Do You Remember The Great Old Westerns?

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Maverick

A subversive Western with a dark sense of humor, Maverick soared to sixth place in the Nielsen ratings during its second season with a 30.4 share as well as winning an Emmy award for Best Western Series in 1959. Starring the then relatively unknown James Garner as footloose frontier gambler Bret Maverick, shortly after joined by Jack Kelly as brother Bart, this hour-long series followed the duplicitous adventures and, more often, misadventures of the Mavericks in their pursuit of money and the easy life.

Starting out as a straight Western drama (the first three episodes, "The War of the Silver Kings", "Point Blank" and "According to Hoyle", were directed by feature Western auteur Budd Boetticher), the series soon developed a comedy streak after writer Marion Hargrove decided to liven up his scriptwriting work by inserting the simple stage direction: "Maverick looks at him with his beady little eyes." Other scriptwriters then followed suit. Garner, in particular, and Kelly joined in with the less-than-sincere spirit of the stories and Maverick took a unique turn away from the other, more formal and traditional Warner Brothers-produced Westerns then on the air (Lawman, Colt .45, Cheyenne and Sugarfoot).

The series was created by producer Roy Huggins and developed out of a story (co-written with Howard Browne) in which Huggins tried to see how many TV Western rules he could break and get away with; the script, ironically, was filmed as an episode of the "adult" Cheyenne series ("The Dark Rider") and featured guest-star Diane Brewster as a swindler and practiced cheat, a role she was later to take up as a recurring character, gambler Samantha Crawford, during the 1958-59 season of Maverick. "Maverick is Cheyenne, a conventional Western, turned inside out," said Huggins. "But with Maverick there was nothing coincidental about the inversion." The Maverick brothers were not heroes in the traditional Western sense. They were devious, cowardly card-sharps who exploited easy situations and quickly vanished when faced with potentially violent ones. A popular part of their repertoire for evading difficult moments was the "Pappyisms" that corrupted their speech. Quoting their old Pappy, and mentor, as a suitable excuse they were likely to come out with (when all else failed, for instance): "My old Pappy used to say 'If you can't fight 'em, and they won't let you join 'em, best get out of the county'."

Following the success of Cheyenne on ABC (from its premiere in 1955) the network asked Warner Brothers TV division to give them another hour-long Western program for their Sunday evening slot. Maverick premiered on 22 September 1957, and pretty soon won over the viewers from the powerful opposition of CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show and NBC's The Steve Allen Show, two programs that had been Sunday night favourites from the mid-1950s. With Garner alone starring in early episodes, Warners found that it was taking eight days to film a weekly show. They decided to introduce another character, Bret's brother, in order to keep the production on schedule. This strategy resulted in a weekly co-starring series when Jack Kelly's Bart was introduced in the "Hostage" episode (10 November 1957). With separate production units now working simultaneously Warners managed to supply a steady stream of episodes featuring either Bret or Bart on alternate weeks. Occasionally, both Maverick brothers were seen in the same episode, usually when they teamed up to help each other out of some difficult situation or to outwit even more treacherous characters than themselves.

The series also reveled in colourful characters as well as presenting wild parodies of other TV programs of the period. During the early seasons recurring guest characters popped in and out of the plots to foil or assist the brothers: Dandy Jim Buckley (played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr.), Gentleman Jack Darby (Richard Long), Big Mike McComb (Leo Gordon) and Bret's regular antagonist, the artful con-woman Samantha Crawford (Brewster). Among the more amusing episodes: "Gun-Shy" (second season) was a send-up of Gunsmoke featuring a hick character called Mort Dooley; "A Cure for Johnny Rain" (third season) spoofed Jack Webb's Dragnet with Garner doing a deadpan Joe Friday voice-over; "Hadley's Hunters" (fourth season) had Bart enlist the help of Ty Hardin (Bronco), Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot), Clint Walker (Cheyenne), John Russell and Peter Brown (Lawman) all playing their respective characters from the WB stable of Western TV series (and with Edd "Kookie" Byrnes from Warner Brothers 77 Sunset Strip as a blacksmith); and "Three Queens Full" (fifth season) was a wicked parody of Bonanza in which the Subrosa Ranch was run by Joe Wheelwright and his three sons, Moose, Henry and Small Paul. In addition, two other episodes ("The Wrecker" and "A State of Siege") were loose adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson stories, albeit translated into the Maverick vein.

