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

by Sandra K. Sagala

  Curry plays poker in the saloon again, a whopping $3 in the pot. Heyes plays in the hotel, $30,000 in front of him. At that moment, the door to the private room is battered in by a telegraph pole in the hands of men disguised with flour sacks over their heads. It’s the Devil’s Hole Gang, come to rob the game.

  Kyle spots Heyes in the midst of the players and calls, “Hey, Wheat, look!”

  The thieves quickly scrape the money into sacks and skedaddle. Heyes directs the ranchers to figure out how much money they lost while he rouses the sheriff, first stopping to check on the gagged and bound hotel clerk.

  Later, in their hotel room, Curry berates Heyes for wanting to stay for one more game. Then Heyes delivers the additional bad news about Kyle using Wheat’s name. “Wheat” can only mean Wheat Carlson, a known member of the Devil’s Hole Gang which is led by Heyes and Curry. Curry wants to leave town right then, but they can’t leave the counterfeit money in the bank and they can’t get it until Monday. After ruminating over alternatives, Heyes convinces Curry he has to get the money back from the gang. They can keep the $35,000 that was in front of Heyes, but they must return the rest. It will save them from having wealthy, angry ranchers after them. Curry is incredulous that Heyes is asking him to do this.

  Nevertheless, Curry leaves on Sunday morning just as Sterling confronts Heyes. In the privacy of Smith’s hotel room, Sterling says he was checking stock certificates and happened to look at the money Smith put in his bank and discovered it to be counterfeit. Heyes reminds Sterling he didn’t deposit it so it would gather interest, nor did he use it — that would be illegal. No, replies Sterling, but he did have it, and still does have it, and that’s illegal. Sterling offers to sell his silence for $15,000 and gives Heyes until Wednesday to come up with it. After that he’ll call in the law.

  Just then the law, in the person of Sheriff Grimly, pounds on Heyes’s door. Grimly questions Heyes about the robbery. Did he hear the robber say “Weed” or “Wheat”? Heyes is pretty sure he heard “Weed” because he knew of an outlaw named Weed Bronson and assumed it was him.

  Meanwhile, Curry has reached the Devil’s Hole hideout and attempts to talk the gang into giving back the money. Do they want the $35,000 scot-free or the whole $235,000 with six angry, wealthy ranchers hiring bounty hunters coming after them? Kyle convinces the rest to give it back because they’d be doing it for their former partners.

  A few days later, when Curry hasn’t yet returned, Smith asks Sterling for more time. He refuses and notes that he removed the money from the vault and put it in a Pierce & Hamilton ’73 safe where it’s still secure. Sterling is going to send for a federal agent. If Smith meets his terms by the time the agent gets to town, Sterling will deal with him.

  As Curry rides hell bent for leather back to Lordstown, the sheriff peruses a stack of Wanted posters in his office.

  Outside the livery stable, a grim Curry greets the questioning Heyes. Heyes believes the gang wouldn’t go for it, until Curry’s face widens into a big grin and he tosses the saddlebag full of money at him.

  That night, Heyes and Curry slip into the bank through the window. While Curry keeps watch, Heyes works the tumblers of the safe. It takes only two tries to open it. After opening the safe deposit box with his key and a bent hairpin, Heyes loads Curry’s arms with the stack of real bills from their satchel, before exchanging them for the counterfeit bills in the box.

  The next morning, Sterling confronts Smith and Jones in the hotel lobby. Is he going through with the deal or not? Heyes and Curry feign ignorance of any deal. When the agent, Mr. Collins, arrives, he tells the banker he’s been looking for the exact sum Sterling wired him about. Sterling accompanies him to Smith’s hotel room. Heyes confirms for Collins that he put money in Sterling’s vault for safe-keeping. “Goodness me,” he says innocently, he hopes it’s not counterfeit as Sterling alleges. At that, Collins appears confused and Sterling dumbfounded. All four men head to the bank.

  Collins inspects the bundles of money with his magnifying glass and in no time pronounces it “good federal currency.” Smith is vindicated and accuses Sterling of opening his deposit box without his consent or his key. Being big-hearted, though, Smith lets Sterling off the hook and the banker agrees to drop the matter. Collins, however, brought to town on a false alarm, will have a bath and dinner at Sterling’s expense.

