Cynical Cinema

Rawhide is one of those classic TV shows that remains cool to this day mostly because of the star power involved.  In this case, the star power rests almost exclusively with Clint Eastwood, who played Rowdy Yates, the cattle-droving ramrod.  Most of those words don’t even make sense to an audience of today.  Cattle-droving?  Ramrod?  Yes, there was a job called “ramrod”.  On cattle drives.  And Clint Eastwood had that job on Rawhide.  Fitting, no?  In previous seasons, it has been a fun pastime to pick out the guest stars who went on to become huge, or who were winding down their careers.  In Season Two, Volume Two, Peter Lorre appeared as a creepy slave trader.

In Season Three, Volume One, there are not many guest stars of note.  Perhaps the biggest would be Leonard Nimoy, who went on to be Spock, revered by nerds the world over.  But there is no one of Peter Lorre’s stature, and that’s too bad.  The show remains great, though.  I like the fact that there is a massive cast, people with different jobs on the world’s longest-running cattle drive.  Each episode focuses on just a couple of those characters, which means that each episode has a totally different, if still totally western, tone.

For example, there is an episode called Incident of the Blackstorms, where a notorious outlaw named Sky Blackstorm uses Pete Nolan and the simple-minded Mushy in order to kidnap his son.  (Blackstorm is apparently native, but is clearly a caucasian actor with a painted face.)  This episode features only Nolan and Mushy, and later on the cook and a few others show up.  But the trail boss (Eric Fleming) and his right-hand man (Clint Eastwood) don’t appear in the episode at all!  Perhaps this is a way to give actors a break.  Like when rock bands used to include 10-minute drum solos in their live shows so the rest of the band can go backstage in order to abuse substances and groupies.

The next episode is all about Fleming and Eastwood.  A crazy, weird rich woman sues Gil (Fleming) and forces him to stop the cattle drive in order to figure it all out.  The other characters appear briefly, but this is the Fleming and Eastwood show (Rawhide at it’s best).  And then the next one is just Eastwood and Sheb Wooley, primarily.  The one complaint I have about Rawhide is that the end of episodes is not always satisfying, and it doesn’t always make sense.  At the end of the Sky Blackstorm episode, the outlaw’s own men conveniently turn on him for some strange reason, but it certainly helps us feel better, as it means he will die as he should, just after turning out to be the decent man he ought to be…it’s weird.

Then there’s this crazy-woman episode, where Gil somehow goes undercover at a fancy place in order to change the woman’s mind.  He’s totally smashed on whiskey, and then an hour later he has nice clothes and a shave and a haircut and appears to be totally sober.  So…he woos this woman, and makes her gunslinger helper jealous and angry, and then she buys the herd from him and installs her gunslinger as the leader, with the intent of having him shot…it makes almost no sense at all.  It’s an episode of Rawhide as difficult to follow as a Steven Seagal direct-to-DVD movie.

But it’s worth muddling through some of these complicated and poorly executed plots, because Rawhide remains badass.  With the theme song and Clint Eastwood.  What more is there?  Season Three, Volume One comes out December 9th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“In a feud, sometimes the law is helpless.”

I still love Gunsmoke.  Marshall Matt Dillon and his bad-ass style of frontier justice was awesome.  James Arness was awesome.  As far as TV characters go, he was as close to John Wayne as anyone has ever been on the small screen.  In an episode in Season Three, Volume One, some bank robbers take Miss Kitty hostage.  And when he says “don’t take her”, there is an incredible menace in both his voice and his eyes that approaches the badass levels of Clint Eastwood a few years later.  Of course, these bad guys have messed with Miss Kitty, so we already know they’re going to die, but he certainly knows how to put an exclamation mark on that.  Just his “don’t take her” means that if they do, they’re already dead.  Of course, the bad guys don’t listen.  And they die.

That being said, there are still some things that bother me about Gunsmoke.  In that episode I just mentioned above, the bad guys robbed a bank, murdered a random cowboy along the road, and roughed up a woman.  But the only reason they die is that the woman is Miss Kitty.  In the episode right before that one, two bad guys poach buffalo, murder a random cowboy along the road, and rough up a woman.  But this woman is the bad guy’s wife.  And Marshall Dillon, rather than killing these guys, or trying them, or even arresting them, he asks the woman if she still wants to go with them.  Of course she says no - these guys have tried to kill her.  So Marshall Dillion beats them up.  And sends them out of town, never to return.

That’s it.  No arrest, no shootout, no justice.  These guys are bad news.  They are poaching buffalo illegally on protected land.  They have murdered someone in an especially brutal knife attack.  They have captured Marshall Dillon and Chester at gunpoint and left them in the desert to die.  They have brutally beaten this poor woman with the intent of killing her.  And then they attack the Marshall with knives, intent on murder.  Well, the Marshall will show you!  He will punch your face, then ride you out of town on a rail!  This particular episode stars Jack Klugman, later to star in the Odd Couple TV series as Oscar the slob.  No real reason to mention that.  Just some trivia.