In 1960 actor James Garner and his Warner Brothers studio bosses clashed when Garner took out a lawsuit against the studio for breach of contract arising out of his suspension during the January-June writers' strike of that year. Warners claimed that it was justified in suspending Garner by invoking the force majeure clause in Garner's contract due to the writers' strike; the clause, in other words, meant that if forces beyond the control of the studio prevented it from making films, the studio didn't have to continue paying actors' salaries. It had been no secret at the time that Garner had wanted to be released from his contract ("Contracts are completely one-sided affairs. If you click, [the studio] owns you," he stated). Finally, in December 1960 the judge decided in favour of Garner. During the course of the testimony it was revealed that during the strike Warners had obtained--under the table--something in the number of 100 TV scripts, and that at one time the studio had as many as 14 writers working under the pseudonym of "W. Hermanos" (Spanish for "brothers").

Garner then went on to a successful feature film career but returned to series television in the 1970s with Nichols (1971-72) and the popular The Rockford Files (1974-80). He appeared as a guest star along with Jack Kelly in the 1978 TV movie/pilot The New Maverick, which produced the short-lived Young Maverick (1979-80) series, minus Garner; he also starred in the title role of Bret Maverick (1981-82) which he co-produced with Warners. A theatrical film version, Maverick, was produced in 1994 with Mel Gibson starring as Bret Maverick and Garner appearing as Bret's father; Richard Donner directed the Warner Brothers release.

As a replacement for Garner in the fourth season of the original series Warners brought on board Roger Moore, as cousin Beauregard, a Texas expatriate who had lived in England (a WB contract player, Moore had been transferred from another Warner Western series, The Alaskans, which had run only one season from 1959). When Moore departed after just one season another Maverick brother, Robert Colbert's Brent Maverick, a slight Garner/Bret lookalike, was introduced in the spring of 1961 to alternate adventures with Bart. Colbert stayed only until the end of that season, leaving the final (and longest remaining) Maverick, Jack Kelly, to ride out the last Maverick season (1961-62) alone, except for some early seasons' rerun episodes.

The series came to an end after 124 episodes, and with it a small-screen Western legend came to a close. Perhaps the ultimate credit for Maverick should go to creator-producer Roy Huggins for the originality to steer the series clear of the trite and the ordinary, and for not only trying something different but executing it with a comic flair.

-Tise Vahimagi

CAST

Bret Maverick (1957-1960)........................ James Garner Bart Maverick............................................... Jack Kelly Samantha Crawford (1958-1959).............. Diane Brewster Cousin Beauregard Maverick (1960-1961).... Roger Moore Brent Maverick (1961).............................. Robert Colbert

PRODUCERS   Roy Huggins, William T. Orr, Howie Horwitz

PROGRAMMING HISTORY 124 Episodes

ABC
September 1957-September 1961         Sunday 7:30-8:30 September 1961-July 1962                   Sunday 6:30-7:30

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood/TV. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Barer, Burl. Maverick: The Making of the Movie and the Official Guide to the Television Series. Boston: Tuttle, 1994

Hargrove, Marion. "This is a Television Cowboy?" Life (New York), 19 January 1959.

Jackson, Ronald. Classic TV Westerns: A Pictorial History. Seacaucus, New Jersey: Carol, 1994.

MacDonald, J. Fred. Who Shot the Sheriff: The Rise and Fall of the Television Western. New York: Praeger, 1987.

Marsden, Michael T., and Jack Nachbar. "The Modern Popular Western: Radio, Television, Film and Print." In, A Literary History of the American West. Sponsored by The Western Literature Association. Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1987.

Robertson, Ed. Maverick, Legend of the West. Los Angeles: Pomegranate Press, 1994.

Strait, Raymond. James Garner, A Biography. New York: St. Martin's, 1985.

West, Richard. Television Westerns: Major And Minor Series, 1946-1978. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1987.

Woolley, Lynn, Robert W. Malsbary, and Robert G. Strange, Jr. Warner Bros. Television: Every Show of the Fifties and Sixties Episode-By-Episode. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1985.

Yoggy, Gary A. Riding the Video Range: The Rise and Fall of the Western on Television. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1994.

Top 10 Search Engine Listings

Cheyenne

Early network television was staked out by refugees from Hollywood's B-western backlots who salvaged their careers by appealing to a vast audience of children. Cowboy stars Gene Autrey, Roy Rogers, and William "Hopalong Cassidy" Boyd made their fortunes in television with inexpensive little westerns made from noisy gunfights and stock-footage Indian raids. As television westerns were made to appeal to younger viewers, the movie industry shifted in the opposite direction, toward "adult" westerns in which the genre's familiar landscape became the setting for psychological drama or mythic allegory, as in High Noon (1952) and The Searchers (1956). With the 1955 premieres of Cheyenne, Gunsmoke (1955-75),and The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955-61), the networks attempted to import the "adult" western into prime time by infusing the genre with more resonant characters and psychological conflicts.

