Hurry on down to Hardie’s

My fellow classic movie mavens are well aware that in the month of February (and first three days of March—except leap year), The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ runs their “31 Days of Oscar” tribute.  This event and “Summer Under the Stars” usually allows me to catch up with whatever I have squirreled away on our DISH DVR, and I was very much looking forward to watching the content (and slapping my favorites onto disc).

But…in the immortal words of Robert Frost: “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft a-gley.” (Who says this blog isn’t highbrow?  Besides 98% of the blogosphere, I mean.)

The good people at DISH decided to have a “freeview” weekend of HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime the weekend of February 17-20.  The following weekend, we were treated to free Starz.  The weekend after that, Encore.  And we just finished up a freeview of Epix this past weekend.  For a recovering movie nut like your humble narrator, this is an embarrassment of riches—particularly because when there isn’t anything on the schedule worth grabbing, there’s always On Demand offerings I can download.  I have been spending every free waking moment luxuriating in movies, movies…and more movies.

Laramie stars John Smith and Robert Fuller

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I went hog wild during the Encore freeview…because their On Demand features episodes of the classic TV westerns they offer on their schedule—this is how I was able to build my substantial Wanted: Dead or Alive collection back in December of 2015.   Encore Westerns on Demand has episodes of Death Valley Days, Laramie, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Tales of Wells Fargo (a recent acquisition), and Wagon Train—which presented me with a dilemma: which show do I download?

I eliminated Death Valley Days and Wagon Train right off the bat; I like both shows—but they’re not something I have to have.  I leaned heavily toward Laramie, particularly due to the piss-poor quality of the Timeless Media Group DVDs…but I’ve got a 30-day window with these downloads, and I didn’t think I could get all EW had in that amount of time (particularly since they’re 50-minute shows).  There’s DVR space to consider, too—I like to have enough of a “buffer” in case Mom (who learned how to work the DVR during her convalescence) wants to grab any Rambo movies or something with Jean-Claude God Damme.  (I don’t know why she insists on recording stuff with commercials…particularly since she hasn’t learned to fast-forward yet.)  So, it came down to either Wyatt Earp or Wells Fargo…and since all six seasons of Earp have been released to disc, I went with Fargo (its DVD release history is a little spotty).

Tales of Wells Fargo originally premiered as a December 14, 1956 episode of CBS’ Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, “A Tale of Wells Fargo”—with a teleplay by Frank Gruber from a Zane Grey story.  The producer of this episode, Nat Holt, had also produced the 1949 film that gave future Wells Fargo star Dale Robertson his first onscreen credit, Fighting Man of the Plains (Fargo creator Frank Gruber also wrote this screenplay…in addition to the novel on which it was based).  Holt had quite a time talking Robertson into doing “Tale” as a regular series—Dale initially didn’t think much of the script, and only agreed to commit to the pilot as a favor to his friend.  He never dreamed that the show would leap to #3 in the Nielsens in its second season (Tales of Wells Fargo officially premiered over NBC on March 18, 1957).  (Wells Fargo remained in the Top 10 in its third season, and continued to be a solid ratings performer until its final season in 1961-62.  More on this in a bit.)

I thought that by downloading all the Wells Fargo Encore Westerns had to offer, I could play a few for mi madre—a longtime fan of the show.  I know I mentioned this on the blog in the past (my previous experience with Wells Fargo was a single episode, “Jesse James,” which was on Timeless’ The Classic TV Western Collection) but my father used to tease my mother unmercifully about this series, derisively referring to the star as “Dale Roberts” and saying…well, I won’t repeat exactly what he said (it’s a little insensitive) but he hinted that Mr. Robertson was a few horses shy of a remuda.  I’ve watched 13 out of the 14 episodes in the first season (“The Silver Bullets” did not download properly, much to my dismay) and a couple from Season Two…and I don’t know why Dad kids Mom so.  Granted, I do not possess the sophisticated television tastes as my old man (and by “sophisticated television tastes” I mean shows about UFOs and cops placing people under arrest) but I’m finding Tales of Wells Fargo to be a pretty entertaining series.  It’s not a great show (there are superior western half-hours, like Gunsmoke and Have Gun – Will Travel) but it’s far and away better than The Cisco Kid or any other juvie oater you’d care to name.  Robertson didn’t consider Wells Fargo an “adult western” or a “kids western”—but a “family western,” assuming your family conducted private investigations for the Wells Fargo company for a living.  (That’s the premise in a nutshell: as Jim Hardie, Robertson chased down bad hombres who robbed the company’s stagecoaches or freight wagon in the 1860s/1870s/1880s, and brought the miscreants to justice.  This was quite a few years before the Wells Fargo company started committing fraud on a major scale.)

