I’ve been watching episodes on Encore. Holy crap: what a classy program. I’m old enough to have seen them the first time around, and I loved the show back when, but I was too young to appreciate the excellent writing, literary allusions, tragic/ redemptive plots. However I did have a serious crush on Paladin, who was equally at home at the opera or on the plains duking it out with no-good ruffians. Richard Boone in this role was the classic example of the guy who was NOT good looking, but was VERY attractive.
Same here. Despite the mugging and hamming it up, the stories are enjoyable. Costumes cool too. I enjoy spotting the various character actors and always watch the credits. Good fun!
I watched it when I was a kid, and am now rewatching it. I’m deep into season 3, and it is still great fun. It is one of those shows that I like more as an adult than I did as a kid. Plus, I can pretty much pick out the Roddenberry shows. Besides the good actors, there is great writing - Roddenberry, Irving Wallace, and Bruce Geller before he created Mission: Impossible, among others. Ida Lupino directed some of the shows.
The Orion slave girl dance from the first ST pilot came from Have Gun, and there was a fake death plot device, just like Amok Time.
My two favorite shows so far: Paladin, ambushed and left with nothing but his undies, moves into a ranch and show the cultured lady of the house he knows more poetry than she does, teaches the cook how to make better dishes, figures out the accounts, showing fraud, and of course beats up the bad guys. The other - Paladin rescues Oscar Wilde, and gives him most of his most famous bon mots.
I’ve seen some of these shows and I want to know just what the guy does for a living. There’s an ad running and in it he says, “I am not an assassin”. But somehow I got the impression he was a hired gun. Was he a bodyguard?
In the episodes I’ve seen, he basically just stumbles into situations. No explanation of why he’s there, what he’s doing, where he’s going,…
I also wanted to ad I’ve been having a pretty similar experience as the OP with Gunsmoke. I too am old enough to have seen some of the later years of it in my childhood, but I didn’t appreciate the quality back then.
He’s a troubleshooter. He helps people with problems, and since it’s the old west, problems requiring his very high fees usually involve violent men.
Like the heroes in almost every western, he tries to get though a day without killing anyone, but seldom succeeds.
I don’t remember very many episodes where he just “stumbled into” a situation. The show’s trademark is his business card, “Have Gun, Will Travel,” and each episode usually begins either with someone seeking him out for help, or him reading about a desperate situation in the newspaper, and sending his card to one of the principals. His home base is a luxurious San Francisco hotel, but his adventures take him all over the west.
Encore has brought a lot of the old classics back at one time or another. Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson, Rifleman, Big Valley, Maverick, the Virginian. TV was better then.
You owe it to yourself to listen to the radio version of Have Gun, Will Travel. It starred John Dehner as Paladin. Dehner’s characterization of Paladin is different from Boone’s, but his spin on the character is no less entertaining. For the first season, the radio show used adaptations of the TV scripts but used original material in later seasons. Lots of familar faces (voices?) turn up on the radio show. Richard “Dick” Crenna is in about a million episodes, for example.
The entire run of the series is available as a free podcast through itunes.
Thanks for the reminder; I loved this show back in the day; I think it was on after Maverick.
Netflix Streaming has all the series. Except a few episodes are shown as “Disc only.”
I used to watch it as a kid, still remember the business card he used to hand out, but haven’t benefitted from it’s availablity since. I’ll have to look harder I guess.
It’s an interesting dichotomy, his “classy” demeanor in that show juxtaposed with the equally forceful, although in a very bad way, personality he displayed in Hombre with Paul Newman and Frederic March.
The fella had range.
“How you gonna get back down that hill?”
I am old enough to remember there was such a show, but too young to remember much more. But I love that style of show, maybe I’ll give it a shot.
John is currently appearing on the Virginian as Morgan Starr, on reruns of the Virginian. Love that Encore group.
Yup, those were the good old days, when kids grew up on shows that taught you that guns solved everything.
My favorite was the Rifleman. The guy lived on an isolated farm, 10 miles from a town of about 200, and still had to kill two or three guys a week.
Ditto the comment about Gunsmoke. One year around Christmas there was a marathon and I watched exactly one zillion episodes in a row! That show ran for 20 YEARS. Far cry from today’s programs that produce six episodes and call it a season.
On Encore, Wagon Train with Ward Bond is on right before HGWT. Bette Davis was a guest star yesterday. Leonard Nimoy was on the day before… played a Hispanic instead of his usual Indian (Native American).
*Rifleman *was also a great show. Chuck Connors showed his boy high ideals.
Speaking of having to kill a coupla people per week: the city with the highest per capita murder rate in the country was clearly Cabot Cove, Maine. I mean the population is something like 120, but every week at least three to four people buy the farm.
He stumbles into a situation in about 1/3 of the shows, but it is always established that he is on his way to a job or back from one.
There were clearly two ironclad writing rules for that show. One was there was always some point where his calling card was shown. Second was that a gun was always fired. For a while I thought the rule was that someone was always killed, but there were a few shows where that didn’t happen.
He does say he is not an assassin, and does turn down jobs where the goal is to get someone killed, and often brings a bad guy to the law at great risk, but if you add up the number of people he killed it would be rather horrendous.
Gene Roddenberry cut his writing teeth on this show.
Another interesting episode was with Phineas Fogg, going around the world in 80 days, hiring Paladin.
Another when he was umpiring a baseball game…
Haven’t gotten to those yet.
I just had a thought though - Paladin is clearly the ancestor of The Most Interesting Man in the World - don’t you think?
I think you’re right! Good call…
Do you think it might also be possible that Paladin (which was only a psuedonym) actually is The Most Interesting Man in the World? I wouldn’t put immortality past him as he was so superior to regular people in every other way.