Max, you make commenting on your columns difficult for me since they are so interesting, detailed, well-researched, superbly written, and compelling. These columns are so different from your brilliant novels, which are no less well written, but fill a very different niche. .
You are, in fact, a man of many parts. An intellectual Paladin, if you will.
I am roughly the same age as you, so I was exposed to the same TV fare of the 50s. "Have Gun Will Travel" was on my watch list, but it was not my favorite. Frankly, I'd be hard pressed to tell you which Horse Opera was. I tried to watch some episodes of every one of them.
Growing up in the Southwest, I was a little off put, because the TV fare was so out of sync with what I knew to be the reality of actual life in the west. For example, no real western character ever dressed like, Paladin, Bret Maverick, Cheyenne, or any of the Magnificent Seven.
If it's any consolation, since I am a retired Paratrooper, I drive folks mad with my running critiques of the inaccuracies of the war movies that were made before Captain Dale Dye showed up to become the technical advisor on various movies and mini-series. Band of Brothers and The Pacific are just two examples of his influence.
I think that I'm most enamored of the portion of this week's column that addresses the issue of what underlying 'motive,' 'lesson," or 'meaning' an author inserted for the benefit of literature professors, teachers, and/or critics. You obviously understand that the intellectual class could not simply accept that a story teller had no hidden agenda to be detected by the reader in order to teach the reader some great truth.
At Brophy Prep, that Jesuit school on Central Ave. in Phoenix, we studied literature all four years. According to the Jesuit fathers who assigned vast numbers of novels and classical works, there was always a lesson to be learned. They ignored the express declaimers that you published this morning from Hemingway and Twain.
Though I did receive a substantial foundation at Brophy, which helped me navigate literature course at Arizona State (happily, NOT, the Harvard of the Southwest), I found the search for deep, hidden meaning in a good story to be tedious and counter-productive.
My favorite novel of my youth was "Catch 22." I haven't done the research to quote Joseph Heller accurately this morning, but, I recall that he described one of his characters in the novel as an arrogant, pseudo intellectual, who 'knew everything about literature, except how to enjoy it.' [Not verbatim, obviously].
My favorite Western Movie was/is/always will be "The Professionals." If you are looking for the hidden meaning, there is a dialogue between Burt Lancaster and Jack Palance that was brutally frank and very compelling to a college student about to go to war. There was no 'hidden' meaning, the writers laid it out for anyone to see.
Thanks, TonyP--it's a fact (as Susan will confirm) that my favorite novel in youth was also "Catch-22." I read it at least six times. (Susan hated it.)
We also enjoyed "The Professionals." Now I think we'll have to watch it again.
Max, I also read Catch 22 multiple times. It really helped me to keep a sense of humor (a critically important trait) after I enlisted in the Army Airborne in 1967. Clearly, the novel was a well-executed, but highly exaggerated parody.
Yet, I can tell you that several hundred times in my first three years in the Army, I'd shake my head and and think, "Yossarian warned me about this."
In my defense, I was a 19-year old lovestruck female away for the summer from my beloved. Neither set of parents would think of allowing long-distance telephone calls, so letters were our only source of communication. The near-opening scene where the censors are taking out random words from letters to the soldiers made me crazy. And frankly, I probably just wasn't cynical enough, old enough, or sophisticated enough to "get" most of the parody. However, I DID enjoy Yossarian's certainty that "they" were trying to kill him, taking cold comfort from the fact that he wasn't singled out -- they were trying to kill everyone! I have felt the same way for about 16 of the last 20 years. MAGA! Susan
How fascinating. It’s doubtful many of the writers of TV shows today know anything more than the formulas which have even become bastardized from a few decades ago. Take Law and Order. It used to be great. Today and for the last ten years it’s unwatchable.
And most shows include the inevitable car or foot chase and gratuitous sex scenes. Boring.
Born in 1957, I was a bit too young to have an opportunity to catch "Have Gun-Will Travel" on the family's "portable" black and white. The only thing portable about that brutally heavy TV set was the rolling cart it sat on and the handle no one trusted to lug it around without the cart.
