Alias Smith & Jones: The Story of Two Pretty Good Bad Men

by Sandra K. Sagala

  At his mansion, Harlingen prepares to empty a similar satchel while Christine, Quirt and Harlingen’s son Allen watch. Allen is infatuated with the young secretary, but Christine intensely dislikes him because he so resembles his father. Instead of finding the secreted jewels, Harlingen pulls out Heyes’s longjohns. He realizes Smith and Jones must have his bag and sends Quirt to find them.

  Heyes and Curry, heading toward Harlingen’s house, nearly encounter Quirt, Hank and Carl, Harlingen’s men, headed in the other direction. They veer off the trail to pass unseen.

  Approaching the mansion at night, Heyes logically deduces which of the lighted windows belongs to Christine. He’s wrong, as he finds out when she appears at a different one. They climb up and Heyes’s face framed at her window startles Christine as she emerges from her dressing room. She faints and Heyes, rubbing her hands, instructs Curry to find something with which to revive her. Perfume ought to do it.

  In the meantime, Quirt returns and informs Harlingen he has followed Smith and Jones’s trail right back to the house.

  Recovered, Christine starts to scream, but the sight of the Bible silences her. She’s glad to have the jewels but wonders why the men felt they had to creep through her window. They want an explanation before talking to a federal marshal about her smuggling jewels across the border. Unwilling to explain, she escorts the duo downstairs to see Harlingen.

  Harlingen is surprised, but also delighted to have the jewels back. He offers Smith and Jones his profound respect and gratitude and a reward of $100 each. They are aghast at the pittance offered for returning millions of dollars in rare gems. When Heyes casually mentions they have to see the marshal about calling off the men who must be looking for them, Harlingen says they are his men and admits the marshal knows nothing about the alleged theft.

  Considering, he then offers them another $200, which Heyes quickly ups to $2,000, to keep his secret. Harlingen is a member of an international association. One of the members is near bankruptcy and Harlingen has loaned him $5 million. The jewels are collateral. Harlingen admits he would have paid as much as $20,000 for their silence. Too bad they agreed on only $2,000.

  The next day, Harlingen finds his son Allen studying the jewels. To his unpracticed eye, they look like colored glass, so Harlingen, Sr. attempts to teach him the rudiments of gem identification. To his horror, he finds they are only colored glass. A jeweler confirms he has fine specimens of quartz, worth over $50!

  Harlingen suspects Smith and Jones have the real jewels and instructs Quirt to bring them back alive. Christine witnesses their conversation and is startled by Allen who says it wasn’t her fault. To show he holds no hard feelings, he attempts to kiss her, an attempt she evades.

  James Quirt hires a man named Logan to kill Smith and Jones. Logan, in turn, hires a down-and-out drunk, the Preacher, to help him. Quirt, Hank, and Carl surprise Heyes and Curry at their campsite and tell them Harlingen wants to see them. All five head back through the canyon single-file. Heyes figures Harlingen thinks they crossed him somehow.

  Atop a high ridge, Logan and the Preacher wait for the procession. When they come into view, Logan urges him to shoot the two in the middle, but Preacher recognizes Heyes and Curry and won’t kill them. He used to ride with them and they’re friends. Logan has no such compunction, so Preacher bashes him with his rifle, knocking him unconscious. An errant shot from Logan’s rifle spurs on Quirt, the riders, and their prisoners.

  In a narrow canyon, they stop to water their horses. Quirt takes Heyes and Curry aside and says it seems to him they are getting a rotten deal from Harlingen, seeing as how they returned the jewels. He’ll let them escape, shooting over their heads. They know exactly what he’s up to and spur their horses right into him. Quirt follows on horseback but the Preacher shoots at him from above. The horse falls, throwing Quirt off and breaking his neck. Inadvertently killing the man who hired Logan and him to kill his friends proves to Preacher that “the Lord moves in mysterious ways.”

  Heyes is eager to learn why Harlingen sent Quirt to bring them back, but first they hide Quirt’s body in a ravine. In the darkest hour of the night, they enter Harlingen’s room through a window, waking him up. Startled and angry, he informs them he had the jewels checked and knows they had to be the ones who switched them. “Who else could it be?”