  After Smith leaves with the satchel of money, Jones gives Sterling back his receipt. The banker can’t help but ask “How did he do it?” Placidly Curry replies, “Do what, Mr. Sterling?”

  Sheriff Grimly’s search through Wanted posters has finally struck gold. He holds up those of Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry. Looking from one to the other, he’s sure he’s identified his men.

  Heyes enters his hotel room and tosses the empty satchel to Curry, explaining that he got in and out of “there” in a hurry. As they pack to leave, there’s a knock on the door. The saloon girl whom Curry met warns them that the sheriff is rounding up his deputies.

  The next moment, Grimly races through the hotel lobby. He throws open the door to Smith’s room but finds it abandoned. While he and the deputies check Jones’s room, the two partners ride out of town at top speed. As Collins boards his stagecoach, he wonders at the posse tearing around the corner in hot pursuit.

  Once on his way, Collins opens his satchel and finds bundles of cash. Holding up one bill to inspect it closely, he pronounces it all counterfeit. His fellow-passengers — two middle-aged ladies — cling to each other in fear and fascination.

  The posse tops a small hill just in time to hear the train whistle and see the last car disappearing in the distance. Crestfallen, Grimly suspects Heyes and Curry are on the train.

  Saturday at 3 p.m., the poker game commences again. Before the ranchers enter the game room, Grimly announces it was Heyes and Curry who robbed the previous game. In fact, Heyes was the Joshua P. Smith with whom they played. Grimly has alerted sheriffs in the towns down the line and they’ll soon be caught.

  When the players see the poker table, they stop in their tracks. All the money has been replaced. After reading a note left on the table, Bixby sends for the sheriff.

  Lounging in a boxcar, Heyes and Curry remember that they started off with $12.70. At one point they had $200,719 in real money. Now they have eight cents, not counting the $100 bill that fell out when Heyes opened Sterling’s safe. In the rush he didn’t get a chance to return it.

  When Sheriff Grimly returns to the hotel, Bixby says the men are rescinding their complaint. There wasn’t any hold-up. Bixby insists Heyes and Curry weren’t in town for two weeks, a fact which should relieve the sheriff. The other players are as confused as Grimly, so Bixby reads the note aloud:

  “Gentlemen: I hope I divided the money accurately. Anyway, it’s all here, except for what I had in front of me when the game was robbed, which I haven’t got any more. If anyone ever tells you it was really Hannibal Heyes you were playing poker with, I hope you’ll point out that, since none of you lost a nickel, either that person is wrong or Hannibal Heyes must be an awful honest man. Signed, Joshua Smith.”

  GUEST CAST

  JIM BACKUS — JOSEPH P. STERLING

  CHILL WILLS — BIXBY

  ROD CAMERON — SHERIFF GRIMLY

  JON LORMER — PARSONS

  BILL MCKINNEY — LOBO RIGGS

  FORD RAINEY — COLLINS

  DONALD WOODS — HALBERSTAM

  DENNIS FIMPLE — KYLE MURTRY

  X. BRANDS — POKER PLAYER

  STEVEN GRAVERS — MATTSON

  JACKIE RUSSELL — SALLY

  The episode began with a depiction of all the best elements of a lazy summer’s day and deteriorated with one gunshot into a morass of grief, re-takes and resentment. Peter Duel had been in the middle of shooting this episode when he took his life.

  When Roger Davis came on as a replacement, because the studio was on a tight schedule, filming resumed immediately. He remembers that he “just popped right in and did it, th
ere was no building or how to do it or…talk about [it]…We just had to go on.” [1]

  His first scene was one that had been filmed on Thursday before Peter’s suicide in which the boys are relaxing in a gully. Thirty years later, watching himself on video, Roger observes, “It was so stupid. It was a really bad, phony moment…I don’t react to the satchel being thrown off the stage. You know, I just sort of get up, because I was in a daze anyway, it was the first scene…Normally, had that satchel come down and hit me on the head when I was sleeping, I would have gone, ‘Whoa, wait a minute, whoa…’ But I just languidly get up and start doing the scene, which was, I’m sure, just because it was that first scene…It was just a very intense moment with everybody on the set.”

