What I watched: Season 1, episode 10 of The Cisco Kid, a Western drama starring Duncan Renaldo as the eponymous Cisco and Leo Carillo as his sidekick Pancho. “The Will” guest starred familiar faces Gail Davis, Riley Hill, and Robert Livingston. This episode was written by Royal K. Cole, and was directed by Derwin Abrahams. This episode has an air date of October 31, 1950, although as a syndicated series exactly when it aired would have varied by market, and it is currently available on Tubi.
What happened: Pancho is writing a letter to Sister Maria, asking Cisco how to spell “fried chicken.” There’s a kind of vague joke about them actually having fried rabbit. A man in a red shirt is harassed by two horseriders in plaid, who promptly begin shooting at him, leading to a chase. Cisco and Pancho chase the assailants off, and the man explains his story.
This leads to a flashback scene where the man, Bob, is working as a freight driver, carrying money back and forth to the bank. However, the banker finds that the boxes are full of rocks and dirt, and Bob gets locked up for stealing the money. Bob’s boss Cantwell eventually bails him out of jail. Cisco agrees to help prove Bob innocent, while Pancho jokes about Cisco being a good friend to everyone but him. Ouch.
There’s a fun spot where Pancho puts a guy on a dolly and sends him into a stack of crates.
Cisco and Pancho interrogate Barker, the boss of the freight line, which includes holding him at gunpoint and locking him in a cabinet. It’s okay, because they know he’s a bad guy. The shooters from earlier come in and break out Barker, leading to a fistfight. Sadly, our heroes do a crappy job tying them up, so the bad guys escape.
It turns out this was intentional, so that Cisco and Pancho can follow the goons. They find that Hanley, who seemed to be helping Bob, is also in on it. It’s now time to introduce this episode’s pretty lady, Bob’s sister Ruth (Davis). Hanley says he’ll be taking her to his farm, but Cisco and Pancho give chase, and shoot Hanley. Ms. Drake doesn’t trust Cisco for obvious reasons, but doesn’t put up too much resistance to going along with them, where she meets Bob and has her suspicions assayed.
This turns out to be a plot for Cantwell to inherit the Drakes’ estates, having already got Bob to sign away his power of attorney when he was bailed out of jail. The sheriff is skeptical of this story but agrees to help Cisco and company. There’s a brief exchange of gunfire, and the bad guys flee. Pancho and Cisco do some more quasi-humour before bidding us farewell.
What I thought: Another day, another mistaken identity Western episode. Here, we have an innocent man framed to appear guilty by a conspiracy of a number of very interesting-looking man. The plot is a little too complicated, but it’s all in service of the larger idea of the Western: the nominally outlaw hero, in this case the dreaded Cisco, lives in an upside-down world where he is the only squeaky-clean hero. Unlike the Lone Ranger, Cisco never goes on at length about how he has a feeling something is off, but rather his inherent roguishness just leads him to correct injustice.
The action in this one is pretty good, but a lot of the seemingly required elements of a Cisco Kid episode, like a pretty girl for Cisco to woo or some humorous situations for Pancho to misunderstand, are introduced in a particularly unenthusiastic manner here. I’m normally a bit of an easy marker for comedy, but I’m not sure the quasi-wordplay between Cisco and Pancho would make even a kid laugh. Ah well.
Coming up next: November’s gonna find us returning to the big top for Howdy Doody.
The Eternal Couch Potato 