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

by Sandra K. Sagala

  The most significant change made during the final rewrites was to switch the crooked casino owner from a man named Fred to a woman named Mia. By doing this, a serviceable and somewhat predictable character became much more intriguing. The dialogue originally written for Fred was retained, a decision which added depth to the boys’ now-female adversary. The “man who owns the town” is a standard character in westerns. He’s expected to be violent and powerful. To see these same traits in a woman goes against the tradition of the genre, where woman are most often the civilizing influence on the men around them, and the audience will sit up and take notice when the cliché is broken. Rather than the predictable bad guy, Heyes and Curry face the more unusual Mia Bronson, making the story more interesting and the ultimate defeat of Mia more satisfying.

  Bad Night in Big Butte

  “A stolen diamond does not belong to the heirs of the thief that stole it!”

  Kid Curry

  STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  TELEPLAY: GLEN A. LARSON

  DIRECTED: RICHARD L. BARE

  SHOOTING DATES: FEBRUARY 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 1972

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: MARCH 2, 1972

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: JANUARY 14, 1974

  Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry mosey into town worried that they’re being followed by one Boot Coby. When Coby veers off, the boys are relieved and Heyes wants to leave while the going’s good. But Curry reminds him they’ve spent the last month looking for Georgette and they can’t give up her trail now. Coby asks the sheriff about a man named Skeet Jenkins and learns he has been dead for two days. His daughter has come to town for the funeral. Heyes and Curry query the hotel desk clerk and learn that no Georgette Sinclair checked in, but a Georgette Jenkins did. They find the lady at the cemetery and debate whether it’s “their” Georgette or not. When she raises the black veil that hides her mournful face, they recognize her, then watch as she persuades the undertaker to open the coffin and search through the dead man’s pockets for a letter. Unobserved, Boot Coby watches, too.

  The boys approach as she heads for her carriage, letter in hand. Offering their sympathies, they wonder who Skeet Jenkins is.

  Skeet was her father’s best friend from his more crooked days, she tells them. As she trails off sadly, the boys change the subject and say they’ve looked her up to borrow $3,000 for a poker stake. She refuses; poker is not her idea of a sound investment. As they help her aboard the stagecoach for Big Butte, Heyes and Curry spot Boot Coby still watching. George, also seeing Coby, suddenly changes her mind. The way Heyes plays poker is more like investing in an accounting firm than gambling. She has only one condition — that they help her out for one night in Big Butte. She won’t say whether it has anything to do with the envelope she retrieved from Jenkins’s pocket.

  In Big Butte, George hopes to get the hotel’s front corner room on the top floor but it’s already been rented to Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones. The boys specifically asked for it because of its view of the sheriff’s office and the main street. George hastens in, laments how small it is, and offers to trade. She peeks through the curtain and spies Coby riding into town.

  It’s the Fourth of July and Big Butte celebrates in a big way. After dark, the town hurrahs the holiday with fireworks, firecrackers and noisy gunplay.

  Heyes and Curry head out of their room for dinner with George, unaware that she’s watching them from around the corner. As soon as they’ve headed downstairs, she picks the lock on their door and enters. Pacing off the room, she locates a spot and begins to hack at the ceiling above it with an axe. After chopping a good-sized hole, she stands on the bed and reaches up into it but can’t locate what she’s after.

  Meanwhile the boys wait for her in the hotel dining room, worried that Boot Coby is after them. If so, why hasn’t he nabbed them? They conclude that maybe he’s not after them and they’d better find out what George is up to.

  When she finally joins them, Coby takes a seat at a nearby table. They tell her that his business is turning people like them in and recovering stolen property. She nervously denies that she’s into anything in which money is involved. At this obvious lie, the boys stand to leave and she admits there may be some money involved. They want fifty percent of whatever they’re talking about. She counters with a flat thirty percent.