After the show's run ended in 1963, I was able to catch an episode here and there in re-runs, usually on a lazy Saturday afternoon, between reruns of "The Lone Ranger" and "Sky King". As I recall, Roy Rogers's show and "The Rebel" were part of the Saturday TV fare, too.
Those few episodes of "Have Gun-Will Travel" that I watched as a young child planted a dormant seed of curiosity and wonder that finally germinated in the early aughts when, as a late forty-something, I found the complete set of "Have Gun-Will Travel" in DVD format at a local department store. Despite a demanding law practice, my primal urge to immerse in the lore of Boone's vehicle was irresistible: Had "Gun"-Must Binge.
And binge I did, all 225 episodes! Now that streaming has made virtually anything available, I still prefer to watch well-written Westerns of that era. The show I'm stuck on now is one, like "Have Gun-Will Travel", I had meaningful exposure to as a child. I've been taking in as many episodes of "The Rifleman" with Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford as my wife will let me.
The basic premise of "The Rifleman" is completely different from that of "Have Gun-Will Travel". The hero of the former, Lucas McCain, is a single father rooted firmly in his ranch and a devoted citizen of the nearby town of North Fork. Most of his character defining experiences, his stories, happen in or near his home.
Boone's Paladin, meanwhile, lives a seemingly rootless life in a hotel in bawdy San Francisco between mercenary missions. Nearly all of his adventures happen on the road; he has little apparent connection to his community.
Regardless of these differences, though, there is an underlying theme that runs through the heart of both programs. That theme begins with an intense commitment to a code of honor. But it doesn't end there. Underlying that code is a vein of Judeo-Christian moral sensibility that modern Hollywood and much of our culture have consciously rejected.
Sam Peckinpaugh had a big hand in launching and maintaining "The Rifleman", too. He wrote the pilot and three of the first four episodes. He also directed at least six episodes. Interestingly, Peckinpaugh tired of the genre's emphasis on moral themes, attempting to take the Western in a different direction with his thirteen episode show, "The Westerner".
I haven't watched an episode of "The Westerner" yet. But I understand that it is to the 1950's Western drama what Tarantino's/Rodriguez' "From Dusk Till Dawn" is to 1931's Legosi horror epic "Dracula".
It might be a stretch to claim that Peckinpaugh initiated Hollywood's fall from grace, its flight from Eden. But he certainly had a hand in reducing the Western genre to a Hobbesian, Darwinian and even Nihilistic existence.
Now back to Paladin, Lucas McCain and Mark! My mind resides more comfortably there!
Great post! I was too young to have seen Have Gun will Travel when it was on TV but found it much later. It's good, enjoyable storytelling, an art that seems to be lost on most TV shows nowadays.
I'd also recommend the 1950's radio version starring John Dehner as Paladin. Classic radio drama.
Usually, shows like "Gunsmoke" started as radio shows before they were "promoted" to TV. Unusually, this show started out on TV before making it to radio.
As we all recall, William Conrad was the perfect radio voice for Matt Dillon. Alas, he could not be cast in the television show for the obvious reasons. PETA would have filed suits on behalf of the horse. Susan
This brings back a lot of memories. When I was growing up my father and I watched many oat burners on Saturday evenings, including Have Gun Will Travel. I haven't thought about that in a long time. I'll have to look for them on PlutoTV. I'll also look for The Professionals. Thanks for this!
Many popular American TV shows never made it across the pond in the 1950s and 1960s - and in any event we did not have a set until about 1964, so I have never seen Paladin. That is an omission that I intend to correct as soon as possible, especially as i always enjoyed seeing Richard Boone in various movies. I can only remember seeing The Lone Ranger and a few episodes of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.
The writer Elmore Leonard explained that Boone always delivered lines he had written in stories of his, which were made into the movies "The Tall T" and "Hombre," exactly as Leonard heard them in his head when he wrote them.
