Fri 16 Dec 2011
A TV Review by Mike Tooney: DANIEL BOONE “The Accused.”
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV Westerns[7] Comments
A Review by Mike Tooney
“The Accused.” An episode of Daniel Boone (1964-70). Season 2, Episode 27. First airdate: March 24, 1966. Fess Parker, Joanna Moore, Ed Ames, Ken Scott, Vaughn Taylor, E. J. Andre, George Savalas. Writer: David Duncan. Director: John Florea.
Daniel Boone (Parker) gets into real trouble when a man he has just been dickering with over the price of furs ends up being murdered.
Every bit of circumstantial evidence points to Daniel, but being a scrupulously honest individual, he allows himself to be jailed even after an inquest clinches his guilt. Things aren’t helped at all by the inflexible attitude taken by the local constable.
Of course, Daniel didn’t do it, as his Oxford-educated Cherokee friend Mingo (Ames) knows instinctively. Not being one to see injustice done, Mingo springs Daniel from the hoosegow and the two set out to find the real perpetrators.
…which they eventually do, but only after a lot of running and jumping and shooting of the sort you won’t find in a typical Perry Mason episode.
Which brings us to the chief defect of this particular show: that, with just a little rearranging, it would have made a grand whodunit, instead of the more prosaic how’s-he-gonna-clear-himself type of plot.
The viewer knows ab initio what happened, who did the crime, and how they attempted to cover it up — and this knowledge contributes nothing to the progression of the storyline.
If the producers had taken the first five tell-all minutes of the episode and simply moved them to the end, at the point when the perps have been apprehended and are explaining how and why they did the dirty deed, this commonplace action adventure show could have been elevated to a higher plane — a genuine whodunit.
By inserting closeups of more of the people with worried expressions at the inquest — Perry Mason-style — and snipping a scene or two later on, the mystery would have been sustained.
But by not doing so, the writer and the director missed a golden opportunity to give us a real rara avis indeed, a buckskin whodunit. Thus, the best moments in the show must remain the final few funny minutes when Daniel and Mingo are stranded literally up a tree.
We’ve already discussed Joanna Moore in a couple of previous Mystery*File entries here and here, as well as Fess Parker here.
If writer David Duncan’s IMDb filmography is complete, the notion of writing a mystery was foreign to him.
And, yes, that’s Telly Savalas’s younger brother George (1924-85) playing the warden. Usually billed as “Demosthenes” (his middle name), he appeared in 114 episodes of Kojak.
December 16th, 2011 at 1:17 pm
One of the greatest faults of the TV series format is the reluctance for producers to stray from their successful formula. Add to this being a show popular with kids (remember the coonskin hat craze?), and they would be unlikely to stray from their action adventure formula for a who-dun-it.
Mike, you are right, too often we can look at a TV show and wish they had just did something different.
December 16th, 2011 at 2:37 pm
I never watched either Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone as a kid or later on, and the coonskin cap craze passed me by completely. So I could be totally wrong in thinking this, but I’ve never considered Fess Parker as being much of an actor, more of a fellow that lucked into two good-paying jobs that (hopefully) set him up comfortably for the rest of his life. Am I right, or wrong on this?
December 16th, 2011 at 3:53 pm
Parker was believable in the role of Crockett and Boone, did he have the ability to go beyond his own personality to portray characters not like himself? I don’t think he tried.
December 16th, 2011 at 4:25 pm
That’s an excellent way of answering the question. I think you phrased your reply very well!
December 17th, 2011 at 4:44 am
The POMPEY episode of Daniel Boone is outstanding. It deals with an attempt by the slave Pompey to escape. It does have some elements of detection – but no mystery.
The show was the only episode of DANIEL BOONE directed by the great Joseph H. Lewis.
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I remember seeing a coonskin cap in somebody’s basement. It was left over from the Davy Crockett craze in the 1950’s. The Daniel Boone show was popular, but not part of a national frenzy like the earlier Davy Crockett.
December 17th, 2011 at 6:57 am
Was it only me, who had a problem with connecting to this blog for some hours?
I know this is off-topic, but i would like to know exactly WHERE this problem arose.
The Doc
December 17th, 2011 at 10:44 am
I was away from the computer for big chunks of time yesterday, so I don’t know what gremlins may have been at work while I was away. But I whenever I did log in, I had no problems, so maybe the problem arose somewhere in the long distance between here and there, Doc. Otherwise I dunno.