  Heyes tells Harlingen that Quirt hired two men to kill them. When the ambush failed, Quirt attempted to murder them himself, so he must know where the real jewels are but, unfortunately, he’s dead. Heyes proposes Harlingen tell everyone Smith and Jones are not suspects and that Quirt has only disappeared.

  Next day, Christine heads for a rundown house far from Harlingen’s manse. Heyes and Curry quietly follow her into the kitchen where she removes the jewels secreted in the pump handle. At the sound of their footsteps, she turns, thinking it’s her father. They accuse her of stealing the gems. When she pulls a small derringer, Curry draws his own pistol. Her father enters the room rifle in hand and orders the boys to drop their guns. When Heyes tells him Christine stole $5 million from her employer, she justifies it because Harlingen cheated her father. The old man is shattered to hear she believed the lies he told her. Harlingen’s version was the truth.

  A few weeks later, Heyes and Curry return to Harlingen’s mansion where a grand party is in progress. Christine and Allen are to be married. Harlingen mournfully ponders the goings-on (and the expense). Heyes and Curry hope for remuneration for returning the $5 million collateral in light of the secret deal that would have been breached. Instead, Harlingen went to see the Preacher and, for a few dollars, learned they have a secret too. He’ll keep theirs, if they’ll keep his.

  GUEST CAST

  SEVERN DARDEN — OSCAR/ALLEN HARLINGEN

  MARJ DUSAY — CHRISTINE MCNEICE

  RICHARD ANDERSON — JAMES QUIRT

  ROBERT DONNER — PREACHER

  BILL FLETCHER — LOGAN

  BURT MUSTIN — JEWELER

  GLENN DIXON — BUTLER

  FORD RAINEY — MR. MCNEICE

  MICHAEL CARR — HANK

  ROBERT BRUCE LANG — CARL

  Phil DeGuere wrote the story outline in mid-December 1970. At that time, there was still worry about having enough episodes to air on time and thus, each character was made the sole protagonist in an episode. “Never Trust an Honest Man” began as a Heyes-only episode, but DeGeure’s original treatment was vastly improved by Huggins’s addition of Kid Curry to the action. Initially, Heyes plays poker with a Texas railroad man on the train from Mexico. Oscar Harlingen is one of the wealthiest men in the southwest. In his Brownsville, Texas, hotel, Heyes discovers gems in his satchel. Returning them to Harlingen, he learns the story of a Mexican cartel and of the jewels being used as collateral. Quirt and Christine schemed to steal the jewels and substitute replicas, but Harlingen suspects Heyes when the jewels turn out to be fakes. Quirt follows Heyes, confronts him and Heyes kills him. When Heyes returns with Quirt’s body, Harlingen accuses him of planning to use the fake jewels to destroy the cartel. On his way to jail, Heyes escapes by wrapping his handcuffed wrists around a deputy’s throat, strangling him and throwing him out of the wagon. Making his way back to Harlingen’s mansion, Heyes finds the fakes in the study. He tricks Christine into revealing she hid the genuine jewels in a secret drawer of her jewel box. At that moment Harlingen enters and Heyes turns the real jewels and the thief Christine over to him. When Harlingen asks what he could do for honest Mr. Smith, Heyes replies that he could put in a good word with Governor Harrison in a nearby state.

  Huggins’s belief that violence for its own sake was unnecessary in a program and his insistence that the boys never killed anyone led to changes in the first draft. Huggins crossed out the scene in which Heyes strangled a deputy. It was also his idea to introduce Harlingen’s son as a new character in order to take the romance away from Christine and Quirt. However, looks that pass between Quirt and Christine in the aired episode confirm that something is still going
on between them. Yet, in the end, it appears that Christine stole the jewels strictly to avenge her father.

  Reflecting Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, DeGuere in his teleplay (or Huggins in the rewrites) imitated screenwriter William Goldman’s technique of having what he calls “smart-ass lines.” For instance, Butch and Sundance debate about the posse still pursuing them.

  “I think we lost ’em. Do you think we lost ’em?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I.” [41]

  Heyes and Curry wonder about the unfamiliar contents of the satchel.

  “Kid, this isn’t my bag.”

  “Sure looks like your bag.” (Heyes pulls out a Bible.)

