What I watched: Season 1, episode 5 of The Cisco Kid, a Western drama starring Duncan Renaldo as the eponymous Cisco and Leo Carillo as his sidekick Pancho. “Convict Story-” guest starred the very busy Gail Davis, Riley Hill, and Robert Livingstone was directed by Derwin Abrahams, and was written by Sherman L. Lowe. This episode has an air date of October 3, 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 bathing in a creek hen a man in the classic prisoner’s stripes steals his clothes. You can see his butt! He has no choice but to put on the prison uniform himself, which causes Cisco to point a gun at him. They go in search of Pancho’s horse Loco, and find him in a nearby barn, where a woman (Davis) points a gun at him. It’s just not Pancho’s day. The woman’s brother frankly admits to being the thief, and has his sister hold them by while he gets away.
Cisco can sense that the thief needs help, or maybe it’s just his way of flirting with the woman. She promises to tell him everything about Bob Drake (Hill). But instead of hearing everything, we see Bob sneaking into an office and digging through a filing cabinet. By the time we get back to Cisco and Pancho they are already headed out, with Pancho unclear on what they’re doing. Me too.
Bob finds himself confronted by three men, one of whom he accuses of being the real killer of Sam Waller. Cisco and Pancho show up in time to save him and punch out some goons. The bad guy decides to go after Drake’s sister. This leads to a horse chase through the woods. The elderly sheriff chases them down, but Pancho stops him at the point of a gun. He says he will deliver Drake to the law provided he has a chance to clear his name within two days. The Sheriff, seeing that someone else is willing to do his job, heads back for lunch. Cops, you know?
Drake isn’t happy about going back to jail, but Pancho assures him that he’ll only be there for a short time. Pancho goes back to reassure the sister, and finds her missing, having been kidnapped by the baddies, led by a Mr. Cantwell (Livingstone). They want her to write a letter to lure her brother out, and when she refuses, they throw her into the basement. Thankfully they aren’t *that* bad guys.
Cantwell has his ranch “well guarded” by he same two guys as earlier, but Pancho and Cisco get the drop on them. Cisco breaks into the house, ad has a nice fight with Cantwell, which involves some destruction of property and a decent judo throw. After the villain is subdued, Cisco rescues the girl. Drake again busts out of jail using the old “Tell the sheriff you’re sick” method. Cisco is trying to get Cantwell to confess, but no luck. They resort to threatening him with a lit fuse of dynamite. Pancho flips out and leaves, but Cisco stays until he confesses, just in time for the sheriff to get there and arrest him. It turns out the dynamite was a dud.
What I thought: This is another episode about mistaken identity, the second in a row for The Cisco Kid. Here, an innocent man is taken for guilty, and has to find the right killer. As with the Lone Ranger, Cisco’s main heroic ability seems to be not fighting or horse-riding ability, but his ability to discern good from evil. The audience is never really presented with concrete evidence that Drake isn’t the real killer, but Cisco seems to believe him mainly because he has a hot sister. If Cantwell had a hot sister as well, there would really be a moral dilemma.
The sister is the main sympathetic point here, because Bob is kind of a nonentity. There’s nothing really distinctive about his personality or story to give this episode a sense of flavour. Even his way of breaking out of jail seems kind of half-assed and uninteresting. Cantwell also isn’t a particularly memorable villain, so the only real point of interest here is what happens to our protagonists. Renaldo and Carillo are plenty charming, if a little encumbered by their accents, but I worry that when watching The Cisco Kid I may just have to expect less charismatic guest stars than the network shows.
The somewhat more interesting part comes at the end of the episode, once we’ve gone past the traditional resolution of the bad guy being punched out. Drake breaks out of prison again, and Cantwell still won’t confess. I didn’t really expect a downbeat ending, but my mind was putting together how this all could end tragedy, with Drake unable to fully trust Cisco and ending up on the lam even with Cantwell defeated.
Instead, we get a borderline torture scene, where Cisco uses the threat of death to coerce a confession. I guess the idea is supposed to be that Cisco’s nerves outlast the cowardly villain’s, or that he outsmarts him, but all I could wonder is how a confession obtained under these circumstances could possibly hold up in court, or be convincing even to Cisco. And surely breaking out of jail repeatedly would still have Drake in legal trouble even if the murder charge was lifted. But these are probably the wrong questions to ask of a kid’s Western. Ultimately, the hero’s triumph is imparting his own clear moral judgement to the legal system. But it is a very strange ending to a very ordinary episode.
Coming up next: Wednesday’s empty, but Thursday brings us a triple-header starting with more Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, with some nursery rhymes attached,
The Eternal Couch Potato 