Hugh Beaumont as Jesse James

One of the aspects of the program that I’ve observed is its rather compassionate portrayals of its outlaw element: in the aforementioned “Jesse James” (07/01/57), future Leave it to Beaver dad Hugh Beaumont portrays Jesse as a very sympathetic sort, and in “Sam Bass” (06/10/57), rifleman Chuck Connors makes the titular bandit a jovial, happy-go-lucky fella (the real Bass was apparently also a “no worries” kind of guy).  (Connors also appears in the premiere episode of Tales of Wells Fargo, “The Thin Rope”—adding some interesting shadings to the villain.)  The nature of Hardie’s work dictated he make contact with many Old West legends, including Belle Starr (a nice turn by Jeanne Cooper), John Wesley Hardin (Lyle Bettger), Billy the Kid (Robert Vaughn), and Butch Cassidy (Charles Bronson).

Jack Elam

Of the episodes I’ve viewed so far, I was very impressed with “The Hijackers” (06/17/57); Hardie puts a premature end to his vacation by tracking down the son (Harry Holt, Jr.) of a wealthy man and his fiancée (Jacqueline Holt) and finds their trail leads to a ghost town, where they’re being held captive by Jack Elam and his gang.  There’s a beautifully done (and wordless) sequence in which Robertson and Elam play hide-and-seek in the abandoned burg, and when the closing credits rolled I was not at all surprised to see serials ace John English attached as director.  (The author of this one is N.B. Stone, Jr., later responsible for Ride the High Country.)  The following episode, “Stage to Nowhere” (06/24/57), is also first-rate; Hardie is escorting an outlaw (Walter Coy) to the hoosegow when their stagecoach is chased down by the man’s gang—also on board are a timid newspaper reporter (the ubiquitous Lyle Talbot) plus a woman (OTR’s Barbara Eiler) and her son (Bobby Clark), who have an important connection to Jim’s prisoner.

Michael Landon

You’ll spot a good many familiar future TV faces and veteran character thesps in these episodes of Tales of Wells Fargo: Michael Landon is not only in “Sam Bass” but “Shotgun Messenger” (05/07/57)—which I’d wager was the first time he worked with his future Little House on the Prairie co-star Kevin Hagen (as one of the bad guys, of course).  Some time back on Facebook, I made a joking reference to actor John Carroll being “the poor man’s Clark Gable” …and my social media compadre Christopher Snowden (the proprietor of Television Diary) responded that he always considered Dale Robertson to be quite Gable-ish.  When I concurred that I can definitely hear a Gable-ness in Robertson’s speech patterns, Chris observed: “[H]e's also there in scenes where Robertson's character is charming the ladies—chin down, and eyes uplifted as a big ingratiating smile spreads wide.  And all of these mannerisms are still in place twenty-odd years later, when he appears for short stretches on Dallas and Dynasty.”

The moustache helps a lot.  (From a 1965 TV pilot, Diamond Jim.)

William Demarest with star Robertson

In the fifth season of Tales of Wells Fargo, Earle Lyon replaced Nat Holt as the series’ producer; Lyon related in an interview: “I took over the last two years.  Dale Robertson called me one day and said he felt Nat was getting too old and couldn’t remember things.  Dale was pretty upset with the way things were going with the series.” NBC decided to side with the show’s star, and Holt’s inaugural season as producer went so swimmingly the network made the decision to not only expand Wells Fargo to an hour in Season Six but produce it in Living Peacock Color.  A cast of regulars was also added as Jim Hardie acquired a horse ranch near San Francisco (star Robertson was quite the horseman in real life) including future My Three Sons co-star William Demarest (as the stock crotchety ranch foreman, Jeb Gaine) and future Folgers’ pitchwoman Virginia Christine (as Hardie’s neighbor, The Widder [Ovie] Swenson).

Tales of Wells Fargo had stiff competition in its final season—it was scheduled Saturday nights opposite Perry Mason, and though it came in a respectable second, ratings-wise, the decision was made (the show was getting a bit expensive for the cost-conscious MCA/Revue to produce) to send it to the Old Syndication Retirement Home.  Star Robertson would later headline Iron Horse, another boob tube oater that barely hung on for two seasons, and J.J. Starbuck (1987-88), a Stephen J. Cannell creation that also resurrected Ben Vereen’s character of E.L. “Tenspeed” Turner (which he had played on the short-lived 1980 series Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, also created by Cannell).

Tales of Wells Fargo’s first and second seasons are available on DVD (Tales of Wells Fargo: The Complete First and Second Seasons); in addition, there’s a collection containing “selected” episodes from Seasons 1-5, and Tales of Wells Fargo: The Best of the Final Season in Color.  In looking at what I downloaded from Encore Westerns, neither seasons five or six seem to be in their package—perhaps they will air these in the future.  Wells Fargo plays much, much better than I had hoped…and later, I will make a small sacrifice to the satellite gods for allowing me to grab these episodes for the dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives.