  “I’m convinced. It isn’t your bag.”

  “Heyes, you’ve done it again.” (Curry, excited at Heyes’s figuring out which window is Christine’s.)

  “Heyes, you’ve done it again.” (Curry, deflated at discovering the window they thought was Christine’s was not.)

  “I think it’s gettin’ to her.” (Heyes waves the vial of perfume under Christine’s nose to revive her.)

  “I think it’s gettin’ to me too.” (Curry turns away, his eyes watering.)

  More than once in the series, Heyes’s brilliant, deductive mind uses the process of elimination to narrow a list of choices. In “21 Days to Tenstrike,” he limits the murder suspects to seven after eliminating Curry and himself. In “The McCreedy Feud,” he needs to find Señorita Armendariz’s room in the hacienda. His technique requires honing, because he gets it wrong there too, having not much improved since his error in locating Christine McNeice’s room by logical deduction.

  Another tenet of the Alias Smith and Jones canon was that Heyes and Curry must never end up with enough money to head for South America, because, at least in the beginning, they would have, much like Butch and Sundance. They can drive a hard bargain to return the jewels, but they cannot end up with the money.

  The Legacy of Charlie O’Rourke

  “The next time we meet a girl like her, we ought to flip a coin.”

  Kid Curry

  STORY: ROBERT GUY BARROWS

  TELEPLAY: DICK NELSON

  DIRECTOR: JEFFREY HAYDEN

  SHOOTING DATES: MARCH 29, 30, 31, APRIL 1, 2, 5, 1971

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: APRIL 22, 1971

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: JUNE 7, 1971

  Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry ride into bustling Browntown, reacting with alarm when a voice calls out, “Kid!” A quick glance around reveals their old friend Charlie O’Rourke hailing them from the window of the local jail. Charlie is glad to see familiar faces and assumes the boys have come to Browntown because of him, just like all the other folks in town, but Heyes and Curry, who were just passing through, are appalled to find out Charlie has been sentenced to hang in the morning. They learn Charlie and a couple other fellows stole $100,000 in gold bars and killed several members of the posse. Charlie wants to tell the boys where he hid the gold, but Heyes doesn’t want to hear. Charlie asks them to attend his hanging. The boys agree.

  Heyes and Curry head to the saloon, sorry that Charlie spotted them, but even sorrier to run into Bannerman detective Harry Briscoe.

  In the saloon, Vic, the bartender, is extremely friendly, anything they want is on the house since they’re friends of Charlie. From a table nearby, saloon singer Alice Banion watches them with interest. Harry buys the boys a drink. He is curious to know why they visited Charlie, how they know him and, most importantly, if he sent for them. They admit Charlie is a friend, but he didn’t send for them and he didn’t tell them where he hid the gold. Harry tries threatening them, then points out, “When you go out after that gold, you’re gonna think you’re leading a parade.” Heyes and Curry watch Harry as he leaves, lamenting the fact they’re only $100,000 short of having enough money to leave town.

  A note falls onto their table. Curry reads it and finds an invitation to visit Alice in her room. They settle back to enjoy her performance as she sings from her perch in a golden birdcage lowered from the ceiling. After the show the boys present themselves at her door. She offers them tea and a business proposition. She wants to open a saloon and dance hall in San Francisco, but she needs a stake. Since they’ll soon be coming in to a large sum of money, perhaps they’d like to become her partners. Heyes and Curry set down their tea cups and leave.

  Alice decides to take matters into her own hands. She visits Charlie and offers him the comfort of songs and companionship as he waits for dawn. Later she attends his funeral along with Heyes, Curry, Sheriff Carver and Vic.

  Heyes and Curry return to town after the funeral and are grabbed by four men who hustle them into the livery stable. After a fierce battle, the boys exit, brushing themselves off. They stride into the saloon, then exit man-handling Harry Briscoe between them. They shove his head into the water trough and hold him down long enough to subdue him. Pulling him out before he actually drowns, Heyes advises, “Mr. Briscoe, the next time you feel like sending men to beat Charlie O’Rourke’s gold out of us — don’t!” Harry struggles to breathe and gasps out one phrase guaranteed to interest the boys — “Five thousand dollars!”