Really a great read. Maybe my favorite TV series ever. My father was in the Air Force so I watched the show from South Dakota, to California, to Japan. As I recall most episodes began with Paladin dandied up in his sophisticated clothes in what I presumed was the Palace Hotel in SF. Also, I have always thought that Paladin was the model for Chris, in the 1960 version of Magnificent Seven.
Im so young, ive never heard of this show. But i have a lot of love for these kind of pulpy simple short tv show heros. Here are some of my favorites: Secret Agent Man, The Saint, Magnum PI, Burn Notice. Almost always a fun little old good v evil story, damsel in distress, and good guy wins in the end, refuses full payment for service. Fun stuff.
A must-watch episode of HG-WT is the gritty origin story where Boone takes over from the original Paladin. Redemption and forgiveness are the themes.
The show has been aptly called Shakespeare With a Six-Gun. Where else could you find a gunfighter escorting Oscar Wilde?
Discovering the radio version 30+ years later was a special treat for my weekly late night commute for five years between Mpls and Fargo. John Dehner was a superb Paladin.
Great article. But for the stories of our lives, we would be without any meaning at all. We are all our own authors. Thanks for celebrating the story with us.
Max, you make commenting on your columns difficult for me since they are so interesting, detailed, well-researched, superbly written, and compelling. These columns are so different from your brilliant novels, which are no less well written, but fill a very different niche. .
You are, in fact, a man of many parts. An intellectual Paladin, if you will.
I am roughly the same age as you, so I was exposed to the same TV fare of the 50s. "Have Gun Will Travel" was on my watch list, but it was not my favorite. Frankly, I'd be hard pressed to tell you which Horse Opera was. I tried to watch some episodes of every one of them.
Growing up in the Southwest, I was a little off put, because the TV fare was so out of sync with what I knew to be the reality of actual life in the west. For example, no real western character ever dressed like, Paladin, Bret Maverick, Cheyenne, or any of the Magnificent Seven.
If it's any consolation, since I am a retired Paratrooper, I drive folks mad with my running critiques of the inaccuracies of the war movies that were made before Captain Dale Dye showed up to become the technical advisor on various movies and mini-series. Band of Brothers and The Pacific are just two examples of his influence.
I think that I'm most enamored of the portion of this week's column that addresses the issue of what underlying 'motive,' 'lesson," or 'meaning' an author inserted for the benefit of literature professors, teachers, and/or critics. You obviously understand that the intellectual class could not simply accept that a story teller had no hidden agenda to be detected by the reader in order to teach the reader some great truth.
At Brophy Prep, that Jesuit school on Central Ave. in Phoenix, we studied literature all four years. According to the Jesuit fathers who assigned vast numbers of novels and classical works, there was always a lesson to be learned. They ignored the express declaimers that you published this morning from Hemingway and Twain.
Though I did receive a substantial foundation at Brophy, which helped me navigate literature course at Arizona State (happily, NOT, the Harvard of the Southwest), I found the search for deep, hidden meaning in a good story to be tedious and counter-productive.
My favorite novel of my youth was "Catch 22." I haven't done the research to quote Joseph Heller accurately this morning, but, I recall that he described one of his characters in the novel as an arrogant, pseudo intellectual, who 'knew everything about literature, except how to enjoy it.' [Not verbatim, obviously].
My favorite Western Movie was/is/always will be "The Professionals." If you are looking for the hidden meaning, there is a dialogue between Burt Lancaster and Jack Palance that was brutally frank and very compelling to a college student about to go to war. There was no 'hidden' meaning, the writers laid it out for anyone to see.
Thanks, TonyP--it's a fact (as Susan will confirm) that my favorite novel in youth was also "Catch-22." I read it at least six times. (Susan hated it.)
We also enjoyed "The Professionals." Now I think we'll have to watch it again.
Max, I also read Catch 22 multiple times. It really helped me to keep a sense of humor (a critically important trait) after I enlisted in the Army Airborne in 1967. Clearly, the novel was a well-executed, but highly exaggerated parody.
Yet, I can tell you that several hundred times in my first three years in the Army, I'd shake my head and and think, "Yossarian warned me about this."
