I almost fell off my chair at the opening shot (after the teaser) of this episode, which shows Curry and Heyes galloping across a distant hill against an early evening sky. This is also the very last shot in Pete Duel’s very last episode “The Men Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” and it had struck me in that context as the perfect ending (as perfect as could be under the very imperfect circumstances, anyway). It’s a long take, the two of them gallop side by side away from the camera and up a hill, then at the top of the frame they turn right and gallop across the screen towards an unknown future. Heyes even has to clamp his hand on his hat to stop it from blowing off, a time-honoured ASJ tradition, and the Kid’s bedroll comes loose and bounces frantically up and down like an inflatable sausage. And now it turns out that at least part of the shot was stolen from episode 3! I had to pause briefly to check whether it really is the same long-distance shot, but I needn’t have bothered because the rest of it, with them galloping away up the hill and the Kid’s bedroll coming loose, also crops up as the final shot in “Exit to Wickenburg.” The experience left me feeling a little strange, as if the ending of the final episode had been cheapened by some kind of weird sacrilege. I suppose it just goes to show that you – or at least I – can’t entirely separate ASJ from Pete Duel’s death. I would feel a lot better about the recycling if someone on the production team had deliberately edited in that shot after completion to create an elegiac ending, but there’s no mention of it in the ASJ book and I note that in the preceding scenes Heyes and Curry are wearing their season 1 coats, presumably to establish continuity with the closing shot, so I fear it was just the show being cheap.

Anyway, once the initial shock had passed (how DARE they ruin my ending???), I enjoyed the rest. Heyes gets to be brilliant at cards again, this time spotting a card sharp in action (he knows the guy who wins can’t have the hand he claims to, and he also knows how the trick works). Rather than confronting the cheats, the boys very sensibly go and check in with the owner of the saloon to see if they’re working for the house, because they’ve learned from bitter experience that it’s not worth kicking up a fuss if the house is behind it (another connection to the final episode! There Heyes does accuse the house of cheating, but this time with the back-up up of the Bannerman Detective Agency). The owner turns out to be a nice young woman called Mary Cunningham, who seems rather overwhelmed by the whole owning a saloon business, but gives the boys her blessing to expose the card sharps. They handle the whole thing very neatly, with no need for violence or bloodshed, and Mrs Cunningham (she’s a widow) is so impressed that she offers them the job of co-managers of the saloon. I actually think this would have been the perfect job for the boys post-amnesty. No hard physical labour, plenty of drinks on the house, and a chance to utilise Heyes’s skill with cards and the Kid’s with a gun. No safe-cracking, but you can’t have everything, and Heyes turns out to be good at book-keeping, too, not to mention handling personnel. They’d be in demand anywhere, and I imagine they’d get enough opportunities to play poker themselves that after a few years they could buy their own saloon, a la Danny Bilson, and live happily ever after.

This is a good episode for the Kid. We get to see his shooting skills as he blasts away at some beer bottles set up right next to Heyes, whose faith in the Kid’s accuracy is so great that he doesn’t flinch at all as a bottle explodes beside him, though he does grumble a bit. Mary Cunningham’s little boy then asks the Kid to teach him to fast-draw but Curry refuses, on the grounds that sooner or later everyone, even him, will meet someone who’s faster than they are. This is another on-going bit of characterisation for the Kid, that while he has total confidence in his own abilities with a gun, it hasn’t made him arrogant or competitive, and he’s always aware, somewhere in the back of his mind, that this could be the time he’s outdrawn. Unlike Heyes, he seems to accept this as the price of living up to his own values; Heyes is a lot more afraid of death, though it doesn’t stop him from stepping up when the occasion demands it.

But I’m getting ahead of the episode. The morning after the boys have dealt with yet another card sharp, Mary Cunningham sacks them out of the blue and refuses to say why, though she does give them a whole month’s wages. Both Heyes and Curry act like perfect gentlemen throughout the sacking, and Heyes even says they’d rather have an explanation than the money (told you they weren’t really interested in money). Mary Cunningham expects them to leave town, but they decide to stick around and find out what’s really going on, as they don’t believe for a moment that that nice Mrs Cunningham who likes them so much no longer needs them. Well, that’s not quite true - Heyes does makes a half-hearted effort to say it’s not their problem and they should leave (“Remember, trouble’s one thing we gotta stay away from”), but the moment the Kid asks if he isn’t curious about what’s really going on, Heyes seizes on the excuse and says why yes, yes he is, curious enough to stick around. He’s kind of doing the Kid a favour here as well, because the Kid likes the Cunninghams and wants to help them (he’s a lot more straightforward than Heyes and suffers less from internal conflicts).

The boys get construction work – both of them turn out to have two left thumbs, possibly because they’re not really concentrating on the job – and a fellow called Finrock shows up and gives them a “friendly” warning. He says he knows their names aren’t Smith and Jones and if they don’t get out of town, he’ll set the sheriff on them. After he’s gone, Heyes deduces that Finrock may know they aren’t Smith and Jones, but he doesn’t know who they really are, otherwise he’d have turned them in already. So someone else must have told him.

