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

by Sandra K. Sagala

  GUEST CAST

  JAMES DRURY — SHERIFF TANKERSLEY

  J.D. CANNON — HARRY BRISCOE

  LARRY STORCH — MUGS MCGEEHU

  FRANK SINATRA, JR — DEPUTY WERMSER

  GEORGE KEYMAS — HANK SILVERS

  DAVE GARROWAY — MORONI STEBBINS

  STEPHEN HUDIS — BOY

  JON LORMER — PROPRIETOR

  TOM WATERS — RANCH OWNER

  LAURIE FERRONE — FIRST GIRL

  RENEE TETRO — SECOND GIRL

  While Roy Huggins provided the stories for almost every episode of the series, there are very few which he did not hand over to another writer to turn into a teleplay. Even on those episodes where John Thomas James receives a full “written by” credit, drafts written by others were often part of the development process. “The Long Chase” is one of only three that Huggins wrote completely by himself, never even telling the story to another writer. [1] As the executive producer, Huggins had no one to answer to but himself when it came to the script and, because of this, he was free to indulge his sense of humor. The teleplay for this episode is full of wry comments and extraneous information that goes against a basic precept of screenwriting, which is that if it’s not shown on the screen, it’s not written on the page.

  This episode was the third season premiere and the audience would, for the first time, enjoy the results of the location shooting in Moab. It would also mark the shift in timeslots from Thursday night at 8:00 p.m. to Saturday night at 8:00

  p.m. Huggins acknowledged this in his scene description setting up the Utah countryside that would play such a big part in this story. “If you are seeing all this in living color in an air-conditioned twentieth century home on a quiet Saturday evening, it probably looks monumentally beautiful…” [2] While in most cases, the town of Little Grande would be described in prosaic terms that allow the set designers and sign painters to do their job, Huggins elaborated. “Little Grande is a hot and miserable community of several hundred souls who will become known to history as hardy pioneers, too late to give them any satisfaction, but in plenty of time to make their grandchildren feel an uneasy, enduring sense of inadequacy and guilt.” [3] Huggins later describes Curry jumping out of the train outside of Little Grande with a nod to the realities of filmmaking. “A truly spectacular and bone-rattling jump is made at no risk to our star.” [4]

  Huggins always liked stories that were about nothing. This sounds strange coming from a master storyteller, but the stories “about nothing” are really those that concentrate on the characters of Heyes and Curry rather than the mechanics of an intricate plot. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing; we’re interested because we like them. So in this story “about nothing,” Huggins focuses on one of the problems the boys often face, being chased by a posse, and treats the audience to one long chase through the hot, dusty desert, throwing Heyes and Curry up against a tough sheriff, a hapless deputy, a pair of scruffy outlaws and the always bumbling Harry Briscoe.

  Huggins loved the character of Harry Briscoe. “I…saw what his potential was and brought him back to exploit that potential,” he recalled. Harry is once again down and out, a man who seemingly can do nothing right, yet who nevertheless always lands on his feet with a little help from his friends, Heyes and Curry. In this story, though, it’s Harry’s turn to save the day. Knowing the boys are depending on him to keep them out of the clutches of Sheriff Tankersley, Harry manages to come up with a plan and bring it to fruition. Along the way, Huggins gave him a lot of funny moments: his attempt to whisper into the sheriff’s ear when asked if he knows who his prisoners are, his surprise when his imaginary dust becomes the real posse, his arrival in Little Grande with two new prisoners. Huggins explained, “It was dangerous because he was right on the verge of being farce and you have to be very careful to avoid that.” [5] J.D. Cannon played the role with relish, but not over the top, also recognizing the need to avoid farce but still have fun.

  During the chase, we see Heyes and Curry perform effortlessly as a team. There is no time wasted when they “rent” all the horses in the livery stable or when Heyes lends a hand to help Curry mount his horse when Curry’s comes up lame. Their long partnership allows them to function as one. With the situation looking bleak, they resort to bickering while waiting for Harry, but when Heyes suggests splitting up, Curry immediately vetoes the idea, ostensibly because it’s impractical at that moment, but in truth because it’s unthinkable. When Curry falls from the train, Heyes races to his side, tears in his eyes, all bickering forgotten. Reunited once again in their ambition to get even with Harry for what they interpret as his betrayal, they enjoy trading ideas for his demise, and then are pleasantly surprised when Harry comes through with horses, food and water. The chase has indeed been long, but no matter what the difficulties, it’s obvious that nothing will split this pair up.

  High Lonesome Country

  “Wouldn’t it be more of a partner thing to do if we flipped a coin?”

  Kid Curry

  STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  TELEPLAY: DICK NELSON

  DIRECTOR: ALEXANDER SINGER

  SHOOTING DATES: STUDIO — JUNE 28, 29, 1972; UTAH — JUNE 30, JULY 1, 3, 5, 1972

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: SEPTEMBER 23, 1972

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: OCTOBER 23, 1973

  Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry ride into town and are soon engrossed in a poker game. After some time the other players leave for their ranch and the game dissolves. Phil Archer remains behind and wonders what the boys do for a living. Curry suggests they might be unemployed trappers. To their dismay, Archer came into town specifically looking for trappers. He’s overjoyed. Heyes and Curry eye each other wondering what they’ve just gotten themselves into.

