marshal, one of the two brother shoots and dies, the other is brought to the town’s run-down jail, unused since the previous officer of the law was sent skedaddling.

   Turns out (you knew?) that a third brother is the owner of a huge herd of cattle being brought to town. It also turns out that he is not likely to take too kindly to his one brother’s death.

   Things get worse, however. The second brother is secretly released during the night while the marshal is asleep, then shot in the back as he tries to make his escape.

   There is much more, which I won’t go into, but the action is very nearly non-stop, and it’s also a pretty good mystery to boot. Clint Walker’s character is as tall as the man playing him, and he has some back story that would have been gone into, if there had been more to the series than this busted pilot.

   Kathryn Hays, later a longtime star of As the World Turns (for nearly 40 years), has little to do but look pretty, but once she realizes that the new marshal is the real thing, taciturn but tough and not a man to back down, ever, she is also as supportive as she can be.

   Let me tell you how much I enjoyed watching this. The print on the DVD I have is just enough out of focus that I would have turned it off within the first two minutes if I hadn’t been caught up in the story as much as I was.