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TELEVISION: Westward the Wagons

4 minute read
TIME

The prairie schooner stands ominously alone (circa A.D. 1860) on the dreary reaches of the Western flats. The boss of the approaching wagon train is understandably puzzled. He rides up to investigate. Just as he is about to tug at the wagon’s flap, he hears a strange whirring. He pulls back just in time to escape the downward thrust of a thin-bladed sword. A samisen twangs weirdly on the sound track and a mustachioed Japanese samurai, complete with formal helmet and robe, emerges into the prairie glare.

“What is it, Major?” gasps a wagon train guard.

The train boss takes a long look, cocks his head, then answers casually: “I think he’s Japanese, Bill.”

As boss of NBC-TV’s Wagon Train, Major Seth Adams (Ward Bond), sometime Union cavalry officer, can be forgiven his aplomb. He has been tangling with oddballs ever since he started his first trek out of St. Joseph, Mo. a year ago last September, headed for Sacramento, Calif. Every week, while the train fights thirst, Indians and renegade whites, Bond has had to take time out to handle the wild and woolly characters with which his scriptwriters people the West. In A Man Called Horse, beefy Ralph (“Picnic”) Meeker turned up as an ignorant settler who had been handed over as a slave to a matriarchal Indian squaw. In The Annie MacGregor Story, a migrating Scottish clan drove off marauding Indians with their skirling pipes. In The Liam Fitzmorgan Story, a group of Celtic types learned about the vengeance of the Irish underground. By the time Bond got his charges to Sacramento, returned to St. Joe via sailboat around the Horn and started West once more to meet the samurai, his train had climbed steadily in the ratings. Last week it was rolling toward the top of both Trendex and Nielsen.

Stupid Samurai. For all its disparate characters, the show maintains its continuity with the fine performances of its two steady stars. As wagon master, Bond, with his 215-lb. weatherbeaten hulk, is more consistently convincing than he ever was during his movie career. As trail scout, handsome Robert Horton, who never did amount to much on Hollywood’s sets, is in his element at last. But the lean-muscled American virtues that Bond and Horton personify never seemed so attractive as they did in last week’s Sakae Ito Story, when they were played off against the sensitive acting of that oldtime film villain, Sessue (Bridge on the River Kwai) Hayakawa, 69.

Entrusted with the ashes of his master, a Japanese diplomat who died in Washington, Ito was on his way home. Then a trio from the wagon train killed his traveling companion and stole the sacred urn, sure that the ashes were really Oriental jewels. After chasing the culprits into the middle of a mess of Comanches, Ito waited while the Indians armed them with tomahawks, then dispatched the whole crew with his terrible sword. “Eeee-to,” clucked Bond in not-too-angry disapproval, after he rode up too late to stop the sudden justice. But Ito was inconsolable. His master’s ashes had been spilled, so he drew a ceremonial knife across his belly in harakiri. (“So big country. My master ronery now. Rost. And onry to brame stupid Samurai Sakae Ito.”)

Next Year, Oregon. On none of its previous adventures has Wagon Train so successfully played up the unexpected contrasts that lift it out of the wheel ruts of run-of-the-week westerns. The samisen sounded across the plains eerier than any coyote’s howl. The ragtag wagon crews never looked so scraggly as they did wolfing their chow while Ito and his servant squatted delicately at their evening meal.

From now on, Executive Producer Dick Lewis’ biggest job will be to maintain the pace. While Wagon Train winds toward San Francisco, its present destination, he will have to find other actors as talented as Hayakawa to give Borid and Horton an occasional boost. But he is confident as any trail boss. “Next year,” he says, “we’ll probably head for Oregon. The year after that we’ll hit the Santa Fe Trail. After that we’ll probably have them back on the Overland Trail.” One of these years they might even take ship for Japan.

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