Rethink unpossible

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there are quite a few old newspapers piled up in the driveway of the blog…and while I have been occupied with an outside project or two, the inactivity is due mainly to sloth, which may very well be my favorite of the Seven Deadly Sins.  Okay, maybe I’m being a little harsh on myself.  I’ve written a piece or two at the Radio Spirits blog—commemorating the anniversaries of Night Beat and The Adventures of Superman—and that review of Without Warning! (1952) I alluded to in my last post is now up at ClassicFlix…though this is cheating a bit; I wrote that last year.

I’ve not been idle in the movie-watching department, however; I took advantage of the Netflix trial period to catch two documentaries that I had read about in past reviews and mentally attached to my “must-see” list.  Ken Burns’ The Central Park Five (2012) was most assuredly time well-spent (my father had a dissenting opinion, and rose from his recliner about a half-hour into the movie), but I can’t say the same for Room 237 (2012)—a quirky offering that reads entirely too much into Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) (one individual posits that Shining is an allegory about the genocide of Native Americans while another argues that it’s an admission that Kubrick faked the moon landing for the television audience back in 1969).  I probably would have enjoyed 237 more if I had a higher opinion of Shining, whose cult has eluded me ever since I saw it back in the day.  I also watched a couple of movies that I DVR’d during a free Showtime weekend: Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013) features a performance from Forest Whitaker that surpasses his Oscar-winning turn in The Last King of Scotland (2006) (seriously, he’s first-rate…but the film itself has problems).  I was also amazed at how much I enjoyed Philomena (2013), which I didn’t think I would but I identified most strongly with Steve Coogan’s atheist journalist, who lends a helping hand to a woman (Judi Dench) who had her son stolen from the nuns at the convent in which she was placed after her teen pregnancy.  (I recorded this one for Mom, who’s quite the fan of Dame Judi; she loved it, and even my Dad stuck around for it.)

In the classic movie arena on Netflix, I got to see Raw Deal (1948) in its entirety; the first time I watched it back in the 90s I dozed off a couple of times due to lack of rest.  (Sensational noir with TDOY faves Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt.)  I also enjoyed The River’s Edge (1957), which a couple of folks recommended to me via Facebook after I posted a link to a Salon.com article about the other River’s Edge (from 1986), which I revisited at about the same time (DVR’d it from the MGM HD channel).  The 1957 Edge features Ray Milland at his nastiest, though I was so underwhelmed by Anthony Quinn I was kind of hoping sexy red-headed Debra Paget would wind up with Ray.  (I always forget Paget is in House of Strangers, which I caught on Fox Movie Channel this morning.)   The bulk of the classic movies I’ve caught lately emanates (of course) via The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™, where I’ve been in the throes of a mini-John Barrymore festival with viewings of Svengali (1931), The Mad Genius (1931) and Counsellor at Law (1933; this one is a piperoo).  I’ve been trying to “clean up” the DVR of late; I caught Doubt (2008) courtesy of TCM (good performances but I wanted to hit Meryl Streep’s nun with a ruler) and Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven (2002) via Cinemax (another movie that I thought would be cinematic vegetable but instead was a most gratifying experience).

I also mentioned in the last blog post a bit o’trouble with the AT&T U-Verse people.  We signed up with U-Verse in mid-January of 2014, and both Los Parentes Yesteryear and I knew that when our year was up, the amount of money we generously give them each month to maintain contact with the outside world would increase…so I called U-Verse to see if I could do a little shrewd horse trading.  AT&T and other cable-like folks really don’t want you to leave; when you call them and state “We’re going to cancel our service” they immediately transfer you to what they call a “retention specialist,” who’s prepared to do whatever it takes to keep you doing bidness with them.  Mostly lying their asses off.  (Oh, I forgot to explain this to Mom the day I called U-Verse, by the way; I thought she was going to have a heart attack when I said “We’re going to cancel our service.”)

The U-Verse rep explains to me that if we agree to take on their U-Voice service for a year we could expect to be paying roughly the same monthly rate for TV and Internet.  Truth be told, I wasn’t particularly wild about doing this—we use Magic Jack as our phone service (and you don’t even want to get me started on that, or we’ll be here for a lifetime)—but Mom had made it clear that it was either re-negotiate or go back to Charter.  (Talk about being in Hell with your back broken.)  So, under the auspices of it being a “second emergency landline” (the rep’s phrase—not mine) I agree to the deal, and ask how much effort it will take to get this set up.  No problemo, he says in his faux Spanish—all I have to do is plug our phone into the phone jack of the U-Verse modem the following day.

