Cynical Cinema

The best reason to watch Rawhide, the TV series, is that it is good. The second-best reason is to watch Clint Eastwood in the TV show he did before he was CLINT EASTWOOD. As Rowdy Yates, his TV persona is just about as powerful as his Man With No Name persona (the one he filmed while on a summer hiatus from Rawhide during Season Five). Season Three, Volume One is on DVD May 27th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and it is well worth it. The other major star of the series was Eric Fleming, whose deep voice and stoic character are perfectly suited to his role as Trail Boss Gil Favor. There are some irritating characters, the ones you would expect from a Western TV series in the 60s. Like, the cook always has to be an eccentric and crotchety old coot with a beard. And his assistant has to be a man with the brain of a child but lots of brawn. But Rawhide rises above these stereotypes, and succeeds at being a very good show. Sadly, Eric Fleming didn’t continue on to a Eastwood-calibre career after this show, he was drowned in Peru during the filming of an adventure series called High Jungle in 1966. But he could have been big.

Another huge reason (for the movie buff, anyway) to watch Season Three of Rawhide, is that this will be the only chance you ever have to see Clint Eastwood share the screen with Peter Lorre! Lorre, on the downside of his career, and looking about as fat and bloated as Orson Welles, was as creepy and glib as ever in Episode 5, called Incident Of The Slave Master. (All the episodes are called the Incident of something or other.) He is running a slave operation in the west, and the cattle-driving gang put a stop to it. With, of course, gunfire and horses. Lorre died in 1964, before Eastwood released A Fistful of Dollars later that same year, and it’s not like the two would have been cast in similar movies. A small moment of trivia for the rabid film fans.

Also for the rabid fans in Season 3 - the only on-screen pairing of Eastwood and Lorre’s Maltese Falcon co-star Mary Astor, in an episode called The Incident Near The Promised Land. Astor retired in 1964. And Mercedes McCambridge, who lit up Hollywood with her screen debut in All The Kings’ Men in 1949, appears in Incident Of The Captive. McCambridge guest starred often on Rawhide and other TV shows like Gunsmoke and Laverne and Shirley and Bonanza. But she is likely best-known now as the voice of the demon in The Exorcist. Too bad - she really had a great career that added up to much more than that.

And the last reason I can think of is that theme song. One of the best theme songs in TV history - load ‘em up! Move ‘em out! I think most of us under the age of 50 are mostly familiar with the song because it’s the one Ackroyd and Belushi sang at that country and western bar in The Blues Brothers. And that’s how I know it too, and it always brings back fond memories. Rawhide is a solid Western TV show from the 60s, it involves Clint Eastwood, and that’s a good enough reason for a Western nut like me to want to pick it up. I love them cattle drivers. It isn’t Red River (the all-time best cattle driving movie…yes, there is an all-time best cattle driving movie, thanks to the Duke), but it gives me my western fix in the meantime.