Sat 22 Jul 2023
A TV Western Review: HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL “The Vigil†(1961).
Posted by Steve under Reviews , TV Westerns[9] Comments
HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL “The Vigil.†CBS, 16 September 1961 (Season 5, Episode 1). Richard Boone, Kam Tong. Gunest cast: Mary Fickett, George Kennedy, Dan Stafford. Teleplay: Shimon Wincelberg. Director: Andrew V. McLaglen. Current;y streaming on YouTube (see below),
There is both very little to this story, and yet there is also quite a lot, and although nothing very surprising happens, it ends up in quite satisfying fashion, Contradictions? This adventure of the western PI-for-hire who calls himself Paladin is full of them.
He is hired by an idealistic nurse straight out of nursing school to help her travel to a community desperately in need of medical assistance, but they have already turned down her offer of help. They want a doctor. They do not want a nurse, not a female one.
She is going anyway.
Not only is she idealistic she is hopelessly naive. (Perhaps they are the same thing.)
Perhaps only a day or two into their journey, they encounter a campsite where they find two men having just finished burying a third under a pile of rocks. Paladin is suspicious, but the young nurse is willing to take their story at face value: that the dead man died from an arrow in the back during an Indian attack. Paladin sees the dead man’s shirt. No hole in the back. He was killed at noon and in the heat, he wasn’t wearing the shirt, he is told. It’s now late in the evening, Paladin responds. What took you so long to bury him? Let’s uncover the body, he suggests.
Events ensue – Paladin is a gunfighter by trade, after all — and by the end of this 30-minute episode, the young lady nurse has learned a valuable lesson about life. Neatly done, although if you are so inclined, one might have to admit, perhaps a little too obviously so.
July 22nd, 2023 at 2:13 pm
When I was a kid, my uncle–who babysat me and my (then) two sisters–let me stay up to watch HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL which was scheduled after my bed-time. I loved Paladin even though at the age of 12 I didn’t quite grasp all the plot implications. In those years, there were plenty of TV Western programs. But HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL was my favorite.
July 22nd, 2023 at 3:37 pm
Mine too, George. There was something about that show that made it very appealing to boys who were about our age at the time. I think I’m a couple of years older than you, though, so I never had any problem watching it. It was GUNSMOKE, which came on right afterward, that conflicted somewhat with bedtime.
And who knew at the time we’d still be watching and talking about these shows now, how many years later?
July 22nd, 2023 at 5:15 pm
I agree with both takes above regarding Have Gun Will Travel, but I actually despise the other Westerns, which were phony sanctimonious soap opera takes on our beloved genre with one brief exception, the first half dozen episodes of The Virginian, which stayed faithful including character and tone to Wister and Joel McCrea, after that, channel surfing.
July 23rd, 2023 at 1:52 am
Well, the story line involving the lady nurse really had no where to go but the way it did, and that was disappointing. If that happened to be the whole focus of the story, you could have lumped it in with all of the other lesser light westerns
July 22nd, 2023 at 9:08 pm
Paladin preferred Champagne to Red Eye, caviar to beef jerky, and carriages to horseback. He was a gentleman and not a nomadic near vagrant, a professional gunman and not a lawman or do gooder. He chose silk shirts and underwear over flannel longjohns and elegance over campfires.
He appreciated the kind of women that were the bad girls in most series, appreciated a bed and roof more than a night sky and a blanket, and yet he did all the frontier stuff as well or better than any cowboy.
Above all he was a killer, even if he didn’t always kill it was his profession, the series title, HAVE GUN…
Aside from the intelligent writing and often offbeat stories there was Boone, a Western heavy, as the hero, not conventionally handsome, sardonic, no Gary Cooper or John Wayne (more a fallen angel type), cynical but romantic, a clear mercenary despite his code, almost the villain in any other Western as if John Carradine’s gambler in STAGECOACH was the hero and not John Wayne’s noble outlaw.
It was a very odd show, one that was almost a social precursor for a generation who would soon be questioning the easy answers we had grown up with. Paladin and around the same time Maverick stood our whole Roy Rogers-Hopalong Cassidy straight shooter childhood on its ear.
Television was growing up with us, maturing as we did before it became timid and retreated from the implication of the new breed of heroes leaving comedy the only place really challenging the status quo.
And it is hard to believe anyone would be naive enough to trust George Kennedy was just casually burying someone in the wild.
July 23rd, 2023 at 1:37 am
You have made some very points there, David. I have been wondering what the appeal of HRWT was for me aback then s a teenager in the late 50s. You’re right. The concept of the singing cowboy with a wacky sidekick was wearing awfully thin by then, if it hadn’t been shredded up and tossed away long before then. In many ways Paladin was a complete antithesis of that old-fashioned and well outmoded 1940s kind of western hero.
That, plus the fact he didn’t take nonsense from anybody.
You mention George Kennedy. I meant to say something about him in my review of this particular episode, and I wish I had.. Seeing him go face-to-face with Paladin is well worth the price of admission. The fellow who wrote the script earned his money with this one, and it couldn’t have been played any better than it was.
July 23rd, 2023 at 9:04 pm
HGWT was a bit different and worked diligently around the budget and time restraints inherent in a half-hour Western. What I find interesting (and a bit amusing!) is the way ideas in Gene Roddenberry’s scripts for the show resurfaced years later in STAR TREK.
July 27th, 2023 at 12:13 am
I’ve never really understood the TV Paladin character. I only know him from the radio serial.
There, John Dehner played him gentle, wry, considerate, but ‘tough when he had to be’. Nothing very unusual. As Dehner himself said, just a slight twist on the ‘Frontier Gentleman’ character he also portrayed.
Where did the TV version come by his upscale tastes? Was he in the war? Was he a Yankee or a Reb?
I get that he was laconic as portrayed by Boone, but what’s it mean to observe that he has a ‘hatred’ in him? Hatred for whom? Just his fellow men in general?
I’d sure like to see Richard Boone duke it out with George Kennedy sometime.
July 27th, 2023 at 12:00 pm
I don’t know the answers to most of your questions, Lazy, but a friend of mine, Martin Grams, has co-written a book called THE HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL COMPANION, and I’m sure he goes into the answers to some of them.
I don’t have a copy myself, but depending on how interested you are, you might want to get your hands on a copy.
I always enjoy the radio show too, when I get a chance to listen to it. It’s one of the few radio shows that came along after its TV version, and many of the early episodes were adaptation of the TV scripts.