The Ben Courtney Story Jan 28, 1959
The Ella Lindstrom Story Feb 4, 1959
The Last Man Feb 11, 1959
The Old Man Charvanaugh Story Feb 18, 1959
A new premise for Wagon Train episodes that opens it up for more stories in use in the first and last of these stories: Flint McCullough is detailed to guide someone who isn't going all the way to California to the location that is their goal. Another observation is that the episodes seem not to have been shown in the order they wee made as the locations referenced would not be reached in the order referenced: In both The Hunter Malloy Story, (S2 E16, 1/21/59) and The Last Man, they have reached the mountains but in The Ella Lindstrom Story, they make a visit to Dodge City. I wish they would stick to the geography: we are following the wagon train as they travel west across the country. I realize decisions are made based upon the perceived quality of the episode or the possible ratings they would get based on the star. But I perceive no pattern of that here. These are three episodes from late January to mid-February. The middle one has the biggest star. The latter one is probably the most interesting. Why move mountains by reshuffling the episodes?
The Ben Courtney Story has an interesting premise but is a bit over-wrought thanks to the over-the-top performance of Stephen McNally as a former union officer, now a lawman, who has a hatred of the confederacy because his wife and child died during the war, (he'd lived in Atlanta before it). Now he's the Sheriff in a town dominated by union sympathizers who have the same contempt for the confederacy but not on the same level as McNally. Flint is leading John Larch's family, who is from the south to a homestead near the town. He and his wife have been raising two young, orphaned boys, one white and one black. McNally concludes that they are keeping the black boy as a slave and demands that they turn the boy over to him to 'liberate' him. Hollywood to this point had bought into the 'glorious lost cause' myth in the movies but on Tv ex-confederates are often depicted as sore losers who dream of restarting the Civil War. Here it's a union man who doesn't see the war as being over. Philip Pine, like McNally a perennial bad guy, gets a good guy role as McNally's deputy who thinks he's gone too far. I like it when bad guys get to play good guys because that's what I assume the actors actually are: those that play bad guys have to be good guys, or at least good sports and let the good guys win in the end.
Bette Davis, the Queen of Warner Brothers and even Hollywood itself in the 1930's and 1940's, had already started appearing on TV before she played Ella Lindstrom but her prior appearances had been in anthology series: this was her first appearance on episodic TV. There would be two more appearances on Wagon Train, and one each on Perry Mason, Gunsmoke, the Virginian, It Takes a Thief and a number of TV movies until she finally, (briefly) because the star of a series, Hotel, in 1983. Ella Lindstrom is the mother of seven children whose husband has just died and who, herself, has a malignant tumor that will kill her as well. She has to plan, with her children, for their future. They elect to stay with the train. Other families have agreed to adopt the children and the eldest daughter is a of a marrying age and her beau, played by Robert Fuller, (who would someday replace Flint McCullough as the train's scout in the last two years of the show), has agreed to marry her and they will take care of the youngest child. The show has no real conflict, no bad guys and no violence. It also doesn't really have a plot and is really more of a character study of Ms. Ella, emphasizing her bravery, intelligence and her love and respect for her children and theirs for her. It's been properly compared to Ms. Davis's restrained performance in 1939's Dark Victory, where she portrayed a socialite with a brain tumor that suddenly makes her care-free life a very serious matter. I'd also compare it to All Mine to Give, the 1957 tear-jerker in which both the parents of a brood of children growing up on a 19th century midwestern farm die and the oldest child has to seek families that will take in his siblings. But The Ella Lindstrom Story doesn't jerk tears It plays the heavy drama rather low key, maybe a little bit too low-key. It doesn't quite have the impact it should.
The Last Man is one of the few Wagon Train episodes with a title that isn't framed by the words "The...Story." The train encounter a wild, unshaved, delirious man, (the excellent Dan Duryea), who is the last survivor of a Donner Pass-type previous wagon train. He's not sure who he is but has a diary kept by a man who said that one of the last survivors had stolen food from the starving people and was thus able to survivor the rest of them. The people on Major Adam's wagon train become angry as they read the diary. One in particular, (Judy Meredith) is incensed: her fiancé was on that train. Duryea has been asked if he is the man who did this and thinks he might be. He even grabs a gun and shoots himself. He can't be moved while recovering but the train has to get through the mountains as winter is upon them. Should they wait until he recovers or leave him behind? A powerful episode full of moral questions.
The Old Man Charvanaugh is apparently a charmer: he tries to sell people buffalo hides and entertains them with his accordion. But he has some not very entertaining sons who help him steal things from vulnerable travelers. Dorothy Green is on the train with her two young children. She wants to make a side-trip to a promised homestead, much as John Larch's family was doing in The Ben Courtney Story. Flint accompanies her and they run into Charvanaugh, (J. Carroll Naish) and his boys, who leave them unarmed and barefoot while they take their wagon away. It's an ordeal to get back to the wagon train and Major Adams and Bill Hawks find an unconscious Flint, dying of thirst. He directs them to Green and her children, who presumably recover, although we never see them again. Flint recovers and goes after the bad guys, not killing any but beating them up with the help of their next victim's family. A decade later, many westerns were cancelled in response to congressional demands to limit violence on TV. They would have loved Wagon Train, which limits the violence in favor of character development. Its more about human stories than human conflict.
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