  As they follow Archer to his ranch, the boys argue about the situation, Heyes reminding Curry that “unless the conversation is about guns or something very simple and unimportant,” he should let Heyes do the talking, not that Heyes talked them out of this. There’s a depression on, though, and their wages will cover the cost of equipment with a little extra when they sell the traps back.

  Helen Archer greets her husband with a smile until she sees who he’s brought home. She recognizes Kid Curry from the Buckton courtroom. Her husband rightly assumes the other man must then be Hannibal Heyes. What should they do? Outlaws like Heyes and Curry won’t be taken easily, but Archer is already thinking about the $20,000 reward on their heads. For now, though, he’ll just let them start trapping.

  As Heyes and Curry set traps out, they worry about running into the smart old cat that Archer will pay a $50 bonus for. Curry wonders at the strange way Mrs. Archer was looking at him, like she was scared.

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch house, Luke Billings comes by. He heard Archer was looking for a trapper. Archer tells him he’s already hired two men but he knows Billings’s reputation as a hunter and wonders if he’d like a job that would pay $10,000. For that price, it would be men Billings would be hunting and he doesn’t hire out to kill men, he says. But when he leaves, Billings heads for the foothills where Archer told him Heyes and Curry are trapping. Archer suspects he may have just been double-crossed.

  At their campfire, Heyes and Curry hear unsettling noises in the dark. At the increased skittering of the horses, they grab rifles and, after a short pursuit, Curry fires at a cougar, wounding it. It’s grown too dark to follow the cat, but the next day, they follow its bloody tracks as Billings, who has arrived in the area, changes his riding boots for moccasins.

  Heyes and Curry track the cougar but it has them in its sights as well. Suddenly the cat springs from a large boulder onto Curry’s back. Man and animal wrestle for superiority. Heyes takes careful aim so as to miss Curry and kill the cougar. His shot alerts Billings to their whereabouts. Ready to quit trapping after the scare, the boys slide down a slope and a bullet blows Curry’s hat off. Billings missed killing him only because Curry slipped when he fired. Now they know why Mrs. Archer was looking at them
funny. Somehow Archer has figured out who they are and hired someone to kill them.

  Since there was only one shot, they figure there’s only one man, so they separate, planning to work their way back to the wagon. Shots ring out occasionally as Billings spots one or the other. As he nears the wagon, Curry hears another shot and Heyes moans as he falls. An angry, determined look crosses Curry’s face as he strips off his jacket and readies his pistol.

  Quietly tracking the sniper, Curry comes up behind Billings and orders him to drop his weapons and run to see how badly his partner is hurt. They find Heyes with a shoulder wound. While Curry holds a gun on him, promising to bury him next to his partner if Heyes dies, Billings uses his knife to dig out the bullet.

  After the surgery, Curry ties Billings up and questions who he is and why he came after them. Billings will talk only if they tell Mrs. Archer where he is. He figures Mr. Archer won’t be happy he’s been double-crossed.

  That evening, Heyes and Curry surprise the Archers and inform them about Billings. All four of them will stay together for the night; in the morning they’ll head for the nearest railroad. Only then will they separate.

  They ride out in single file. Curry, bringing up the rear, raises his hands to fend off a buzzing insect just as a bullet blows off his saddle horn. At the shot, all four scurry for cover in a gully. Billings must have gotten loose. He’s got a Sharps buffalo rifle, accurate up to a thousand yards. Because it takes an expert five seconds to reload the single-shot rifle, Curry has time to stand up and look for where Billings may be. He ducks down in time to avoid being shot.

  With ten hours of daylight, Billings could move and get a clear shot at them from another angle. Archer is not willing to wait and is going for help. They decide Curry will shoot his hat off to make Billings think he’s trying to escape from the outlaws. Archer reaches his horse but a bullet from Billings’s rifle causes the horse to rear, throwing Archer off and breaking his leg. Helen Archer runs to her husband, checks on him, then mounts the horse and rides away. Billings is so surprised, by the time he reacts, she’s out of range.

  Archer must be okay so Heyes and Curry agree they must give Billings twenty minutes to move, then one of them will have to play decoy. They argue over who it will be. Curry can run faster than Heyes, but not when they’re scared. Heyes complains about his wounded shoulder. At the end of the first twenty minutes, Heyes contends that Curry should run because he’s younger. Being only a couple years younger is no difference, Curry counters. Heyes suggests alphabetical order but Curry will agree only if they’re talking about Joshua and Thaddeus. They decide it would be fair to flip a coin. When Curry loses the toss, he pulls off his boots. Puzzled, Heyes reminds him he always wanted to die with his boots on.

  Curry runs and, at Billings’s missed shot, turns around and races back to the gully. Billings hasn’t moved.

  Who runs next? It seems fair to flip a coin, Heyes answers, a precedent has been set. Curry will have none of that. He insists that Heyes will run next.

