Huggins knew about the Big Store con from having read the autobiography of Joseph R. Weil, known as the “Yellow Kid.” In one of the early chapters, Weil tells about a con he pulled in which the results of a horse race were known beforehand and could be bet upon with that knowledge. [14] The prerequisites to any of these cons were that the mark have plenty of money, want to make more, and be willing to cheat. Set up with all its trappings, the fake bookie joint had betting windows, chalkboards for race results, a ticker-tape machine, smoke-filled rooms and up to several dozen actors, from the inside man running the show and the roper who brought the mark in to the bit players and extras, all doing their part for a percentage of the score. It was theater to everyone but the mark. [15]
In one version of the script, Heyes, seeing Grace’s greed come to the fore, suggests that other things are more important than money, and their kisses outside of her hotel door suggest what those might be. Her rejection of further love-making makes him stand back and regroup. Finally, despite his growing feelings for her, a “determined” Heyes visits Soapy in his hotel room and insists unenthusiastically that they’re going to give her “the works. She’s got it coming.” [16]
There is a propensity among the ladies of Alias Smith and Jones to need a swim to cool off when they’re with the boys. Grace is the first one to enjoy a refreshing dip while she and Curry are waiting for the stagecoach wheel to be fixed. When she emerges from the creek, viewers only see her from the neck up. She may have modestly left on her nineteenth century undies and been semi-decent when faced with a rattlesnake curled up in the dress she’d left lying on the ground. However, a note in an early version of the script shows that she is to discover the snake when “she hasn’t yet put on a thing. Naturally we are shooting this with discretion and have hired a director known for his stable family life.” [17]
Return to Devil’s Hole
“Why did you become an outlaw?” “As long as this trip is, ma’am, I wouldn’t have time to explain that to you. Or even me.”
Clara Phillips, Hannibal Heyes
STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES
TELEPLAY: KNUT SWENSON
DIRECTOR: BRUCE KESSLER
SHOOTING DATES: JANUARY 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 1971
ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: FEBRUARY 25, 1971
ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: MAY 17, 1971
A chartered stagecoach speeds across the West. In Garden City, Mrs. Clara Phillips alights from the stage and heads for the hotel where she asks for Mr. Smith, bringing a delighted smile to the face of the unctuous clerk until he realizes she doesn’t want Mr. Furnifold Smith, but Mr. Joshua Smith. He tells her with a sniff that Smith and Jones went west. Off goes the chartered stage once again.
Arcadia brings her better luck. Carlton, Mrs. Phillips’s butler, brings a wary but intrigued Hannibal Heyes to meet with her. Mrs. Phillips tells him Sheriff Lom Trevors sent her to Heyes because he’s the only one who can help her. Her husband, thinking he’d killed his business partner, fled and has taken refuge in Devil’s Hole. But the partner didn’t die after all and now she needs to find her husband and tell him all the charges have been dropped. As the former leader of the Devil’s Hole Gang, Heyes can get her inside the hideout.
Heyes’s first instinct is to refuse, but Mrs. Phillips waves a bundle of cash under his nose and he agrees. Kid Curry isn’t happy about this and urges Heyes to let him come along. Heyes convinces him to stay behind and wait for Colonel Harper, who’s promised them a high paying job. Heyes gives Curry the money Mrs. Phillips paid him, tacitly acknowledging the danger in going to Devil’s Hole without his partner.
Heyes and Mrs. Phillips make the long trip to Devil’s Hole. They pass Kyle at the checkpoint and he tells Heyes that Big Jim Santana is back and running things again. Heyes wasn’t counting on this.
The tension mounts as the former and current leaders of the gang meet again, but Big Jim welcomes Heyes with a friendly hug and a slap on the back. Mrs. Phillips goes off with Lobo to get settled while Heyes and Jim talk.
The meeting begins with Jim marking his territory by punching Heyes in the jaw. Heyes reciprocates, just to let Jim know they are equals, and no longer leader and subordinate. With that settled, Mrs. Phillips returns and tells her story. From her description, Jim determines her husband must be Matt Hamilton. Kyle informs Hamilton his wife is here to see him, which he finds very surprising since he’s not married, but he goes to see her nonetheless. Mrs. Phillips shocks everyone by pulling a gun and shooting Hamilton as he walks through the door. To justify her actions, she tells Heyes and Jim a new story. Hamilton is not her husband, but the man who seduced her teenage daughter, who subsequently took her own life.