  Ben played it as well as any actor could under the circumstances, smiling in anticipation, as directed, of spending the money. But, by now in the series, the audience knows it’s not going to work out for them. “They’re kind of hard luck guys in a low-key way.” Director Alex Singer praised Huggins the writer. “That’s very skillful storytelling. You’ve established the milieu enough to know that…there’s going to be a sharp turn of some kind…Even when you have set up the rules, and what I just described is nakedly commercial, it’s hard to be nakedly commercial and effective. It’s not understood by anybody who isn’t a writer…” [2]

  Roger needed to re-do the master shots and all of the close-ups to take Peter’s place in them. Because the production crew already had close-ups of the six other poker players, they didn’t want to waste them. They had been filmed from many different angles, so it was many more than just six shots. According to Singer, “It was probably a dozen shots and done with some difficulty and time-consuming hours and hours of work…But Roger would have to, in effect, fit his performance into what Peter was doing.”

  Fortunately, several of the scenes with Peter were salvageable. For instance, when Heyes walks into the Lordstown Hotel after leaving the stagecoach, Roger remarked after he watched the episode, “I noticed…it’s the back of Pete…I certainly know what Pete looked like and more than that, I know what I look like.” Also, when Heyes explains to Curry why he has to ask the gang to return the money, close-ups of each of them show the partners in discussion. Studying the scene closely, Singer points to the differences in shadows and lighting from shot to shot, indicating it is more than likely the back of Heyes’s head is Peter’s. When Heyes’s full face is seen, obviously it needed to be re-shot of Roger.

  Several lines were added to accommodate Roger that were not in the earlier scripts. Curry enters Heyes’s room and laments that, despite their having looked at land with several ranchers, none has invited Heyes to join the poker game. In the Duel/Heyes script of December 23, 1971, “Heyes is shaving” is the only stage direction. However, the scene was revised on January 4, 1972, to include a line in which Curry notices Heyes has shaved off his mustache. The line about Heyes thinking it makes him look sinister was also added to complement the scene. The peculiarity of these lines leads one to wonder why, if Roger appeared on the set with the mustache, it was necessary to include his removing it as part of the episode.

  Roger explains. “I was coming off the show I’d done and I had the mustache.” When Huggins saw the dailies of the first few scenes, he called immediately, “You got to get rid of that mustache, Roger…everyone in the Tower thinks it makes you look sinister.” So Huggins expanded the shaving scene, including the “in” joke about the sinister-looking facial hair. It was an easy solution to avoid shooting Roger’s already completed scenes over again. [3]

  One trivial difference occurs in the way the two Heyeses open a safe. When Peter as Heyes manipulated the tumblers, he put his ear to the combination lock as if to hear them falling into place. Roger/Heyes relied more on his sensitive fingertips to feel the tumblers. Tapping first to get the feel of the metal, he then lightly held the dial in his fingertips as he rotated it. The insert, however, was probably a stand-in’s hands because Roger was busy filming more important bits and keeping him overtime would have added to production costs.

  As for the secondary characters, according to the script, Wheat Carlson allegedly is part of the robbery, but he “will be played this week by someone we can afford.” When he was hired to play Wheat, Earl Holliman had great fun doing the two ninety-minute Alias Smith and Jones movies, but, at that time in his career, he didn’t want to do a series in which he wasn’t the lead and he declined to appear in smaller roles. [4] Dennis Fimple was Kyle, one of the dimmer members of the Devil’s Hole Gang. Like most good outlaws, Kyle frequently had a chaw of tobacco stuck in his cheek and, as he and Lobo watch the ranchers enter the hotel for the game, this episode was no exception. In order to replicate the appearance of tobacco, an actor was frequently given licorice as a substitute. For an appearance in the 1993 series Harts of the West, Fimple also played a grubby, chewin’ character, with one scene where he was supposed to spit a good stream. There were a lot of takes. Fimple had a sweet tooth, so instead of using the waste bucket to spit it out, he just swallowed and took a fresh wad of licorice for each take. The poor man did not realize until later that, taken in large quantities, licorice serves as a laxative. [5]

  Which Way to the OK Corral?

  “Five years from now you won’t find two people in the whole country who even remember the Marshal of Tombstone. What kind of name is that anyway — Earp?”

