What I watched: The eighth episode of The Gene Autry Show, a kid-friendly Western starring the titular singing cowboy and his sidekick Pat Buttram. “Doublecross Valley” was directed by George Archainbaud and written by J. Benton Cheney, with guest stars Gail Davis, Harry Lauter, and Stanley Andrews. “Doublecross Valley” originally aired at 7:30 PM on Sunday, September 10, 1950 on CBS, and is available to watch on the Internet Archive and Tubi.
What happened: We open with some action, as Judd Parker and his gang attacks a Union supply train and steal their gold away into the hills. They blow up some boulders to bury their stash. As is the way of things, Judd betrays his partners and shoots them so that he doesn’t have to split the gold.
Decades later, two men have heard the legend of the buried gold and are planning to buy the Triangle Ranch from Big Jim Watson (Andrews), where it is said to be located, by any means necessary. We finally get to Gene Autry, who in this episode is a sharp-dressed sheriff with a fiancee, Susan (Davis). She warns him that a man named Idaho is here with plans to shoot him. Gene intimidates Idaho, and when he finally tries to draw on him a stranger shoots at him. He introduces himself as Kent (Lsuyrt), a “naturalist”, and there’s a somewhat anachronistic joke about nudism. Gene’s fiancee immediately takes to Kent. Jim runs interference by informing Kent that Susan is “practically engaged” to Gene.
They have dinner at Big Jim’s house, and Pat provides his requisite comic relief by eating too much. They tease Susan about making biscuits that are hard as rock, and Susan attacks Gene back for not being able to deal with local raiders. Some ranch hands quit because of the violence. Kent volunteers to help, but shortly afterwards Jim is shot.
Gene and Kent chase down the gunman on horseback, and Kent shoots him dead, much to the dismay of Gene. Susan is still tearing into Gene, and he’s starting to have his own doubts. Gene and Pat decide to ride out to follow the raiders and set an ambush for them.
They see the men take shovels and start digging. Gene comes back to town and accuses Kent of being behind the raids, saying that he has clay on his boots from the Triangle Ranch. In the meantime, Pat has discovered the gold they were looking for. Kent and the others come in to hold them at gunpoint, but are distracted by a ringing clock, allowing Gene to punch them out. I guess this is the titular doublecross.
Gene and Kent slug it out while Pat fans himself with his hat, and of course Gene wins. We fade to him singing this episode’s song, “Texas Never Cry”, to Susan, who now adores him again. She’s just into violence. True to form, the episode ends with Gene spanking her over his leg.
What I Thought: This is another Gene Autry episode that is pretty similar to the Lone Ranger formula that I’ve become oh so familiar with, including a villain with a duplicitous and perhaps overly circuitous plan to get a big stash of gold. I may have gotten a false impression from the comparatively gentle first episode I watched. Ultimately, it’s not all that surprising that a Western aimed at kids would focus primarily on the action, but part of me is always looking for som ething a little slower and more atmospheric.
The main difference in The Gene Autry Show, of course, is that rather than being an outsider Gene is part of the community under threat, although in a slightly different way each time. While it’s strange in retrospect to watch a series like this that actively resists continuity while starring a singular actor, in these early days where filmed TV was a novelty it’s easy to see how Autry and his production company would conceive these episodes the samea s movies. After all, nobody thinks that John Wayne is literally the same person in all his movies, although he usually plays similar characters. But television, unlike the movies, would move away from this star-driven concept towards static characters.
In “Doublecross Valley”, the main grounding relationship is Gene’s romantic entanglement with Susan. Gail Davis had previously appeared in “Blackwater Valley Feud” (a lot of valleys around here) as another love interest for Gene, although she was a much more likeable character then. The show perhaps misjudges her dialogue, and instead of being teasing or difficult she just comes off as mean. The conclusion, in which she receives corrective spanking, is also disturbing and ill-judged, no matter how playfully it’s presented. It seems hard to believe that these people ever liked each other, let alone were “almost engaged.”
The other thing that interested me about this episode was the opening scene, containing the crime that sets up the stakes of the episode. For one thing, it takes up a fair amount of time before Gene and company even show up, and the initial criminal Judd Parker seems to vanish into the wind without receiving punishment. For another, the event is set shortly after the Civil War with Parsons identified as attacking a Union supply train.
Westerns often dance around the Civil War, due to the still-ongoing cultural dispute of how to remember the war. In the 1950s much of the white South still identified with the Confederacy, or at least a mythical version of it, and studios wanted to avoid offending. Westerns were full of noble ex-Confederates, as in Ford’s elemental Stagecoach, but they mostly avoided dealing with the war itself. The Union could be referenced as a plot element, but Gene Autry wasn’t about to put on their colours and fight the Rebs.
It’s not clear how long has passed since the opening scene, but the world of The Gene Autry Show is anything but the one split apart by war. In theory, this would place the story towards the end of the 19th century, when the West was already somewhat settled. But in reality the show, like so many other Westerns, takes place in no place and time other than the mythical West, a national dream of a bucolic past where all troubles can be solved by a good man with a steady hand.
Coming up next: Oliver J. Dragon is here to fix television.
The Eternal Couch Potato 