User Reviews

Sheila Dembro (played with lecherous intensity by Beverly Michaels) demands to know the answer when Cheyenne rejects the latest in her attempts to seduce him that began the moment she got a look at his massive chest shirtless. "Far from it," he answers before telling her to go back to her husband. With this episode, we begin to flesh out Cheyenne Bodie's moral character. From episode one he proved himself to be brave, trustworthy, noble, intelligent and capable, but now we see that he's an upright gentleman, too. Sheila's 17-year-old stepdaughter, Johnny (Ann Whitfield), has a crush on Cheyenne, but in some ways she's more mature than the increasingly more unhinged Sheila.

After a violent encounter with the greedy Martin Storm (expertly played by Barton MacLane) and his band of gunslingers, Cheyenne is nursed back to health by John Dembro (the wonderful Regis Toomey), and his wife and daughter. In gratitude, Cheyenne helps Dembro organize other small ranchers into an effective coalition against Storm, incurring that would-be land baron's eternal wrath. The depth of Sheila's obsession is made clear when she lets her husband die in a fire and then, under the influence of Martin Storm and her own irrational passion, accuses Cheyenne of the murder. The very townsmen who two weeks before had hailed Cheyenne as a hero turn against him. This is not the last time Bodie is threatened with hanging by the very people he tried to help, so we also get a glimpse into the character of some old West towns. Judging by the current affinity for violence in the world, both individual and mob-generated, this might not be a completely fictionalized version of Old West mentality.

However, one of the best parts of this episode is the relationship between Cheyenne and Johnny. He treats this lovestruck teenager with great respect and gentleness, another facet of his personality that drew legions of women to the character and to the man who portrayed him so authentically. The final scene in the episode is priceless. Johnny holds out a businesslike hand for a no-doubt reluctant goodbye handshake but instead of taking it, with a small smile he scoops her up by the waist and plants a chaste kiss on her lips. She had once said to him, "I could never forget you," and the look on her face after that sweet kiss assures us that she never did.

Warner Brothers recycled two classic movie plots in this 1956 episode of "Cheyenne" with Clint Walker entitled "The Storm Riders" and the emphasis surprisingly enough is SEX! This extremely interesting episode of "Cheyenne" must have surely hoisted eyebrows when ABC-TV first aired it. The villains catch our protagonist, Cheyenne Bodie, herding twenty horses across their range and warn him that he must turn around and ride off their property. Naturally, our strapping big hero has other ideas until a ruthless cattle king Storm (Barton MacLane of "High Sierra")orders his top hand gunslinger to lasso Cheyenne and pull him off his horse. Of course, Cheyenne is taken by surprise, loses his twenty head of horses, and winds up bruised and battered. He rides slumped over in the saddle onto a small rancher John Dembro's property (Regis Toomey of "The High and the Mighty") and the rancher's young wife Sheila (Beverly Michaels)and daughter Johnny (Anne Whitfield) nurse big Clint Walker back to health. Dembro offers Cheyenne a job as a ranch hand which our hero readily accepts. Frustrated wife Sheila and the budding 17 year old daughter take one look at Cheyenne's massively muscled chest with a field of dark black hair and swoon. The daughter starts dressing up and behaving like a woman, while the somewhat older wife confesses to Cheyenne that her marriage to an older man isn't what she expected. Meanwhile, the evil range boss offers to buy out the small rancher, but he refuses when Cheyenne challenges the villain's top hand over a matter of money owed him for the loss of his horses. Initially, "The Storm Rider" looks like a familiar rendition of "Shane" with the smaller ranchers trying to survive a hostile takeover from a big rancher. The writers (R. Wright Campbell and "Dirty Harry" scribe Dean Rieser)switch horses in the middle of the stream and focus on the unhappy Sheila whose obvious glimpse of Cheyenne's chest hair stimulates her libido. When Cheyenne guns down the nasty top hand gunman in town in a duel, he awakens the slumbering hope and courage in the small ranchers that if they band together they can repulse the power of the fiendish range boss. Meantime, Cheyenne spurns Sheila's advances and she grows shrewish and takes her rage out on her husband who has drunken too much liquor following Cheyenne's shoot-out with Storm's top hand. Now, the small ranchers agree to band together. At this point, the show centers on Sheila's jealousy. She drives her unconscious husband back to their ranch and puts the horse and carriage in the stable. Dembro is so drunk that he cannot unhitch the horse. Sheila becomes irrational and sets fire to the stable with a lantern and her husband dies in the ensuing blaze, but the murder haunts Sheila. Eventually, the authorities are able to lay the blame for Dembro's death on his insane wife. Beverly Michaels is thoroughly convincing as the delusional frontier wife trying to make the best of a terrible situation. The scene where she knowingly leaves Dembro in the barn to burn to death is a plot element lifted from two previous Warner Brothers movies: "Bordertown" (1935) with Bette Davis and "They Drive By Night" (1940) where jealous wives murder their husbands. Again, for a television show aired in 1956, "The Storm Riders" boasts more obviously adult oriented sexual intonations than you'd expect from this landmark ABC-TV series aired in 1956. Future "Maverick" producer Roy Huggins produced this episode.