  Inside the saloon, Harry offers them a $5,000 reward for returning the gold. Heyes reiterates that Charlie didn’t tell them where he hid it. Harry divulges that Alice spent the night singing to Charlie and undoubtedly now knows where the gold is. All Heyes and Curry have to do is get Alice to let them help her dig it up, then take it away from her and return it for the reward. The boys refuse, but Harry threatens to look at descriptions of outlaws in the sheriff’s office. He’s sure he’ll find them there. Defeated, Heyes and Curry visit Alice.

  She wonders why she should share her good fortune with them. Heyes and Curry spell it out — at $21 an ounce, $100,000 worth of gold bars weighs about three hundred pounds.

  Heyes, Curry and Alice board the stagecoach, followed discreetly by a posse. At a relay station, when the driver is out of sight, Heyes hijacks the coach, whipping the horses into an all-out gallop. A few miles later, he pulls up, and Alice and Curry clamber out. Heyes slaps the horses. They take off again, pulling the empty coach. The boys and Alice take cover and watch as the posse gallops past them.

  Alice doubts the wisdom of a plan that seems to have left them on foot in the middle of nowhere. Curry goes off to a pre-arranged spot where Harry is waiting with three horses. He brings them back and her faith in them is renewed.

  The trio rides off into the desert. She notices someone behind them, so the boys check it out. It’s Harry. Ordering him to leave them alone or the plan won’t work, they return to Alice and spin a story about the fellow being an advance man for the railroad. Unfortunately for them, Alice had watched them through binoculars. “You two are the worst pair of liars that ever lived.” They confess Harry promised them a reward which they planned to split with her. She’s not convinced, so the boys try another tactic, telling her they did it for her own good because they didn’t want her to steal the money and end up running for the rest of her life. “Running is something we know a little about,” Heyes says. “You wouldn’t like it.” Alice agrees to settle for the reward.

  Finally they reach the spot where Charlie buried the loot. Alice bubbles with excitement as they unearth the gold bars. They’re rich and she’s with two handsome men. Life isn’t so bad, is it? She could fall in love with both of them, separately of course; she couldn’t choose between them. Heyes suggests flipping a coin. Into this lighthearted moment enters Harry Briscoe, who attracts their attention by shooting at the ground near their feet. He takes the boys’ guns as well as the horses and the gold, explaining that every man has his breaking point. For years he’s been returning other people’s money. Now he’s going to take this gold and head for Mexico.

  Heyes, Curry and Alice head for San Pancracio. It’s tough going. Finally Alice complains she can’t go on. The trio leans against a rock, eyes closed against the glare of the sun. Curry is sure Heyes has an idea and waits to
hear it. “We’re goners,” Heyes offers glumly.

  At that moment, a cheerful voice greets them. “Guten tag!” It’s Kurt Schmitt, an immigrant who wonders what they’re doing in the desert without horses. Over the hill in his camp, he serves them sausage and strudel. Heyes and Curry ask if they can borrow his draft horses to go after Briscoe. Kurt is a businessman, though, and offers to loan them in return for twenty-five percent of the reward. He’ll throw in his two hunting rifles at no extra charge. Alice is impressed by Kurt’s business acumen.

  The boys track Harry, and find him taking a break, teaching himself Spanish. He shoots at them and tries to escape, but they circle around and wedge him between two rocks, Curry above him and Heyes beside him. Harry gives up.

  They get ready to take Harry back and turn him in, but he thinks outlaws Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry owe him a favor. He finally did check the Wanted posters and figured out who his friends Smith and Jones really are. He suggests they split the gold and go their own ways, but Heyes refuses. The reward is good enough for them. Harry is dumbfounded. “Mr. Briscoe, as you already know, an honest man will sometimes turn dishonest for a price. Well now, it works the other way around, too.” Harry and the boys come to an agreement — they won’t tell what he did if he doesn’t tell who they are.

  Back in Browntown, Heyes counts out Alice’s share of the reward. She’ll take Kurt’s share, too, as she’s the banker in their partnership. The Golden Perch Rathskellar will be San Francisco’s finest restaurant. Alice bids goodbye to the boys, still wondering what would have happened if she’d met them one at a time. As she and Kurt leave, Curry remarks to Heyes they probably should have flipped that coin.