Of course, they don’t leave, and the very next evening they get ambushed on the street. Heyes gets hit over the head with a gun and he veeeeerrry slowly drops to his knees and topples over, like a slow motion film of a tower being dynamited. It’s very funny. The ambushers wake them up outside town (“Can you hear me? And you can understand what I’m saying?”) and repeat the warning to get out of town.

Once again, though, the boys decide to stick around. They find out who attacked them, lasso the guy off his horse, and Heyes derives considerable from satisfaction from interrogating him exactly the way he interrogated them (“Can you hear me? And you can understand what I’m saying?”). The guy tells them it was Mary Cunningham who ordered both Finrock to warn them and him to attack them, as she really, really wants them to leave town.

Confronted about this, Mary Cunningham resorts to crying a lot and refuses to tell them anything. Heyes is too much of a gentleman to bully a crying woman, and the Kid likes Mary, so they give up and leave (Heyes is SO NICE to Mary Cunningham, no wonder I liked him as a kid. He has a gentle side to him that doesn’t come out all that often, but when it does, it’s really lovely).

When they go back to their hotel room, they find Finrock waiting for them with a gun. He’s still claiming to be friendly, but the gloves are off now. If they don’t leave, someone will have them killed.

Faced with an immoveable object in Mary Cunningham and an irresistible force in Finrock’s death threat, the boys decide discretion is the better part of valour. But the Kid has been doing some thinking. Heyes isn’t keen on this muscling-in on in his area of expertise, but he hears the Kid out. His partner reckons it wasn’t Mary Cunningham who hired Finrock and set the ambushers on them. This is the Kid’s big idea? I think anyone with half an eye could have figured that out. Heyes is very polite and doesn’t criticise his buddy’s intellectual prowess out loud, but he does ask if he has any idea who ELSE it might have been. The Kid’s powers of thought don’t extend that far. Heyes kindly says it’s important to know when you’re beat. But the next morning, as they’re saddling up to leave, his eye falls on the SLOANE Land Agency sign and he has an idea. He tells the Kid he didn’t sleep well the night before, thinking about who really might have hired Finrock and co. (aha! The first appearance of the “Heyes gets insomnia when his brain is fizzing” trope), but it now strikes him as weird that Sloane owns half this town and yet they’ve never once seen the guy (“Now a man as important as this Mr Sloane, all he’d have to do is come walkin’ down the street and all the bowin’ and scrapin’ would whip up a fair-sized dust storm”).

So they drop in on Sloane’s office and his secretary lets them in (a second female character with lines! This is unprecedented in the series so far! And sadly will not prove to be much of a precedent for subsequent episodes). Heyes, by this point, has figured out that whoever hired Finrock must be someone they know pretty well (well enough to know they weren’t Smith and Jones and yet not want to set the sheriff on them), so he’s rather taken aback when Mr Sloane turns out to be a complete stranger. Since that idea was a bust, they go to the saloon bar to get one last drink for the road, where they fortuitously spot “Mr Sloane” leaving his office and the barman tells them that isn’t Sloane, it’s his bookkeeper (Mr Sloane has quality minions, both Finrock and the bookkeeper are clearly men of multiple talents).

Presumably the boys get the address from the bartender, because nightfall sees them sneaking into the real Mr Sloane’s big fancy house. They burst into his drawing room, guns at the ready, and this time Heyes’s theory is proven correct, Sloane IS someone they know, or rather Heyes does – it’s Jim Plummer, leader of the first gang Heyes ever rode with, and who Heyes hasn’t seen since Plummer absconded with the loot from a robbery ten years ago. Plummer has evidently been softened by his life of respectable ease, because he’s helpless as a baby in the face of Heyes and Curry, but I conclude that his talent for picking quality minions hasn’t declined since the day he decided to give a chance to a young Hannibal Heyes.

Heyes threatens to let what’s left of the gang know of Plummer’s whereabouts, unless he buys Mary Cunningham’s saloon for the amount he cheated them out of, so $30,000. The boys don’t ask for a cent for themselves, even though there’s no way Plummer could ever have let the law know about the blackmail. I guess those two outlaws really don’t care that much about money.

This is a GOOD episode. It’s got funny dialogue, good dialogue, some good characters played by decent actors, TWO women with lines and a tight little story that showcases Heyes’s brains and the Kid’s moral character (of the “two pretty good bad men” I think even Heyes would agree that Curry is the good-er bad man). The Kid doesn’t get that many lines, but he does get to both shoot and think. And his saddle roll doesn’t quite fall off when they both ride off up the hill at the end. I call that a win.

I realise there hasn't been any activity here for absolutely ages, but as someone who's just rediscovered the series and gone back through all the old posts, I figure someone else might do the same at some future point and might like to find some more recent episode reviews.

