Thu 29 Jun 2023
An Unaired Western TV Pilot Review: THE WILDCATTERS “Kelly from Dallas†(1959).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV Westerns[7] Comments
THE WILDCATTERS. “Kelly from Dallas.†Unaired pilot, 30 min. Batjac Productions, 1959. Claude Akins, Sean McClory, L.Q. Jones (as Justice McQueen), Karen Steele, Don Wilson (yes, that Don Wilson), Denver Pyle. Created, written & produced by Burt Kennedy. Directed by Budd Boetticher. Currently available on You Tube (see below).
Set in WWI-era Texas, three friends work as oil well diggers on spec (that is to say, wildcatters), but their latest venture seems to have gone bust, not because there’s no oil, but the owner of the venture has lost the rights to it to a lady gambler, who has given them only one more day before closing it down.
Also in opposition to the project is a local cattle rancher who fears that oil, if found, will poison the only watering hole on his land.
And that’s about there can be said about the story line itself. It’s a jaunty, more than semi-humorous effort, with blaring music, a backfiring contemporaneous automobile, and featuring the beauteous Karen Steele as the lady gambler.
A highlight of the episode occurs when the three guys barge in on the lady and start to strip down to take a well-needed bath but not noticing that she is already in the tub.
Mostly an entertaining but essentially inconsequential enterprise, in spite of an excellent cast and high production values. If it had been picked up as a series, one has to wonder how long it would have lasted before running out of stories to tell. This pilot seems to have exhausted most of the possibilities, all in itself.
June 29th, 2023 at 10:06 pm
Try to picture Claude Akins, Sean McClory, and LQ Jones starring today in a CW series or for that matter, any TV series on any network. The mind boggles. Was this the only series or pilot produced by John Wayne’s Batjac company?
June 29th, 2023 at 11:47 pm
Yes, indeed, the three lead guys in this one had a good sense of camaraderie. It looked to me as though they were having a lot of fun doing it.
As for Batjac, I looked on Wikipedia and found that the company was also the one that did the TV version of HONDO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hondo_(TV_series)
There may others that either Wikipedia — or I — missed.
June 30th, 2023 at 5:14 pm
This one has brilliant antecedents, but being an oilfield brat I would once like to see somebody come within a mile of actual oilfield work. My Grandfather was a wildcatter in 1918 before starting his own company, and like 90% of the films about the early and contemporary oil business most get the colorful part right, but the actual drilling all wrong.
There are a handful of pretty good movies on the subject, and in some of them they stray close to reality once in a while (BOOM TOWN, THE WHEELER DEALERS, BLOWING WILD, TULSA, and HELLFIGHTERS), but most are about as realistic as most Westerns (OKLAHOMA CRUDE is entertaining, but complete fantasy about drilling a well).
The colorful characters are real enough, they’ve been staples of the industry from the start back in Pennsylvania in 1857, and the danger real enough (though very few wells were allowed to blow in — it’s a waste of money and dangerous).
All told between my grandfather and father I spent 47 years of my life in and around the oil business, and from the silliness of WAR OF THE WILDCATTERS to the idiocy of oil wells in Dallas County in DALLAS (there are none, there is no oil in Dallas County, never has been) it is one of the most irritating sub genres to watch in terms of ignoring reality for fantasy.
James Bond and Indiana Jones are documentaries compared to most oil business films.
June 30th, 2023 at 6:48 pm
If/when you watch this one, David, maybe you can tell us which category it fits into: Good, Bad, or Ugly. I suspect Bad, but since all I know about the subject is what I’ve seen in the movies or on TV, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Door Number 3.
June 30th, 2023 at 5:17 pm
Thank you so much for telling us about this.
It’s great to watch a Boetticher I’ve never seen.
June 30th, 2023 at 6:50 pm
Glad to oblige! I came across this totally by chance, browsing my way through YouTube’s offerings, but of course whan I did, it caught my eye immediately.
July 1st, 2023 at 10:48 pm
Steve, any area where you have a little expertise makes it harder to watch when they get little things wrong (like novelists binding their manuscripts or writer heroes who never write or only do so in bouts of creative genius, most newspaper movies, and the like, professors who never teach or grade papers…).
A lot of the oil field movies are fun, it’s just when three people dig and bring in a well by themselves or they always let the well blow in when it is costing money to do so it takes me out of the movie.
My grandfather was drilling a well in our backyard when I was four, I’m a little jaundiced about a couple of clowns drilling one alone when it is a 24 hour a day job for a crew plus service industry experts.
This sounds like a fun episode and like it probably stays out of the field and off the well sight. The story even sounds plausible though almost no one ever owned a well completely, the thing was financed by selling percentages to multiple partners who supplied everything from food to pipe. Winning full control of a well in the 20th Century in a Poker game is pretty far out though you might own the controlling interests.
But with Botticher and Kennedy involved they may well have gotten the details right.