I’m sure once I got off the phone with this mook he and his fellow retention specialists had a hearty guffaw at my expense…because when I followed the instructions he gave me the set-up refused to work, and so I had to call Customer Service to find out what the hell was going on.  That is when I learned that the order to start the U-Voice had been bumped up to January 22 (I made the call on the 16th)…and what’s more, I would have to wait until U-Verse sends me another modem via UPS.  (The modem we had was, I thought, perfectly fine…but they argued we need one with a battery backup.)  The January 22 deadline came and went, and was then bumped up to the 26th.  February 7 was the next date after the 26th had passed.

In the meantime, because we’ve not started the U-Voice, the amount of our service soars to a level that generates much profanity from Ma and Pa Shreve.  I had been proactive in watching the bill online to see if it would change, and when it did I spoke to another service rep, who assured me we would not see this amount on the paper statement they send us.  Well, he lied.  He lied a lot.  (That’s where the parental swearing came into play.)  After I got the bill, I called U-Verse and spoke with a woman who told me that this was the amount we would be paying from now on.  Then I started swearing, and asked to speak to a supervisor to straighten things out.

As of this post, we have received the modem; I was able to connect it with little trouble (well, except I had to reset the wireless connection—that was a small pain in the tuchus) and in AT&T’s favor, sending them the modem back isn’t too difficult—you just drop it off at a UPS store, fill out a metric ton of paperwork, and they box it up for you.  But the U-Verse experience left a sour taste in our collective mouths here at Rancho Yesteryear; Mom has already said we’re crawling back to Charter next year, something I thought I’d never hear from her.

I saw this article at Raw Story, Salon and a few other places (it was originally published at Alternet)—it explains why the cable industry is so horrible (they single out Bombast Comcast, a company so loathsome they’ve started to refer to themselves as “Xfinity”), and tells a few jaw-dropping tales of mistreated customers.  If anyone out there in Blogland is employed in that capacity…you should really look into getting into a more honorable line of work, like cooking meth or working for the USPS.

Still can’t get the parts…check back next week

Earlier this month, I received an e-mail from the folks at AT&T U-Verse that over the (Thanksgiving) holiday weekend, they were going to give all subscribers a free preview of their “U-450” package—which is the company’s top of the line subscription deal (the ‘rents and I have the “U-200”).  What this entailed for us was four days of premium channel largess: HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, The Movie Channel, Starz—you get the idea.  What this entailed for me was that because the On Demand access is also included (I think the only channels exempt from this were the ESPN stuff and Disney), it gives me carte blanche to add a few movies to the dusty Thrilling Days of Yesteryear archives.

They have some sort of block on the HBO/Cinemax stuff, so I wasn’t able to record anything off of those channels.  (Drat.)  This didn’t keep me from helping myself to a look at a few newer movies that I had not seen; my BBFF Stacia mentioned in an e-mail that she and Mr. Stacia were amused by The Lego Movie (2014), and I sat down with that Friday night.  I wasn’t particularly fond of the fact that the movie shifts gears toward the end (it gets a bit sappy) because a good portion of it is some fairly smart satire in a kind of Rocky and Bullwinkle mode (the kids will enjoy the Legos while the adults chuckle at the jokes) but overall it was most entertaining.

The best HBO offering I watched was Dallas Buyers Club (2013), which I thought Mom would like because she’s a big Matthew McConaughey fan (though not so big that she’s been able to figure out why I keep saying “All right, all right, all right” every time his Lincoln commercial comes on) and I didn’t think I would because the subject matter sounded depressing.  Yet I thought the movie was sensational (both McConaughey and Jared Leto won well-deserved Oscars) and she hated it (thought the profanity was a bit much—“It’s Texas, ma…whaddya gonna do?”).  A genuine first-rate film, one of the best I have seen in a long while.

Starz offered up the 2011 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature—Inside Job (2010), which I also thought was a winner.  (I put this on for Dad…and he shrugged at it in a most uninterested way.)  Curiosity also bid me welcome to Saving Mr. Banks (2013), which, sadly, was simply not my cup of Harmless Harvest.  I liked Emma Thompson’s performance as P.L. Travers, the author of Mary Poppins…but the movie seemed to suggest that she was a bitch because she had daddy issues and it was up to ol’ Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) to come to her rescue.

I guess what I’m trying to say is because I have been distracted by all this movie goodness—not only have I been able to watch some more recent films but I’ve been indulging with past favorites like Blow Out (1981), Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985)—that’s the reason why there’s no Serial Saturdays in this space…and why there’ll be no Doris Day(s) on Monday.  (Now…now…let’s not all be disappointed at the same time.)  But I will have material at the ready this week, including an interesting entry in Tuesday’s “Overlooked Films” feature and a review on a Grapevine Video purchase as well.  In the meantime, my look at The Strange Love of Molly Louvain (1932) is available for your perusal at ClassicFlix.  Now—back to the screening room!