Jim checks on Hamilton’s injuries, leaving a disillusioned and disbelieving Heyes with Mrs. Phillips. He returns with word that Hamilton is still alive and soon they will be able to hear his side of the story.
Hamilton tells them Mrs. Phillips doesn’t have a daughter and never did. He admits he spent time with her in San Francisco, but he tired of her and left. Jim doesn’t believe him and threatens to let Mrs. Phillips have her gun back. Hamilton adds a little detail he hadn’t mentioned before — he took $25,000 worth of her jewelry with him when he left.
Jim knows one of them is lying. “Oh, at least one,” agrees Heyes. Jim demands proof from Mrs. Phillips that she does indeed have a daughter. A photograph in a locket is back at the Arcadia hotel. Heyes is elected to return for it, while she remains in Devil’s Hole.
That evening Heyes tries to convince Jim to retire from the outlaw life. He’s incredulous that Jim wants to risk his newly won freedom by pulling another job. But when Jim reveals that the job, the one he spent seven years planning while in prison, is to rob the Wells Fargo Clearing House in Denver, Heyes is impressed in spite of himself. He wards off temptation by arguing even more forcefully and finally stomps off, leaving Jim to think about what he’s said.
The next day, after Heyes heads back to Arcadia, Mrs. Phillips breaks into Jim’s desk and retrieves her gun with the idea of taking another shot at Hamilton. Jim catches her and puts an end to that plan.
In town, Heyes roots through her luggage and finds the locket. Meanwhile, she and Jim have been trading life stories and find themselves growing attracted to each other.
Heyes returns to Devil’s Hole. Jim, Mrs. Phillips and Heyes come together for the unveiling of the photograph. Inside the locket is a photo, but only of Mr. Phillips, not a daughter. Mrs. Phillips now insists she has several photos of her daughter in a safe deposit box in San Francisco. The story of the locket was another ruse to buy time so she could try to kill Hamilton again.
Jim confides that he’s thought about what Heyes said and he’s decided to give up the outlaw life after the job. The gang would never let him back out now. Heyes agrees it might be tricky, but he talks to the gang about Jim’s change of heart. They are not happy and it looks like things might get nasty, but Jim saves the day by telling them that Heyes misunderstood — his retirement will begin after the job is over. As they leave the bunkhouse, Jim admits to Heyes he’s not going through with the job and they make plans to leave Devil’s Hole immediately. The gang senses a double-cross and discovers Jim, Heyes and Mrs. Phillips riding away. They follow in angry pursuit, but the trio manages to escape.
In Arcadia, Mrs. Phillips is ready to board the stagecoach to San Francisco. When Jim asks her what really happened, she admits Hamilton’s version is true. She invites Jim to come with her and he accepts. Heyes and Curry see them off, deciding they now have an important friend in San Francisco, if they ever need one.
GUEST CAST
FERNANDO LAMAS — BIG JIM SANTANA
DIANA HYLAND — CLARA PHILLIPS
BRETT HALSEY — MATT HAMILTON
DENNIS FIMPLE — KYLE MURTRY
WILLIAM MCKINNEY — LOBO RIGGS
LEE DE BROUX — HARDCASE
SID HAIG — MERKLE
JON LORMER — 2ND DESK CLERK
BOOTH COLMA
N — CARLTON
CHARLIE BRIGGS — RED MATTSON
VAUGHN TAYLOR — 1ST DESK CLERK
ROBERT B. WILLIAMS — STATION AGENT
Of the five episodes which split up Heyes and Curry to accommodate the production time crunch, “Return to Devil’s Hole” is the least successful. This episode suffers not only from a lack of interaction between Heyes and Curry, but also from the missed opportunity to explore the conflict between Big Jim and Heyes as current and former leaders of the gang. Instead the story focuses on Heyes trying to convince Big Jim to quit while he’s ahead and on the burgeoning romance between Big Jim and Clara Phillips. Taking the attention off the principal characters and placing it on the guest stars contributes greatly to the general dissatisfaction this episode leaves behind.
