Whitmore is always worth watching, as savvy an actor, as powerful a presence as you can get. On his ability to attain great stardom a writer in the early Sixties wrote that Whitmore did not pan out as "the next Spencer Tracy." No, but in that age of teen idols could Tracy himself have been the next Tracy? This episode of The Big Valley shows just how easily Whitmore could leave a lasting impression by mining the depth of a character's psychosis up to the very end, where he tops a grinning performance with a maniacal mug showing how nuts he really is and always was. It is not the kind o guy he played in his many brilliant performances over many years, yet aptly this is a Western, for this deeply intelligent, richly acute acting force of nature was the Wallace Stegner of actors.
Review of Night in a Small Town