Cheyenne starred Clint Walker as Cheyenne Bodie, a former frontier scout who drifts through the old West, traveling without any particular motivation from one adventure to another. Along the way he takes a number of jobs, working on ranches or wagon trains, taking part in cattle drives or protecting precious cargo. Sometimes he works for the federal government; at other times he finds himself deputized by local lawmen. Essentially, the producers of Cheyenne changed the character's circumstances at will in order to insert him into any imaginable conflict. Indeed, several Cheyenne episodes were remakes of earlier Warner Brothers movies like To Have and Have Not (1944) and Treasure of the Sierra Madre(1948) with the character of Cheyenne Bodie simply inserted into the original plot.

With Walker as a lone redeemer wandering from community to community, Cheyenne had a thin, though extremely adaptable, premise for generating episodic stories. With its virtually unrelated individual episodes, this type of series bears many similarities to the anthology format. In Cheyenne, each episode featured a new conflict involving new characters, with only the recurring character of Cheyenne Bodie to connect one episode with another. Each time Cheyenne enters a new community, he either witnesses or provokes a new story in which he can participate to varying degree--though he is the force of moral order able to resolve any conflict. This structure is particularly suited to the western's violent resolutions, since only one continuing character must remain alive when the dust settles.

The series was held together not so much by its premise as by its charismatic star, Clint Walker, who rose from obscurity to become one of the icons of the TV western. With his powerful physique and towering height, Walker commanded the small screen through sheer presence; his performance gained gravity simply from the way his body dominated the screen. Walker's personal strength extended beyond the screen to his dealings with Warner Brothers, which exercised tight control over its contract performers. In battling the studio, Walker made Cheyenne one of the more tempestuous productions in the history of television.

For the 1957-58 season ABC offered to purchase a full season of thirty-nine episodes of Cheyenne, but Warner Brothers declined. Since each hour-long episode took six working days for principle photography alone, the studio couldn't supply a new episode each week. Because Walker appeared in virtually every scene, it was also impossible to shoot more than one episode at a time. Consequently, Warner Brothers developed a second series, Sugarfoot, to alternate with Cheyenne.

In a gesture that would characterize creativity at Warner Brothers, the studio designed Sugarfoot as only a slight variation on the Cheyenne formula. In Sugarfoot, Will Hutchins played Tom Brewster, a kind-hearted young drifter who travels the West while studying to become a lawyer. Toting a stack of law books and an aversion to violence, he shares Cheyenne Bodie's penchant for meddling in the affairs of others. But whereas Cheyenne usually dispatches conflicts with firepower, Tom Brewster replaces gunplay with a gift for rhetoric--though he knows how to handle a weapon when persuasion fails. The series was more light-hearted than Cheyenne, but otherwise held close to the formula of the heroic loner.

In May 1958 Clint Walker demanded to renegotiate his contract before returning for another season. Walker had signed his first contract at Warner Brothers in 1955 as a virtual unknown and had received an initial salary of $175 per week, which had risen gradually to $1250 per week. After the second season of Cheyenne, Warner Brothers capitalized on Walker's rising popularity by casting him in a feature film, Fort Dobbs (1958), and by releasing a musical album on which he sang. But Walker was still merely a contract performer who worked on the studio's terms. Walker timed his ultimatum carefully, assuming that he had acquired some leverage once Cheyenne finished the 1957-58 season as ABC's second-highest-rated series. He requested more freedom from his iron-clad contract, particularly the autonomy to decide which projects to pursue outside the series. "Television is a vicious, tiring business," he informed the press, "and all I'm asking is my fair share."

When Warner Brothers refused to negotiate, Walker left the studio and did not return for the entire 1958-59 season. After meeting with ABC and advertisers, Warner Brothers decided to continue the Cheyenne series without its star. In his place the studio simply substituted a new charismatic drifter, a former Confederate captain named Bronco Layne (Ty Hardin). Warner Brothers received some puzzled fan mail, but the studio sustained an entire season without Walker--and finished among the top twenty programs--by interspersing Bronco Layne episodes with reruns of Walker episodes from previous seasons. If there was a difference between episodes of Bronco and Cheyenne, it was solely in the stars; otherwise, Bronco was a nearly identical clone.

Warner Brothers finally renegotiated Walker's contract after his boycott, and Cheyenne resumed with its star for the 1959-60 season. Bronco survived as a stand-alone series and alternated with Sugarfoot for the season. During the following season, the three shows alternated in The Cheyenne Show; occasionally the characters would crossover into episodes of the other series.