Several other elements contribute to its failure. Numerous flaws in logic begin with Clara Phillips’s assertion that Lom Trevors pointed her toward Heyes. Aside from the fact that such a thing is extremely unlikely behavior on the part of the boys’ mentor, there’s the question of just how a wealthy lady from San Francisco came to know anything about an outlaw-turned-sheriff of a small town in Wyoming. Clara’s motive for trying to reach Devil’s Hole starts off strong, then gets progressively weaker with each new story until we’re left with a woman who went to an inordinate amount of trouble to get even with a man who stole her jewelry. As a reason for fanatical revenge, it falls short and lands with a thud.
Even though this is a story for Heyes, he seems to be relegated to the sidelines, more often an observer than a true participant. The problem was present from the very first draft of the script. Roy Huggins noted it in the rewrite notes that came out of the script conference held on December 10, 1970, saying in regards to the new outline, “So far now, Heyes has had a part in all the scenes. He’s been present, at least. He has not been absent from anything that’s happened.” The very fact that they were reworking the script so the star is “present, at least” shows how badly developed this story was right from the beginning. Admittedly, this episode was among the earliest developed and the writers were still feeling their way with the characters, but to focus so completely on Big Jim and Clara was a mistake they should have been able to avoid. Keeping the story revolving around Heyes is especially important in an episode in which Curry’s appearances add up to less than two and a half minutes of screen time.
Despite its weaknesses, the actual episode is a great improvement over early drafts of the script. The first draft portrays Heyes as a habitual loser at the poker table and has him fawning over Big Jim like a star-struck fan. Heyes’s attitude doesn’t surprise Big Jim, who, faced with a woman in Devil’s Hole, laments to the gang members hanging around, “Seven years and that boy’s as dumb as he ever was.” [18] Big Jim doesn’t fare much better, being described as a “poor smitten bastard” who is so instantly besotted with Clara that he acts like a sleepwalker whenever she’s around.
Another weakness in the first draft is the lack of specific details about the big job. Only Big Jim knows what it is and he keeps it a secret, not only from Heyes and the gang, but also from the audience. This leads one to believe that Marion Hargrove couldn’t think up a plan spectacular enough and therefore decided to keep it under wraps. It wasn’t until the third story conference, held on January 5, 1971, that the job, robbing the Wells Fargo Clearing House, was decided upon.
As executive producer Huggins was responsible for the overall direction of the series and no detail was too small for his attention, whether it was a matter of characterization, a story point or a bit of dialogue. In the second draft script, Heyes responds to Clara’s demand that he take her to Devil’s Hole by saying, “Take you up into — Mrs. Phillips, have you got any idea what you’re asking? Devil’s Hole is a refuge for every outlaw, every cutthroat, every misfit from here to Canada.” [19] This speech was flagged by Huggins and discussed during the January 5 story conference:
P. 12 Final speech on page. This is wrong, because it creates great expectations which are not fulfilled. It’s also wrong because Heyes is talking about his old gang — and that’s not the picture we want to make of his old gang. They weren’t really that kind of people. “Refuge” sounds like teeming thousands. Devil’s Hole is just a place where a certain gang hangs out. Not one member of that gang has ever killed anybody. They are not “cutthroats.” Our series should be acceptable to everybody — even churchgoers. [20]
In the next draft, Heyes’s speech has minor modifications, making the gang a gentler group and Devil’s Hole a hideout and not a refuge. Other improvements include adding conflict to the scene where Heyes is telling the gang that Big Jim is going to quit (which Huggins had declared to be “mushy”) and eliminating the ambiguity from the latter part of the script.