  Back in their hotel room, Heyes and Curry stare at the damage in the ceiling. Coby comes by and orders them to the sheriff’s office. There, Coby, the sheriff and the deputy go through Heyes’s and Curry’s clothes as the boys stand in a jail cell wrapped in blankets. When they ask what the men are looking for, Coby scoffs at their ignorance. They just happened into town on the night the statute of limitations runs out on a famous robbery, stay in the hotel where the robber was captured, and tear up the room? Curry admits it sounds too coincidental, but that’s what it is. Disgusted, Coby asks if they never heard of the $200,000 Thurston diamond.

  Not finding anything, the sheriff unlocks the cell. The boys plan to leave town, however, the sheriff orders them to stay until somebody pays for the damage to the hotel room.

  Coby is angry the sheriff released them but he has no reason to hold them since they don’t have the diamond. The room that was torn up was not even there seven years ago when the robbery took place. The third floor was only added a year ago. The sheriff suspects that Coby, on the trail of the diamond, would not turn it over to the state if he locates it nor would he settle for the ten percent finder’s fee. For his part, Coby accuses the sheriff of wanting him out of town so he can collect the fee. The lawman argues that, as a public official, he will only get thanks from the governor if he turns in the gem. Coby doesn’t believe him.

  While the sheriff is searching Heyes and Curry, a frustrated George paces off the steps in their room, checking the placement of the ceiling hole. They return to the hotel and badger the desk clerk for a new un-damaged room. When he refuses, they threaten to sue because the damage looks like an inside job. Acquiescing, he offers them the room directly under their old room.

  Just missing them, George descends the stairs to the lobby. Feigning fascination with desperadoes, she queries the desk clerk who explains about robber Skeet Jenkins. The sheriff fell off the roof chasing Jenkins and ended up with a wooden leg.

  “The sheriff fell off a three-story building and only lost a leg?” George wonders. The clerk clarifies that it was only a two-story building then. She grins as realization dawns. “That would mean seven years ago the second floor was the top floor!”

  Curry undresses for bed arguing that they should leave because, in the past seven years, someone was sure to have found the diamond. Maybe not, Heyes says. It may be only as big as a .45 caliber slug and easy to hide.

  The noise of exploding firecrackers covers the creaks as George pries up floorboards. Soon she’s got a sizable hole directly under the one she chopped in the ceiling.

  As Heyes begins to undress for bed, Coby knocks on their door. Because Curry is already asleep, Heyes steps into the hall to talk with him. Coby thinks that they or their lady friend know where the diamond is and says they’ll have to go through him to get it out of town.

  While they’re talking, George’s crowbar slips and dislodges the diamond. It falls smack into the sleeping Curry’s navel. Heyes spots it as soon as he reenters their room. Peeking through the hole in their ceiling, her floor, George claims it. She reasons that it’s hers because it was willed to her by the man who stole it. Seven years ago, Wilton R. Thurston made some bad investments and all he had left was the diamond. He hired Skeet Jenkins to steal it so he could collect the insurance. Skeet died on his way to retrieve it, so it belongs to George. Curry points out that a stolen diamond does not belong to the heirs of the thief that stole it; it belongs to the heirs of the victim. There were no heirs but Heyes argues that it still doesn't belong to her. “All right,” she says, “maybe it just belongs to whoever finds it. And that's me!”

  She plans to sneak out of town with it. When they shimmy down
a knotted sheet thrown out the hotel window, the sheriff and two deputies greet them, armed with rifles.

  George, Heyes and Curry are once again stripped and locked in jail cells while their clothes are searched to no avail. George says they didn’t find the diamond but were sneaking out of town to avoid this sort of humiliation. The sheriff isn’t buying it. Heyes deals for their release. But the only deal the sheriff will make is the keys to the cell in exchange for the diamond.

  At that, Coby calls for a conference with the sheriff. Coby sees through him; the sheriff wants the diamond, not because he will get a letter from the governor, but because he lost a leg. If the sheriff cuts Coby out, he threatens to track the lawman down. If they work together, half of $200,000 is better than nothing.