In my defense, I was a 19-year old lovestruck female away for the summer from my beloved. Neither set of parents would think of allowing long-distance telephone calls, so letters were our only source of communication. The near-opening scene where the censors are taking out random words from letters to the soldiers made me crazy. And frankly, I probably just wasn't cynical enough, old enough, or sophisticated enough to "get" most of the parody. However, I DID enjoy Yossarian's certainty that "they" were trying to kill him, taking cold comfort from the fact that he wasn't singled out -- they were trying to kill everyone! I have felt the same way for about 16 of the last 20 years. MAGA! Susan
When reminded that the same "they" were trying to kill everyone, he asked, "What difference does that make?"
Which, it turns out, is exactly right. It doesn't make a difference whatsoever.
How fascinating. It’s doubtful many of the writers of TV shows today know anything more than the formulas which have even become bastardized from a few decades ago. Take Law and Order. It used to be great. Today and for the last ten years it’s unwatchable.
And most shows include the inevitable car or foot chase and gratuitous sex scenes. Boring.
Thanks for all the interesting info.
Once when delivering one of my software products to the USAF, I called it "Paladin."
Born in 1957, I was a bit too young to have an opportunity to catch "Have Gun-Will Travel" on the family's "portable" black and white. The only thing portable about that brutally heavy TV set was the rolling cart it sat on and the handle no one trusted to lug it around without the cart.
After the show's run ended in 1963, I was able to catch an episode here and there in re-runs, usually on a lazy Saturday afternoon, between reruns of "The Lone Ranger" and "Sky King". As I recall, Roy Rogers's show and "The Rebel" were part of the Saturday TV fare, too.
Those few episodes of "Have Gun-Will Travel" that I watched as a young child planted a dormant seed of curiosity and wonder that finally germinated in the early aughts when, as a late forty-something, I found the complete set of "Have Gun-Will Travel" in DVD format at a local department store. Despite a demanding law practice, my primal urge to immerse in the lore of Boone's vehicle was irresistible: Had "Gun"-Must Binge.
And binge I did, all 225 episodes! Now that streaming has made virtually anything available, I still prefer to watch well-written Westerns of that era. The show I'm stuck on now is one, like "Have Gun-Will Travel", I had meaningful exposure to as a child. I've been taking in as many episodes of "The Rifleman" with Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford as my wife will let me.
The basic premise of "The Rifleman" is completely different from that of "Have Gun-Will Travel". The hero of the former, Lucas McCain, is a single father rooted firmly in his ranch and a devoted citizen of the nearby town of North Fork. Most of his character defining experiences, his stories, happen in or near his home.
Boone's Paladin, meanwhile, lives a seemingly rootless life in a hotel in bawdy San Francisco between mercenary missions. Nearly all of his adventures happen on the road; he has little apparent connection to his community.
Regardless of these differences, though, there is an underlying theme that runs through the heart of both programs. That theme begins with an intense commitment to a code of honor. But it doesn't end there. Underlying that code is a vein of Judeo-Christian moral sensibility that modern Hollywood and much of our culture have consciously rejected.
Sam Peckinpaugh had a big hand in launching and maintaining "The Rifleman", too. He wrote the pilot and three of the first four episodes. He also directed at least six episodes. Interestingly, Peckinpaugh tired of the genre's emphasis on moral themes, attempting to take the Western in a different direction with his thirteen episode show, "The Westerner".
I haven't watched an episode of "The Westerner" yet. But I understand that it is to the 1950's Western drama what Tarantino's/Rodriguez' "From Dusk Till Dawn" is to 1931's Legosi horror epic "Dracula".
It might be a stretch to claim that Peckinpaugh initiated Hollywood's fall from grace, its flight from Eden. But he certainly had a hand in reducing the Western genre to a Hobbesian, Darwinian and even Nihilistic existence.
Now back to Paladin, Lucas McCain and Mark! My mind resides more comfortably there!
Great post! I was too young to have seen Have Gun will Travel when it was on TV but found it much later. It's good, enjoyable storytelling, an art that seems to be lost on most TV shows nowadays.
