Have Gun Will Travel....

[J.T.B.]

Yeah, I think shows like this and the Twilight Zone really benefit from being shot in black & white. I believe it adds to their charm and better hides production shortcomings like cheap sets, garish stage make-up, or use of stock footage.

Also, there's something about B&W film that triggers your imagination in a way that color footage doesn't. Maybe it's just that your mind fills in the details like the color of a room's walls or how dingy a character's outfit may appear to other characters.

I agree. The film noir-ish aspect works much better in b&w. I will also take a half-hour grayscale Gunsmoke any day. The color ones were still great, but they seem to lose a storytelling... directness? I can't put my finger on it. Wagon Train and Laramie were also better in b&w.

Gunsmoke and Maverick also had great mail order bride stories. One on Maverick was in a later season and was also a funny parody of Bonanza. But I have also noticed the similarity of the GR HGWT story and "Mudd's Women."

In his great memoir, frequent HGWT guest star Harry Carey Jr. said that Richard Boone was very outgoing and a natural leader in all areas. He made it sound like Boone was the main motivator behind the extensive location shooting because he liked to "get out of town," especially to Lone Pine, California, where they had a "home away from home" hotel and Boone could lead extended nightly partying. He would try to get Andrew McLaglen to over-indulge, Carey said, but McLaglen would defeat him by falling asleep and no one could wake him up.

Carey said that James Arness was also very influential and respected behind the scenes on Gunsmoke, but was a more reserved and businesslike type of guy. He makes it sound like great fun working on Westerns in those days, where everybody knew each other (his father in law was Paul Fix). He was used to a "family" of cast and crew from working on John Ford pictures, and made HGWT sound similar. He says the standard rate for guest work across all the shows was $750 for six days.

 

[Christopher]

Of course, the "wiving settlers" or "mail order brides" idea isn't new, but seeing that GR wrote "Les Girls" for Have Gun Will Travel and then comes up with a variation called "Mudd's Women" for Star Trek six years later is a connective thread that's hard to miss or ignore.

Sure, that's pretty self-evident. I'm just putting it in the larger context by pointing out that it wasn't exactly a unique idea. You said he "got the idea" for MW from "Les Girls," but how can someone get an idea from oneself? Better to say that he based "Les Girls" on an already well-known Western trope and then engaged in his standard practice of recycling his old material.

And the moral of "Mudd's Women" (and "Les Girls," to an extent) is so similar to that of "The Girls from Earth" that I have to wonder if that was also an influence on Roddenberry. Or maybe that, too, is just part of the larger wiving-settlers trope that Robinson and Roddenberry were both drawing on.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Season 3, Episode 3: "Les Girls" written by Gene Roddenberry.

Not a far stretch to imagine where GR got the basic idea for "Mudd's Women" for Star Trek.

He steals his ideas from the best.

 

[Warped9]

One of the interesting aspects of the Art And Politics In Have Gun Will Travel is the comparison of three other competing shows of the time: Gunsmoke, Bonanza and Wagon Train.

The author looks at how those shows were developed, the kinds of stories they made and how they treated characters both regular and guest.

There is also the larger context of how the Western craze began on television and how it quickly faded away and tied to the evolution of television in those early years.

I found it quite interesting.


I started warching HGWT out of curiosity to better understand some of the references to the show I came across. I soon found myself liking it very much and partly because it struck me as so atypical of the Western shows I recall of that era.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Dammit, we're going to buy the book already!




j/k but you are doing a pretty nice sell job

 

[Warped9]

Dammit, we're going to buy the book already!




j/k but you are doing a pretty nice sell job

Well the thread isn't about these books specifically, but after getting hooked on the show I wanted to know more. After checking out some online sources I went to Amazon and found these books. I downloaded the Kindle versions onto my iPad.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

^ I hope you didn't take that wrong, just being funny, I legitimately suspect a number of people reading this thread have had their curiosity piqued about it.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Indeed. I never would have thought to look for books on HGWT, although in retrospect it makes sense that they would exist.

 

[Warped9]

There are books and there is a FB page.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Interesting. I had no idea there as such a large HGWT fandom.

 

[Warped9]

^ I hope you didn't take that wrong, just being funny, I legitimately suspect a number of people reading this thread have had their curiosity piqued about it.

No I didn't take offence.

 

[Warped9]

I'm enjoying this series, but I have to say that while I don't know what the Old West was really like (in general), as seen in Have Gun Will Travel it was a dangerous place brimming with plenty of ignorance, stupidity, greed and arrogance with the occasional spot of decency and intelligence thrown in periodically. It's somewhat of a precursor to the Old West depicted in Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns and others that followed.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Sounds just like the modern world.

 

[Warped9]

It's almost painful to see how often HGWT--a half hour show--went shooting on location while TOS could rarely afford it. Watching HGWT you get to see quite a few interesting locales that could have served for alien landscapes on TOS.

Pity.

 

[RJDiogenes]

The locations they found for HGWT, especially in the later seasons, were pretty amazing.

 

[Ssosmcin]

I've enjoyed this show for years and finally got the complete series box set.

A particular favorite episode is "Genesis," which shows how Paladin came to be Paladin. Sort of a Secret Origin story for the character. It doesn't disappoint.

This is one of my favorites too. It kicks off with the most exciting and brutal fight scene of the series and the rest of the episode is just amazingly dark, yet hopeful. Richard Boone is outstanding in the dual role of Paladin and Smoke (in heavy makeup without mustache - almost fooled me!).

 

[Warped9]

I've just finished watching the complete series.

This was an excellent show overall. While not all the episodes were winners and some of them were meh none of them were stinkers.

In an odd way I came to think of Paladin as something like Batman in the old west with his dual nature.

 

[Ssosmcin]

This is a great article on the series at AV Club.

http://www.avclub.com/article/adult-western-peaked-have-gun-will-travel-209684