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. “Oil Land” guest starred Peggy Stewart, Fred Kohler Jr., and Robert Livingston (returning from the previous episode.) was directed by Derwin Abrahams, and was written by J. Benton Cheney. This episode has an air date of October 10, 1950, although as a syndicated series exactly when it aired would have varied by market, and it is currently available on Tubi.
What happened: We open with some more footage right out of the 4-H club, as two men on horseback herd a pack of cattle. The older man, Hank, goes out to look for strays and finds oil on the ground. He proves that it’s really “black gold” by lighting a match. He shows it to his partner, who promptly shoots it. Didn’t have to deliberate on it too hard. The shot is overheard both by a nearby young woman and our intrepid duo Cisco and Pancho. The killer escapes just as Cisco arrives on the scene.
The young woman, of course, sees Cisco and Pancho standing over the bodies rifling through his wallet and assumes they’re the killer. The man was Burton Williams and the girl is his niece Peggy (Stewart), who promptly holds the men at gunpoint. They’re always named Peggy. Cisco and Pancho don’t seem too alarmed. The real killer, by the ominous name of Hank (Kohler), runs into town to negotiate buying the ranch with his banker friend Walt Stewart (Livingston). So there’s a Peggy, a Stewart, and the actress Peggy Stewart. Hank maintains the pretense that Burton was killed by strangers, but he’s not fooling anyone.
Peggy has taken Cisco and Pancho into jail, and doesn’t listen to their protestations of innocence. The banker knocks on the door and makes an offer to buy the ranch, but Peggy refuses to sell. The sheriff sends Cisco and Pancho to the US Marshall. The banker tells Hank to go after the wagon and fake an escape for Cisco and Pancho, setting up his plan to frame them for a kidnapping he’s going to conduct.
Hank poses on a rock and shoots the wagon driver, leading to a classic runaway carriage situation. Despite being handcuffed, the duo are able to grab the key from the dead man’s pocket and free themselves. Cisco is able to stop the horses, but convincing Pancho to go back to town proves to be equally difficult. They do eventually make it back to the sheriff’s office, and write a letter to let him know they’re going over to the ranch. Pancho thinks that all of this is dumb, and secretly pockets the letter.
The duo reclaim their horses and ride back to the Circle J ranch. These ranch names really aren’t that creative. The banker Stewart already has Peggy tied up. Cisco and Pancho see Hank arriving and hide, then get the drop on him. They resolve to take Hank to the sheriff, hoping that it will somehow loosen his lips. When they stop at a watering hole, they encounter the sheriff and his posse and have to flee. “That’s what makes sheriffs sheriffs, they’re always shooting at somebody,” Pancho notes.
Hank has escaped in this melee, and makes it back to Stewart, who has picked up a few more goons. He takes out a big stick of dynamite and plans to blow up the house with Pancho and Cisco inside of it, then forge Peggy’s signature. Well, you could have just done that to begin with. Pancho and Cisco free Peggy, who is no longer suspicious of them, and hear the fuse burning in time to escape. Pancho, apparently a demolitions expert, tries to cut the fuse before throwing it back at the men who are shooting at them. The explosion gets at least one of them, although they cut away before we can see his dismembered body parts flying up in the air.
Cisco chases down Stewart and punches him out. When the sheriff and his posse arrive, they’re ready to arrest Cisco and Pancho. Peggy testifies that Stewart and Hank are the real culprits, although Hank has already been killed in the explosion. Pancho gets in trouble for not passing along the note, and runs away as everyone laughs..
What I thought: I’ve written in the past about the frequency of mistaken-identity plots on these kid-oriented Westerns — The Lone Ranger has certainly had his share, and in just a fraction of a season Gene Autry has already racked up a couple. And so we have one again in The Cisco Kid , where Cisco and Pancho are framed for a murder on fertile oil land. It’s not the first time that this has happened to our heroic duo (there was a similar plot in the pilot), and it almost certainly won’t be the last.
There’s an additional resonance to this plot device in the case of The Cisco Kid‘s two Hispanic lead characters, though. “Hispanic” didn’t necessarily mean the same thing in 1950 as it did today, much less in the Old West time period this was set in, but like all immigrants Hispanics in the US have been a consistent scapegoat for crime and social problems. The Western frontier was made up mainly of areas that were once part of New Spain, but in Hollywood Westerns it’s imagined as a land of WASPs, with maybe the occasional Hispanic or Black character as comedic relief.
The Cisco Kid doesn’t exactly resist those stereotypes — Cisco and Pancho are, after all, the almost-exact cliches of the Latin lover and the bumbling foreigner. But there’s a possibly unintended and definitely unearned social charge to their confrontations with Anglo sheriffs, who become certain of their guilt without any good reason. Episodes like “Oil Land” thus become, inadvertently, stories about Latino heroes correcting a racist justice system. God, don’t you hate woke Hollywood?
The other thing that interests me about The Cisco Kid is how it was made. A lot of the shots in this series seem like they were taken from somewhere else, such as the lengthy cattle-herding sequence at the start of this episode that looks very similar to the one at the start of “Rustlers.” Notably the scenes involving our actual characters don’t involve many cows. The horse chases also are shot from a way’s away, which could be a sign of re-used material (or stuntmen). On the other hand, nothing I’ve read about the series notes re-used footage, and colour stock footage probably wouldn’t have been that cheap at this time. Maybe they just shot a bunch of cow footage one day so they could use it throughout the series.
The fact that I could wonder this perhaps reflects the generic nature of TV Westerns. There were different heroes, but they all had more or less the same plots, and more or less the same type of action sequences — and all of this was, of course, inherited from B-movie and film serial Westerns. That doesn’t mean that these shows are bad, and I’ve loved plenty of media that was ultimately pretty generic. But when there’s no real art to combining the components, it’s inevitable that at some times they can feel like leftover casserole.
Coming up next: It is, weirdly enough, our second straight show involving the movie Destination, Moon.
The Eternal Couch Potato 