  The sheriff offers his prisoners a new deal. Since the diamond rightfully belongs to the state, and he’s a duly authorized representative, he’ll give them $1,000 reward each. Curry and George scoff at the ridiculous offer, but Heyes says he’ll take it. They don’t have the diamond, but to get it, they’ll have to let him out of jail. The sheriff reluctantly acquiesces but will hold Curry and George.

  Heyes boards the train as Curry and George kill time playing cards through the bars of their adjoining cells.

  Three days later, Heyes returns from the Denver zoo with a cage. In it is an Africanus Phodopus, a great African diamond hunter. Coby and the sheriff don’t believe it, but pretend to go along.

  As soon as it’s dark, since that is when rodents do their best work, Heyes heads for the hotel, cage in hand. He enters the room alone and covers the keyhole with tape. He lights a lamp and unscrews the doorknob to the adjoining room’s door. The diamond falls into his hand.

  Coby and the sheriff, frustrated at their inability to peek through the keyhole, enter the room with guns drawn to find Heyes gazing dejectedly at the phodopus, who didn’t find the diamond.

  Once more, Heyes, Curry and George are searched, while Coby turns the room inside out. Once more, the search is futile. With no choice, the sheriff turns them loose. Ready to leave, Heyes can’t understand why the phodopus failed. “He must not be a purebred.”

  Safely out of town, the trio buggy to an abandoned out-building where Heyes retrieves a homing pigeon. Attached to its leg is the Thurston diamond.

  Sometime later they take the jewel to Soapy Saunders for evaluation. “Well, well, well,” he says, examining it through an eyepiece.

  “Well?” asks Heyes.

  “Well?” asks Curry.

  “Well?” asks George.

  “Well,” says Soapy, it’s quartz and worth only $50!

  Georgette is dismayed and walks out but the boys remind her of the poker stake money. They still expect her to fund the game. What has she got herself involved with, she asks the audience, a bunch of crooks?

  GUEST CAST

  JACK ELAM — BOOT COBY

  MICHELE LEE — GEORGETTE SINCLAIR

  ARTHUR O’CONNELL — SHERIFF, BIG BUTTE

  PAT BUTTRAM — SHERIFF

  SAM JAFFE — SOAPY SAUNDERS

  MILLS WATSON — DEPUTY SHERIFF SAM PERKINS

  DAVE WILLOCK — CLERK, BIG BUTTE

  ROBERT NICHOLS — DOC

  PAUL SCHOTT — HOTEL CLERK

  FRANK FERGUSON — BILLINGS

  LAURA ROSE — MOXIE

  DONNY SANDS — DRIVER

  AMANDA REISS — MARIA

  WALT DAVIS — MINISTER

  Mark Twain opens Chapter 17 of Pudd’nhead Wilson with a quote about July 4th. “Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.” [20] It is appropriate that this episode is set on the Fourth of July because it is filled with foolishness.

  In his as-yet-unpublished autobiography, Roy Huggins wrote that the kind of humor he liked “is the kind that comes out of character and is funny only if the actor understands how that character would read the line and why.” [21] Knowing his actors, in his rewrite notes for Glen Larson, Huggins consistently challenged Larson to come up with funny lines for them and the humor in the episode is the result of Larson’s trying really hard. So, the attempts at humor in the dreadful exaggerated facial expressions and breaking of the “fourth wall” between actors and audience in this episode cannot be blamed on the writer but must be laid at the feet of the director. When Heyes and Curry ask Georgette just who the dead Skeet Jenkins was, she looks into the camera and the audience hears a BOING going off in her head. (A similar note was sounded in “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even” when the jeweler examines the necklace hung on Wheelwright’s woman. His eyepiece falls with a BOING as he realizes it’s fake.) In the final scene, Georgette wonders what she’s got herself into and, with eyes wide facing the camera, appears to ask the audience. The two directors responsible for these juvenile attempts at humor were not involved in any other Alias Smith and Jones episodes.