By the end, the actors were numbed by the repetition of the scripts and by the dreary, taxing routine of production on series in which one episode was virtually indistinguishable from another. Even after returning from his holdout, Walker disliked working on Cheyenne and complained to the press that he felt "like a caged animal" pacing back and forth in a zoo. "A TV series is a dead-end street," he lamented. "You work the same set, with the same actors, and with the same limited budgets. Pretty soon you don't know which picture you're in and you don't care." Will Hutchins admitted hoping that Sugarfoot would be canceled. Its episodes, he complained, "are pretty much the same after you've seen a handful. They're moneymakers for the studio, the stations, and the actors, but there's a kind of empty feeling when you're through."

-Christopher Anderson

CAST

Cheyenne Bodie...................................... Clint Walker Toothy Thompson ......................................Jack Elam

PRODUCERS

William T. Orr, Roy Huggins, Arthur Silver, Harry Foster

PROGRAMMING HISTORY 107 Episodes

ABC

September 1955-September 1959.... Tuesday 7:30-8:30 September 1959-December 1962...... Monday 7:30-8:30 April 1963-September 1963................. Friday 7:30-8:30

FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Jackson, Ronald. Classic TV Westerns: A Pictorial History. Seacaucus, New Jersey: Carol, 1994.

MacDonald, J. Fred. Who Shot The Sheriff: The Rise And Fall Of The Television Western. New York: Praeger, 1987.

West, Richard. Television Westerns: Major And Minor Series, 1946-1978. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1987.

Woolley, Lynn, Robert W. Malsbary, and Robert G. Strange, Jr. Warner Brothers Television: Every Show of the Fifties and Sixties, Episode by Episode. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1985.

Yoggy, Gary A. Riding the Video Range: The Rise and Fall of the Western on Television. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1994.

Top 10 Search Engine Listings

Cheyenne TV Show - Cheyenne Television Show - TV.com

The Cheyenne Show TV Show - The Cheyenne Show Television Show - TV.com

The Cheyenne Show TV Show, TV.com is your reference guide to The Cheyenne Show Show. Episode guide, photos, videos, cast and crew information, forums, ... www.tv.com/the-cheyenne-show/show/6127/summary.html - 34k - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from www.tv.com ]

 

Classic TV Western Shows - Cheyenne, Clint Walker

Top Ratings for Classic TV - Old TV Show Ratings - 50s

Top Rated TV Shows of the Fifties. ... Peter Gunn 18. Cheyenne 19. Perry Mason 20. The Ford Show 21. Sugarfoot 22. The Ann Sothern Show ... www.fiftiesweb.com/tv-ratings.htm - 20k - Cached - Similar pages [ More results from www.fiftiesweb.com ]

 

Amazon.com: Cheyenne (Television Favorites) (1955): DVD

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TV Westerns

"Cheyenne" (1955)

Cheyenne: TV Favorites Compilation DVD movie

Maverick (TV series) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lawman

9/22/1957 - 7/8/1962 ABC
Black and White - 30 minutes -156 episodes
Oct. 1958-April 1962 Sunday 8:30-9:00
April 1962-Oct. 1962 Sunday 10:30-11:00

Produced by Warner Brothers

Lawman Cast

Lawman Theme Song

Lawman. Lawman.
The Lawman came with the sun.
There was a job to be done.
And so they sent for the badge and the gun
Of the Lawman.

And as he silently roved,
Where evil violently ploved
They knew he'd live or he'd die by the code
Of the Lawman.

The man who rides all alone
And all that he'll ever own,
Is just a badge and a gun and he's known
As the Lawman.

Lawman Tidbits

Marshal Dan Troop (John Russell) may have been the straightest lawman in the TV West. A fella of few words and fewer smiles, he protected Laramie from all manner of bad guys.

In sharp contrast was the hunky Peter Brown as Deputy Johhny McKay. If Russell was stonefaced, it didn't matter to women. They only had eyes for Brown.

Passings

Wyatt Earp

Sugarfoot

Wagon Train

Series Complete credited cast:

Ward Bond .... Major Seth Adams (1957-1961)

Robert Horton .... Flint McCullough (1957-1962)

John McIntire .... Christopher Hale (1961-1965)

Robert Fuller .... Cooper Smith (1963-1965)

Denny Miller .... Duke Shannon (1961-1964) (as Scott Miller)

Terry Wilson .... Bill Hawks (1957-1965)

Frank McGrath .... Charlie Wooster (1957-1965)

Michael Burns .... Barnaby West (1963-1965)  

(more)