A few weeks ago I happened to watch an interview on Youtube with Quentin Tarantino and Leonardo DiCaprio in which Tarantino talks about how aspects of DiCaprio’s character in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood were based on Pete Duel of Alias Smith and Jones fame. I hadn’t thought about ASJ in years, but I used to watch reruns on the BBC as a young teenager and had a massive crush on Pete Duel as Hannibal Heyes, so after watching the Tarantino interview I did some digging and discovered that all the ASJ episodes are available online at the Internet Archive. And so I sat myself down to watch the pilot and was almost knocked out of my seat by a lightning bolt of recognition – that black hat, pushed jauntily to the back of his head! That oversized grey coat! That voice! It was as if all the intervening years had burned away and my teenage self was staring greedily at the screen out of my eyes.
After that I had to I watch all the episodes – no, that’s not quite true. I’m a Pete Duel purist. As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one true Hannibal Heyes. I know this is unkind to Roger Davis, who seems to be a lovely person, but as far as I’m concerned none of his episodes exist. I watched all the real episodes, and since I seem to have gone and got all fannish about a series that ended over fifty years ago, I figured I might as well write some reviews.
So I’ll start at the beginning, go on until I reach the end, and then stop. The opening voiceover, “Into the West came many men…” is great. You don’t notice what an info-dump it is because it’s done with such humour and lightness. Unfortunately, things go a bit downhill from there. I really wouldn’t recommend anyone new to the show to start with the pilot, because a lot of it is very tedious, and the only important piece of information, the amnesty deal, is recapped at the start of all subsequent episodes anyway. I spent quite a bit of time thinking “I don’t remember it being this boring.” A lot of the blame lies with the Devil’s Hole gang - a bunch of “walk-offs” if ever there were – who sorely try my patience. There’s comedy and then there’s unfunny caricature, and the Devil’s Hole gang barely even rise to the level of the latter. For one thing, they’re all so incredibly stupid. Their IQs aren’t just subterranean, they form a sort of gravity well, dragging down the intelligence of anyone who comes within their radius. Why else would Heyes, whom the opening voiceover has just informed us is one of “the most successful outlaws in the history of the West” not realise that fording a river might make his dynamite damp?
Well, obviously it’s so that the nice little old lady, Birdie Pickett (there are so few women in ASJ that they all deserve to be mentioned by name) can tell Heyes and the Kid that they’re not cut out for the job, but it would have been nice if they hadn’t screwed up at something so fundamental to a job they’ve been doing very successfully for several years. And it also gives Wheat a reason to start challenging Heyes for the leadership, which I guess is mostly in there so we don’t worry about what’s going to happen to the gang once their leader quits (as if I CARED), but also has the virtue that we get to see the conflict-avoidant side of Heyes for the first time. He really doesn’t push back at all at Wheat (though he doesn’t stop the Kid pushing back, either – this will also turn out to be very in-character).

Heyes and the Kid have had enough of being chased by posses and decide they want to try to get amnesty. They go to Porterville to ask their old friend Lom Trevors, an outlaw who’s gone so straight he’s now a sheriff, to apply to the Governor of Wyoming on their behalf. While they’re there, much to Lom’s discomfort, Miss Porter (another woman! Hooray!), daughter of the bank owner and manager in his absence, asks Heyes and the Kid to check out how secure the bank is, and then offers them jobs. All these scenes reflect the show as I remember it, funny, charming and with great interactions between Heyes and the Kid.
And then once again we spend far too much time watching the Devil’s Hole gang show off the single brain cell they share between them. WHY are we spending any more time with them than absolutely necessary when we could be watching Heyes and Curry? Or even Curry and Miss Porter, or the boys and Lom. Instead we get what feels like hours of plot points about how the gang have got their guns back and are sitting in the saloon ostensibly playing poker but really are sekritly digging a tunnel all the way from the saloon to the bank. They may be stupid, but they sure can dig fast. And dispose of a shedload of earth without any visible means of doing so. And smuggle enormous planks of wood in through the saloon to shore up their tunnel without anyone spotting them. I guess they must have hidden talents. More to the point, if I detail every time the show ignores the laws of physics, or basic biology, or law, or logic in order to make the plot work, these reviews will be hundreds of pages long, so I hereby vow to ignore all such infelicities and focus only on vibes and characterisation. Let’s see if I can stick to it.
In summary, this episode is a succession of great actor moments floating around in a sea of story slop. There’s Heyes tossing the damp dynamite to the Kid and the Kid’s reaction. There’s the first of many scenes to come in which Heyes tries to argue the Kid out of standing up to a bully, and the Kid temporarily backs down for Heyes’s sake but then goes out and forces a confrontation anyway. There’s the boys trying to persuade Lom to ask the governor to give them amnesty (“Can we help it if we’re a little bit better at what we do?”) There’s Heyes’ near breakdown over being surrounded by so much money and not allowed to steal It, all done in the persona of a timid bank clerk persona (presumably he invents this character for the sheer joy of messing with the other clerk’s head – I mean, he’s already met Miss Porter and she knows what he’s actually like, he doesn’t need to impersonate a bank clerk to get the job). I always get a kick out of Heyes’s fake personae and it’s nice to see that crop up as an element of his characterisation this early on. And then there’s the wonderful scene with the money raining down and Heyes giving the Kid his hat back (Heyes is very touchy-feely in this episode and the Kid… isn’t, so that’s another bit of characterisation that’s present right from the beginning). There’s also lots and lots of pretty Heyes, which obviously I approve of, but the episode as a whole is definitely one for the completist rather than a must-see.