What I watched: Season 1, episode 3 of The Cisco Kid, a Western drama starring Duncan Renaldo as the eponymous Cisco and Leo Carillo as his sidekick Pancho. “Rustlers” guest starred Christine Larson, Raymond Hatton, and Jonathan Hale, was directed by J. Benton Cheney, and was written by Derwin Abrahams. This episode has an air date of September 19, 1950, although as a syndicated series exactly when it aired would have varied by market, and it is currently available on Tubi.
What happened: An announcer promises us adventure and romance, with “O. Henry’s famous Robin Hood of the Old West”, the titular Cisco Kid. In the opening we see a big group of cattle being herded, with a lot of herding. There’s a lack of dialogue which makes it weirdly naturalistic, and it goes on for a couple of minutes.
Joe, the foreman of the cattle ranchers, has sent for the Cisco Kid. Rancher Barry (Hale) is upset about bringing in such a notorious outlaw, but Mary (Larson), the lady owner of the ranch, trusts in his judgement. We get a brief glimpse of Cisco and his sidekick Pancho riding into town, with Pancho wondering why they’re looking for trouble. Meanwhile, back on the ranch, two men sneak in and shoot Joe while he’s writing in a book. They leave a fake dying message: “Sheriff, I was wrong – Cisco Kid with rustlers shot me.”
We cut fairly directly to Cisco and Pancho being chased by a posse, who shoots at them from horseback. Pancho falls from his horse, and adds in a bit of obviously overdubbed dialogue. Cisco hides among the trees to avoid capture, and comes back to save his partner. However, there’s another man in the bush who draws a gun and arrests both of them. The two men meet with Mary and Barry in jail, neither of whom believe them. Cisco gets out of prison by showing the guard his flying hat trick, which lures him close enough to the bars for them to grab the keys and escape. Someone sees them escape, and reports it to the sheriff (Hatton).
Cisco and Pancho meet up with Mary to plead their innocence. Cisco says he would never kill his old friend Joe. Mary is still skeptical, but is persuaded when Cisco argues that Joe couldn’t have written the message as the pen was in his right hand, and he was a leftie. She hides the duo while Barry comes around to look for them, and they recognize him from El Paso as the criminal Bill Stevenson.
As soon as they walk out of the cabin, Bill’s men shoot at them. There’s a lot of ducking behind cover and missing, but one of the rustlers is shot and the other flees. Poncho and Cisco find their horses and give chase. The man reaches a cabin, where he vanishes through a hidden passageway. A white-haired man greets Pancho and Cisco when they arrive, and they don’t find the hiding place.
Bill is upset at his lackey for having screwed up the job. Pancho and Cisco spy on his ranch, noticing the armed men surrounding it. Seeing the man they were chasing, they conclude there must be another way to the ranch. They rough up the old guy and find the hidden passageway. It seems to just lead to the outside, so I’m not sure what the point is. Our heroes find two guys and shoot one of them, then tie up the other. The bad guys arrive to chase them, but Cisco takes them down, eventually capturing Bill. Mary is now fond of them, hoping they come back home, while the sheriff is still against them. Pancho and Cisco wave goodbye to the TV audiences.
What I thought: Most of US TV history is written about the networks, the endless battle between NBC, CBS, and ABC to capture the mass audience. But there were also many independent TV stations across the US, which produced programming of regional interest (often a lot of sports and news) but lacked the resources to put together dramas and comedies like the networks were offering. Stations affiliated with the networks also needed programming to fill the hours not covered by network programming. Into this void stepped syndication, in which studios would independently produce TV shows and sell them to stations on a one-to-one basis, rather than the block programming of networks.
The Cisco Kid was one of the first successful syndicated television series. It was produced by Frederick Ziv, who had success in the radio syndication business (including a radio version of The Cisco Kid), and saw an opportunity in television. Ziv’s Cisco Kid was nominally based on a character introduced in O. Henry’s short story “The Caballero’s Way”, although the heroic wanderer in the series is a far cry from Henry’s immoral gunslinger. The series was one of the most-syndicated programs of the era, and reportedly popular with kids, who it was obviously aimed at.
There are obviously parallels to The Lone Ranger, as well as other kid-friendly Westerns like Hopalong Cassidy, and The Cisco Kid is a clear attempt to cash in on the trend. We have the heroic character who wanders into a different town every episode, often based on some never-heard-before connection to an old friend; the racialized comedic sidekick; and the routine of riding off at the end. Cheney, the screenwriter of this episode, had previously written the “Doublecross Valley” episode of The Gene Autry Show, another entry into the family-Western genre. This is not to diminish the show, however — a lot of great TV series have started out as some executive’s attempt to follow trends.
The Cisco Kid changes the formula somewhat by making the protagonist Mexican, as well as the sidekick. (Although they speak to each other in accented English.) Perhaps because of this choice, Cisco and Pancho seem to constantly be under suspicion, at least if “Rustlers” is anything to go by. Unlike in The Lone Ranger, where the good guest stars are often suspicious of the masked hero but have it allayed quickly, Cisco has to do a lot of work to win Mary over to his side, which makes the plot more believable.
“Rustling” wasn’t the first episode of The Cisco Kid — there were two previous episodes which my famously comprehensive show-finding process missed. But I think it does provide a solid impression of what a standard adventure will be. In comparison with network shows, there’s a kind of charming shagginess to The Cisco Kid. A lot of the dialogue doesn’t quite match the flow of the lips, and there are a lot of wordless and somewhat awkward sequences. On the other hand, this is the first series we’ve seen which had the foresight to shoot on colour film, even though colour TV was almost nonexistent at the time. This gave The Cisco Kid a long life in syndication, and it’s still something of a treat to watch today after 243+ black and white shows.
Coming up next: Kukla, Fran, and Ollie hit up the nightclub circuit.
The Eternal Couch Potato 