I'd also recommend the 1950's radio version starring John Dehner as Paladin. Classic radio drama.
Usually, shows like "Gunsmoke" started as radio shows before they were "promoted" to TV. Unusually, this show started out on TV before making it to radio.
As we all recall, William Conrad was the perfect radio voice for Matt Dillon. Alas, he could not be cast in the television show for the obvious reasons. PETA would have filed suits on behalf of the horse. Susan
This brings back a lot of memories. When I was growing up my father and I watched many oat burners on Saturday evenings, including Have Gun Will Travel. I haven't thought about that in a long time. I'll have to look for them on PlutoTV. I'll also look for The Professionals. Thanks for this!
Wonderful post. Thank you, Max!
I grew up without tv. Sadly, I missed Paladin. Gonna have to go figure out how to use Pluto...
I love the reference to story telling as old as time. It has been said there is really only one tale; redemption.
Many popular American TV shows never made it across the pond in the 1950s and 1960s - and in any event we did not have a set until about 1964, so I have never seen Paladin. That is an omission that I intend to correct as soon as possible, especially as i always enjoyed seeing Richard Boone in various movies. I can only remember seeing The Lone Ranger and a few episodes of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.
The writer Elmore Leonard explained that Boone always delivered lines he had written in stories of his, which were made into the movies "The Tall T" and "Hombre," exactly as Leonard heard them in his head when he wrote them.
The heavy hand of ideology can squash all the life out of fictional characters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31Kg4D8jV_w
Really a great read. Maybe my favorite TV series ever. My father was in the Air Force so I watched the show from South Dakota, to California, to Japan. As I recall most episodes began with Paladin dandied up in his sophisticated clothes in what I presumed was the Palace Hotel in SF. Also, I have always thought that Paladin was the model for Chris, in the 1960 version of Magnificent Seven.
Exactly right, JG! and Chris and Paladin himself are modeled after all their predecessor knights and Samurai.
Can you picture Richard Boone "culturally appropriating" a role as a Ronin in an Akira Kurasawa epic film? :)
Actually, yes. He'd be great as Kuozo.
Im so young, ive never heard of this show. But i have a lot of love for these kind of pulpy simple short tv show heros. Here are some of my favorites: Secret Agent Man, The Saint, Magnum PI, Burn Notice. Almost always a fun little old good v evil story, damsel in distress, and good guy wins in the end, refuses full payment for service. Fun stuff.
LOVED Burn Notice especially the character Fiona who always had a trunk full of explosives. Ammo Grrrll.
Right. "Fun stuff" is a good reason for any story.
a great read, need to go watch some episodes
1. The years from the end of World War II until the mid-1960s seem to be something of a Golden
Age for American story-telling. Certainly that was true for pulp science fiction, in the days of
innocent fun with rocket ships and laser pistols.
2. In his essay, "The Simple Art of Murder", Raymond Chandler covers much the same grounds,
only for hard-boiled detectives. IIRC, the critic Robert Warshaw identified the gunfighter and
the detective as the two prototypical American protagonists, although I can't seem to find
the essay where he discusses this.
3. Speaking of protagonists, that, to me, was Gene Roddenberry's great achievement. To the
gunfighter and the detective he added a third type of protagonist - the Starfleet officer.
Unfortunately, it took a generation for the zeitgeist to catch up with his invention, in
"Star Trek TNG."
Good points. And Warshow was one of the few critics I pay attention to. Now I want to find the essay myself.
One essay by Warshow is called "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner." Warshow is a good topic all by himself. Maybe next week's.
A must-watch episode of HG-WT is the gritty origin story where Boone takes over from the original Paladin. Redemption and forgiveness are the themes.
The show has been aptly called Shakespeare With a Six-Gun. Where else could you find a gunfighter escorting Oscar Wilde?
Discovering the radio version 30+ years later was a special treat for my weekly late night commute for five years between Mpls and Fargo. John Dehner was a superb Paladin.
Great article. But for the stories of our lives, we would be without any meaning at all. We are all our own authors. Thanks for celebrating the story with us.