Lawrence Hall, HSG
Raymond Massey in a
Funny Hat
Recently I was a bit under the weather and so was confined
to quarters.
I don’t know why we say “under the weather”; we all live
with weather. We can’t be under or over or beside the weather; the weather
simply is.
Anyway, while I was under the same weather as everyone else and
serving as a warm pillow for the dachshunds I found myself idling before the
Orwellian telescreen and marveling at the images and sounds.
I hadn’t watched Rawhide since I was a rug-rat and
was happy to ride again with Mr. Favor, Rowdy, Wishbone, and all the lads
herding sophomores to Sedalia, Missouri.
Rawhide was one of the most popular television shows
from 1959 to 1965, and with its quality production values and writing attracted
some of the best American and international actors as guest stars.
We remember Frankie Laine’s full-voiced, high-octane, yee-haw
rendering of the theme song but tend to forget that the music for the series
was written by Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin. Tiomkin was either Ukrainian or
Russian, depending on contemporary politics and borders, and wrote the music
for a generation of Hollywood films, including many for John Wayne.
Wagon Train, 1957 - 1965, in many ways parallels Rawhide
as a pilgrimage or quest featuring a solid core cast and a brilliant series of
guest stars.
One of the stranger Wagon
Train episodes, Princess of a Lost Tribe, has scout Flint McCullough
(Robert Horton) encounter a lost tribe of Aztecs and the requisite beautiful
princess on a mysterious mountain. Montezuma IX (Raymond Massey in a funny hat)
is a descendant of Montezuma and he and Flint have several clunky discussions
on the nature of faith and sacrifice. The dialogue is groan-worthy, but Massey
and Horton manage to keep straight faces throughout.
In the end Flint wins the
princess’s heart but some bad Aztecs rip it out as a sacrifice to the gods
after killing the good Montezuma. Flint escapes down the mountain mourning the
most beautiful woman he has ever known.
Now all of this sounds silly and cheesy
and impossible, like a lesser Edgar Rice Burroughs story or a Star Trek
episode, and it is. One simply accepts it as a yarn.
But then for something truly silly
and cheesy and impossible on television, there was the House of
Representatives.
-30-
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