What I watched: A first-season episode of family Western The Gene Autry Show. In addition to the titular Autry, the episode features sidekick Pat Butram and guest stars Gail Davis, Francis McDonald, Stanley Andrews and Harry Lauter. It was written by Paul Gangelin and directed by George Archainbaud. “Blackwater Valley Feud” aired on Sunday, September 3, 1950 on CBS at 7:00 PM and is available on Internet Archive.
What happened: Pat runs into Jody Bowers, the new man running a chuckwagon for the TC company, replacing his friend Bill. They decide to race the coaches, but Gene interrupts, saying that his boss (in this episode anyway) and the owner of the road, Meechum, has said they can’t use it. The ornery old owner of the company, Carson, objects, drawing guns, but Gene is the quicker draw. Also with the company is the owner’s neice, a feisty cowgirl. Gene decides to let her go through because she’s hot.
Carson and Meechum meet in town and argue. Meechum objects to Carson selling his company to a bunch of hicks, and there’s a scuffle with a lot of wide punches thrown. If anyone in these shows took a boxing class they would own the West. Pat gets involved in the melee too, with assorted comic hijinx. Gene finally comes in to break them up, but not before Meechum starts waving a gun around. He kicks Pat in the butt, and there’s literally a “wah wah wah” effect.
The next time Carson tries to ride the road, his men have deserted him. Lilah wants to come with him, but he sends her back becuase he doesn’t want to look like he’s hiding behind a woman. When he does try to ride across the trail, men shoot at him and kill him. Gene meets with Meechum, who swears he didn’t do it.
The sherriff doesn’t believe Meechum’s story and sends him to jail. Some of his friends try to get Gene to change his testimony to protect his boss, but he refuses. The bad guys decide to intimidate Lilah next, hoping to get her to sell the ranch. One cowboy knocks her off his horse, and Gene slugs him for disrespecting a woman, which he describes as “settling things peacefully.”
Gene tries to convince Lilah not to turn the land into a farm by showing her the landscape and singing a song. This doesn’t work. When they return to Lilah’s ranch, they find that four horsemen (not those four) riding around shooting their guns in the air. Gene pursues and kills one of the men, who no one can identify. Lilah decides to sell the ranch, and Jody conveniently has an in at a local development company. I think I see where this is going.
Our hero gets a hunch that something ain’t right. Gene goes to the sheriff and looks up a law that says the road will become public if Jody crosses it one more time. Weird laws. Gene tries to stop Jody from making the trip, but he takes off and the remaining horsemen attack. Gene shoots them and chases Jody down in his wagon. He catches up to Jody and clotheslines him, then stops the horses before they enter the road. The episode ends with Lilah deciding to keep ranching and Gene letting her use the road.
What I thought: I quite liked the first half of the episode, which presented a conflict in which neither side is entirely sympathetic or in the right. As in previous Gene Autry Show episodes, the conflict is relatively small scale and based off the physical reality of frontier life, in which having the right of way on a private road can be a matter of survival. Bound up in it is a betrayal of the trust which the business of the West was based on, and a gap between legal rights and the responsibilities of frontier honour.
But The Gene Autry Show seems uncomfortable with this conflict, or perhaps unaware how to solve it, and, in a common move for genre narratives, ultimately brushes it to the side by introducing a grander, more straightforward villain who is pitting the two sides against each other for their own ends. The back half of the episode, with Gene helping Lilah investigate her father’s death, isn’t exactly bad, but it feels a little formulaic and more consciously fictional.
Lilah herself is a fun character, played with verve by Gail Davis, admirably loyal to an unadmirable cause. We’ve seen strong-ish female characters in The Lone Ranger, but this might be the first time in this series I’ve actually seen a woman on horseback. Of course, the plot has to end with her realizing she’s wrong, but at least she’s still an independent woman at the end of it.
Perhaps most interesting is the underlying ideology behind the conflict. Carson and Lilah want to transform their land into farmland, which goes against the ethos of the west, the beauty of the rolling hills that Gene sings so eloquently about. (This is also the first time the song has factored so directly into the plot.) “They’re cowboys, not farmers,” he says of the locals, suggesting that their occupation is not just a matter of happenstance but rather their fundamental character. The development of the West is both the cause that spurs the Western and its ultimate undoing, with the transformation of the untamed land of adventure into a boring old part of modern America being the ghost that has haunted Western films since its beginning.
But in Western movies and TV, the end of the West can be averted, at least for a little while. Eventually, the viewer knows, the private roads would become highways, the ranches would indeed become chicken farms and then factories, and Americans would stop being cowboys and start being people who watched cowboys on TV. But for now, there is only one farmer to persuade, and with a little bit of the Autry charm we can spend a little bit longer in the Wild.
Coming up next: Suspense returns for its second season with “A Pocketful of Murder.”
The Eternal Couch Potato 