  Hannibal Heyes

  STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  TELEPLAY: GLEN A. LARSON

  DIRECTOR: JACK ARNOLD

  SHOOTING DATES: JANUARY 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 1972

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: FEBRUARY 10, 1972

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: DECEMBER 17, 1973

  A shot kills Alberto Diego, Señor Armendariz’s foreman, as he rides through the gate at Big Mac McCreedy’s ranch. The shot awakens Sam Bacon, a scruffy man snoozing nearby. He sees a rider gallop off, then spies McCreedy approaching from the opposite direction. Mac examines the wounded man, then hurries off to get a doctor. Sam makes his way to Diego and helps himself to his wallet and his beautifully decorated rifle.

  Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry search for Sam Bacon on Big Mac’s behalf. Questioning the stage dispatcher they learn he’s calling himself Morton and he bought a ticket to Tombstone, a destination that causes their hearts to sink. Marshal Wyatt Earp is a man they’d prefer to avoid. Despite their reluctance, they board the stagecoach.

  Inside, a woman is asleep, her face hidden by her hat. The stage starts with a jerk, throwing her to the boys’ feet and revealing their old friend Georgette Sinclair. George is on her way to Tombstone to be a chanteuse in the Birdcage Saloon, while the boys need to find Sam Bacon n order to prove Big Mac didn’t kill Diego. They entreat George not to help them and, offended, George assures them that for the length of their stay in Tombstone, they don’t know each other.

  In town, George presents herself to Harvey Clifford, owner of the Birdcage Saloon, for her audition.

  Heyes and Curry spend the next two days unsuccessfully looking for Sam. Discouraged, they nevertheless congratulate themselves on avoiding Earp, but their luck doesn’t hold. “Afternoon, gents,” Earp greets them.

  In their hotel room, Curry is all for giving up and leaving town. Heyes tries to dissuade him, but Curry worries about what the marshal’s greeting meant. There’s a knock on the door. Heyes opens it and George bursts in, flinging herself into his arms. A deputy marshal told her to get out of Tombstone or she’d be killed. Heyes urges her to march over to the marshal’s office and report it. George agrees that’s what they should do and the boys protest her assumption they’ll accompany her. “There are Wanted posters on his wall — ours!”

  Grumbling about blackmail and extortion, Heyes and Curry follow George to Earp’s office where she reports that one of his deputies threatened her. Earp is skeptical, but sends Joe, the deputy on duty, to round up the others. George explains that the deputy, a man she’d never seen before, told her for no reason to leav
e town on the three o’clock stage. When deputies Harold and Jake make an appearance, George clears them. Earp is losing patience when deputy Bart Russel enters and she says he’s the one. Bart denies ever having seen her before and points out that there isn’t a three o’clock stage, a fact Earp acknowledges. George is outraged, but Earp turns his attention to Heyes and Curry, wanting to know if they heard the threats. Heyes admits they didn’t, but Curry vouches for George’s word despite their earlier claim that they just met her on the stagecoach. The marshal demands to know what they’re doing in Tombstone. Heyes presents the subpoena for Sam Bacon, which Earp points out is invalid in Arizona. He warns them not to kidnap local visitors or try to get publicity for their lady friend. The boys quickly hustle George out.

  George is furious, as are the boys, albeit for different reasons. Curry suggests the safest course would be for her to leave town, but George refuses. After all, she has Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry to protect her.

  In the saloon Heyes plays poker and pumps the other players for information about Bacon. One man recalls him and another suggests that Doc might know more. Doc? The gentleman next to Heyes speaks up. “Holliday is the name. You can call me Doc.” Heyes is taken aback.

  The game continues. Curry pushes through the crowd of spectators and watches Heyes win. When Doc calls for a break, Curry reminds his partner they promised to be at George’s debut, but Heyes, delighted to find that Doc Holliday’s reputation as a poker player is overrated, figures he could win another thousand dollars if he stayed in the game. At the mention of money, Curry’s attitude changes. “Heyes, you stay right here. I’ll take care of George and Sam Bacon.”

  At the Birdcage, Clifford introduces George to an enthusiastic audience. Curry smiles as he watches her, but his smile fades as he catches sight of his quarry. When George takes her bow, Sam notices Curry’s interest in him. He flees with Curry right behind him.