  Other nonsensical particulars should have been worked out before final shooting. When the sheriff and Coby are searching their clothes, Heyes and Curry are wrapped in full-length blankets. Georgette, presumably a proper lady of the 1880s, was given a short blanket that leaves her shoulders and legs exposed. Gentlemen that they are, or perhaps single-minded in their hunt for the diamond, neither Coby nor the lawman leers suggestively at her. The phodopus, a typical rodent active at night, is supposed to work best in the dark. Heyes tapes the keyhole shut so Coby and the sheriff cannot peek in to see him light a lamp. Don’t they see the light stream out under the door? How did Heyes carry the homing pigeon in the same cage as a hamster without a lot of fluttering and screeching from the two animals? Since when does a zoo lend out its animals? How did Heyes train a homing pigeon in the three days he was gone to Denver? Huggins might shrug, assuming these conjectures to be “overthink.” But it can be argued that they are instead examples of the writer’s and director’s “non-think.”

  The story line went through drastic changes throughout numerous revisions. Initially, the title was “The Girl with the Empty Box,” in which a woman named Justine Plunkett coerces the boys into accompanying her to the town of Providence. When she chops a hole in her hotel room floor looking for hidden money, dollar bills float down, forming a “hundred thousand dollar patch quilt of greenbacks” on the sleeping Curry. [22] By Huggins’s rewrite notes of January 13, 1972, Clementine Hale had become the female lead and the boys are tracking her down to retrieve the photograph of the three of them. When Sally Field did not reprise her role for this episode, the female lead was given to Michele Lee as Georgette Sinclair. The boys are looking for Georgette to borrow money for a poker game, an unlikely but still plausible theory. Don Ameche was not available either and, instead of Diamond Jim Guffy as originally planned, the trio takes the diamond for evaluation to old friend Soapy Saunders. Jim Guffy, Soapy Saunders and Silky O’Sullivan are rich gentlemen to whom Heyes and Curry can turn to get money, advice or scam props. They appear to work interchangeably in the scripts depending on which actor was available. Huggins used the same tack in Maverick, creating the character of Gentleman Jack Darby when Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. was unavailable to reprise his role of Dandy Jim Buckley.

  From the beginning, Roy Huggins worried about the logic of the diamond belonging to whoever possesses it after midnight on July 4. He insisted it must be clear that it belongs to the state before that. “This is a fairy tale that we must hope the audience will believe. They will — because it takes a lawyer to answer that question.” [23]

  Thirty years after the episode aired, Jack Elam had no recollection of his role of Boot Coby. “I can only say that in any show that long ago — I was mean! Bad and mean!” [24]

  Courtesy of Ben Murphy

  Ben Murphy and Roger Davis. ABC Photo Release

  Dennis Fimple as Kyle Murtry. Courtesy of Chris Fimple

  Georgette Sinclair, played by Michelle Lee.

  Chapter 8r />
  It Was a Good Life, but Times Were Changing

  By some miracle, Peter Duel’s suicide had not destroyed Alias Smith and Jones and the network ordered a third season. Universal decided to make the new season something special and do what they had never done before — send the production out on location. While the show did spend some time off the studio backlot during its first two seasons, the locations had always been local, no more than an hour or so from Universal. This time the cast and crew would trek to the wilds of Utah.

  Jo Swerling remembers that after Peter’s death, “we wanted to come on very strong with our new cast…we wanted to give the shows, those first shows, a kind of a John Ford western movie look because it’s very spectacular.” John Ford had created a signature style by shooting on location in Monument Valley, Utah, in which the grand rock formations became as important to his films as the actors and the script. But the Alias Smith and Jones team decided Monument Valley was too limited for their purposes and instead chose to take their production to Moab. “Moab had a lot of those same kinds of rock formations and mesas…but it also had mountains with snow and things like that so we felt that if we headquartered ourselves there, we’d get a wider variety of looks,” Swerling explains. Besides a wider variety of scenery, Moab was also logistically a better choice than Monument Valley, with the town reasonably close to the chosen locations and with easy transportation in and out of the area. The time spent in Utah eventually stretched to three weeks, longer than originally planned. “I got yelled at on that one,” Swerling remembers with a grin. [1]