A further change took place during the final dubbing of the episode. Music is used in filmmaking to enhance the scene — setting the mood, heightening the tension, providing a counterpoint to the images on screen. Silence can be used in the same way. In every draft of the script for “Return to Devil’s Hole,” the sequence showing Heyes and Mrs. Phillips on the way to the hideout calls for the brief exchanges of dialogue to be punctuated by periods of silence. In the final episode, however, this sequence is backed by a ballad called Take a Look Around. This is the only episode which uses a song as background music; indeed, it is the only non-period song used in the series. The background music in Alias Smith and Jones was always recorded new for each episode, but tapes of each piece of music were kept in the music library and could be used in a pinch. Jo Swerling explains, “Maybe by agreement when the show was spotted we decided not to put a music cue at a certain place and then you look at the show on the dubbing stage and you go, ‘Eww, God, I don’t think we made the right decision. It feels like it needs music.’ Well, then you can go into the library and grab a cue and cut it in.” [21] When faced with the final edit of the trip to Devil’s Hole, it was obvious that the scene needed music and Take A Look Around was chosen to fill the gap. It was an unfortunate decision as the 1970s era ballad is jarring and does nothing to enhance the sequence.
While this episode remains flawed, the tremendous improvements made during the development process show what can be accomplished when no detail is too small to argue over and pleasing the audience is the overriding goal.
A Fistful of Diamonds
“And we wanted that amnesty real bad.”
Kid Curry
STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES
TELEPLAY: ROBERT HAMNER
DIRECTOR: JEFFREY HAYDEN
SHOOTING DATES: JANUARY 27, 28, 29, FEBRUARY 1, 2, 3, 1971
ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: MARCH 4, 1971
ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: JULY 26, 1971
It’s after hours in Kingsburg and Charlie Wells, the bank manager, accuses president August Binford of speculating with the depositors’ money. Threatened with a visit by the State Bank Examiner, Binford kills Wells, then removes all the money from the safe and leaves the bank. He returns shortly with a crowbar, conks himself on the head hard enough to draw blood and dynamites the safe.
Soapy Saunders, Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry’s old friend who helped out with the Big Store con on Grace Turner, is delighted to see them again. His opulent mansion is a wonderful place to visit but Heyes and Curry have come to ask him to teach them one of his scams. Binford has accused them of robbing his bank; the descriptions he gave of the thieves came straight from their inaccurate Wanted posters. Soapy is not surprised, he’s never met a banker yet he could trust, but he maintains that cons don’t work on bankers. However…
Heyes and Curry, dressed as scruffy miners, enter the Kingsburg bank, hoping to rent a lockbox. When Binford learns of their cache — ten fresh-out-of-theground diamonds worth a quarter of a million dollars — he’s happy to hold them for safekeeping.
That evening they watch as Binford enters his paramour’s hotel room. Betsy is a worldly woman who has heard Binford’s promises of marriage and future wealth too many t
imes before. But the sight of the uncut diamonds arouses her interest.
Binford steps out to find Heyes and Curry on the front porch of the hotel. He pleads his case to be their personal banker and financial advisor. They know he is untrustworthy because he took the stones to the local jeweler to be evaluated after promising to tell no one, but he retorts that it was necessary to determine their value in order to plot a course of action. They adjourn to Betsy’s room to talk.
One man could not afford to pay them what the diamonds are worth, so Binford suggests they incorporate and sell stock to the public, or he could offer them $20,000. They had in mind $100,000 each with $50,000 up front in good faith money. Binford is flabbergasted but agrees only if a mining engineer surveys the diamond field and T.F. Ayers, the experts in New York, appraises the stones. Heyes and Curry cautiously agree.
The next day Heyes and Curry spot Betsy on the street and figure that Binford would tell her first the good, or bad, news from T.F. Ayers. Curry gallantly offers to woo Betsy and get in her good graces. But Betsy rebuffs him with the news that she and Binford are to be married.
Shortly afterwards, Curry spies a cowboy entering Betsy’s room. Curry’s knock on her door interrupts ardent kisses between Betsy and Ben, the cowboy. Quickly hiding Ben in the next room, Betsy opens the door. Over her protests, Curry enters and says he knows about the cowboy and he could tell Binford. Stepping out from the other room, Ben advises Curry to leave. When the Kid declines the advice, Ben goes for his gun but Curry is quicker. Ben hastily makes his farewells.
Alias Smith & Jones: The Story of Two Pretty Good Bad Men Page 10