And then there’s the way Matt Dillon talks to the Indians.  The Indians, you see (it is the 50s, after all) speak in broken English.  Like, “me see white man go over mountain”.  Which is kind of cringe-inducing in itself.  But then Dillon will respond to the Indian in the same voice.  Like one of those people who talks baby-talk to babies as though that will help them understand better.  So he will respond “did brave see what color hat”?  as though the poor Indian couldn’t possibly understand regular English.  (Then again, the attitudes toward native people in Gunsmoke were probably pretty enlightened, for the time.)

I do like Gunsmoke a lot.  James Arness is fantastic, and he has the badass eyes and posture and voice to make him the coolest guy on television for many, many years.  (More trivia - apparently the role was originally planned for William Conrad, but he was getting too fat, so they went with someone more photogenic.  Conrad went on to star in Cannon and Jake And The Fatman later on, when he was even fatter.)  I love the way he always tries to rile up the town doctor.  I love the way he randomly decides who lives and who dies based on how close he is to their victims.  And I love the fact that kids once grew up watching this stuff, instead of the garbage I remember from childhood.  I’ll take Gunsmoke over Growing Pains any day.  Season Three, Volume Two comes out December 9th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“Book ‘em, Danno.”

In my review of Hawaii Five-O Season Four, I suggested that the program was a blueprint for the career of David Caruso. Jack Lord and his bizarre hair and his silly-tough-guy delivery are very Caruso-esque, just thirty years earlier. And I also suggested that Hawaii Five-O is campy, dated, and totally hilarious in retrospect. And I was totally right. Season Five remains equally campy, equally hilarious, and equally worth watching while under the influence of…irony. Throw back a gram or two of irony, and you can enjoy Hawaii Five-O as much as you can enjoy Spongebob, Scooby-Doo, or anything done by Cheech and Chong.

Unfortunately, when I got my copy of Season Five of Hawaii Five-O, I was totally out of irony. I had an ounce on order, and I was waiting for delivery when I began watching the show. Eventually, I had to turn it off. Without a keenly developed sense of irony, this show just plain sucks. Even the episodes with Wo Fat, who is still awesome. Even the one with Ricardo Montalban is not very hilarious without irony. So make sure you roll up some quality ironic sensibilities before purchasing Season Five of Hawaii Five-O, out November 18th from Paramount Home Entertainment.

          One of the worst things you can say about a TV show or movie from the 70s or 60s or even the 1930s and 40s is that it feels dated.  That it doesn’t stand up over time.  That what was once considered classic is stuck, mired, in it’s own era, completely lacking the ability to maintain it’s relevance in today’s world.  And then, every now and again, being “dated” can actually be a good thing.  Such is the case with Hawaii Five-O, a show which may be the classic show that holds up the least over time.  And I love that about it!  It is so cheesy and mired in the seventies that it becomes hilarious to watch.  The Fourth Season of Hawaii Five-O comes out tomorrow, June 10th, from Paramount Home Entertainment. 

          Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett must be the most hilariously dated screen character available on DVD right now.  His hair is glorious, in a 1970s pre-Flock-Of-Seagulls sort of way.  This is the most dated hair on TV, next to MacGyver’s mullet.  His delivery is painfully cheesy, the one-liners and the tough guy talk are a cross between Clint Eastwood and Don Johnson, which just doesn’t work.  Well, any more, I guess.  The tough-guy showdowns between McGarrett and the big evil bosses (especially the wooden yet enigmatic Wo Fat, played by Khigh Dheigh) are ludicrous but SO entertaining.  It’s pretty clear to me that on CSI:
Miami, David Caruso is channeling 70s-era Jack Lord.  And for some reason, people still love that show, while I think David Caruso is hilariously over-the-top.  The legacy of the ludicrous cop.  A funny one, I think. 

          Also awesomely dated is that famous theme music.  One of the most familiar tunes in the world, I had never seen an episode of Hawaii Five-O, I couldn’t have identified the theme correctly in any way, but as soon as the first episode started up there it was.  This one’s up there with Bonanza as probably the greatest most recognizable theme music in TV history.  Another hilarious part of the show - prototyping the David Carusos that were to come - is that Steve McGarrett seems to be the only character on the show.  Oh, they’re a team, McGarrett and the other guy…played by James McArthur…what was his name?  Oh yeah.  Danno!  A guy who exists simply as a reason for Lord to utter the line “book ‘em, Danno”.  I’m certain this series was intended to be extremely serious in it’s day, but it has now become so campy as to be awesome.  Watch it next time you’re about to get into CSI:
Miami and look for the comparisons.  Then again, many people don’t get the humour in CSI:
Miami either, so perhaps they’ll watch this and be very entertained.  I know I was.