  Heyes gets ready to run, removing his vest, gloves and boots. His mad scramble out and back proves Billings remained in the same place.

  Twenty hot, dusty minutes later, Heyes announces it’s Curry’s turn to run. Oh no, says Curry, they flipped and he lost, so he ran, then Heyes ran. Now they flip again.

  No, argues Heyes, the principle is that they take turns. Heyes refuses to run; he’s weak from loss of blood. Curry thinks for a moment then suggests they flip to decide if they should flip again. Heyes stands firm and Curry concludes, with no help coming for a long time, they’ll have to just keep doing this, so he takes his turn and runs.

  As Curry slides back down into the gully exhausted, Heyes figures they only have to do it one more time. It’ll be his turn, all nice and even. By then Mrs. Archer should be back with help.

  “Look, Kid,” Heyes says, “if Billings get me, I want you to turn in my body for the reward. I don't want him to get it.” “What?! How can I do that, Heyes? Who gets the reward on me when I'm gettin' the reward on you?” In the middle of the new argument, they hear two pistol shots. Mrs. Archer, instead of going for help, circled around behind Billings and shot him.

  After checking on Archer, Heyes and Curry ride toward town. Curry anticipates selling the traps back and recouping their money. Heyes takes a dim view of this prospect and leans on a hardware store post watching Curry wheel and deal. The merchant insists that once the traps leave the premises, they are used but reluctantly offers a twenty-five percent return. Outraged, Curry demands seventy-five percent because the traps were new only six days ago and some were hardly used at all! No deal, says the store owner, once they leave the premises, they are used. Curry counters, how about fifty percent of their money back if they throw in a dead cougar?

  GUEST CAST

  BUDDY EBSEN — PHIL ARCHER

  ROD CAMERON — LUKE BILLINGS

  MARIE WINDSOR — HELEN ARCHER

  WALT DAVIS — CLYDE

  MONTY LAIRD — BILL

  CLARKE GORDON — STOREKEEPER

  The episode was born in April 1972 when Roy Huggins told the story to Tony Barr, a programming executive at ABC who had the contractual right to approve stories. In Huggins’s case, it was “pretty much of a rubber stamp…They’d had a long-standing relationship with Roy on the show…and they knew that he worked out these stories in great detail.” [6] Director Alex Singer knew a good writer like Huggins set something up for the audience to anticipate. Viewers will “sit still for the relatively quiet stuff because they know that there are two payoffs here that they’ve already installed. One is that these guys are really in danger of being captured by a very shrewd man who isn’t at all the kind of easy-going, farmer-type he pretended to be, and secondly, there’s a cat that’s a bit of a question mark…” Tension builds not only for Heyes and Curry, but for Archer who has to contend first with the outlaws, then with Billings who ratchets up the anxiety. When Mrs. Archer argues with her husband over killing Heyes and Curry, she also becomes a component Archer must deal with.

  When Huggins re-told the story for writer Dick Nelson, he added that the boys were being hired to trap a cougar. Huggins knew cougars are called painters in Montana, and the boys could be hired to trap a painter. This was dropped as no one outside of Montana would know the term. Reminding the writer that stock footage of a cougar existed from “The 5th Victim,” he also insisted no souvenirs be taken of the dead cat. “We don’t want to see our boys cutting off an ear or anything like that.” [7] The cinematographer shot Ben Murphy’s wrestling with the dummy cougar from a discernible distance. However, some of the intercut shots are of a trainer working with a real cat whose jaws had been tied to keep it from biting. The filming came out well, and Singer recalled, “I know that they all enjoyed it. It’s a naked piece of action and they could look like heroes.” [8]

  Villainy in the episode is assigned to Billings, a huge man in animal furs. At no point did Billings announce he was a tough guy; he said very little, but his presence was powerful. Huggins wanted to hire “the biggest actor we can find and the scrawniest-looking horse we can find.” Singer exaggerated Billings’s threat by shooting from a low camera angle, making him appear even larger and meaner. “You create the entity by the kind of shot that you do, by the actor’s presence in the makeup and so on.” [9]

  Billings’s Sharps rifle was favored by buffalo hunters for its heavy bullets and long range, about three times that of a regular rifle. Invented in 1848 by Christian Sharps, it was a breech-loading firearm manufactured in great numbers for Civil War use. The single shot weapon had to be loaded by pulling down the trigger guard, releasing the breechblock. When the chamber was laid open, the cartridge was inserted. The breechblock was then closed cutting off the end of the cartridge exposing the powder. The trigger was pulled, the powder ignited and the gun fired. [10] All of this took time in the hands of even an expert shooter.

  To test Billings’s position, Curry wouldn’t have wanted to
run in his boots, particularly if they had any heel height. The high narrow heels on boots prevented the foot from slipping through the stirrup, especially on fast turns and stops. Riding was less tiring when the weight fell on the balls of the feet or the toes. The pointed toes of cowboys’ boots made them easy to insert into the stirrups and the stitching kept the boot together when the leather wore thin. Thus, while very practical in the saddle, boots were often uncomfortable for walking or running. However, when the scene called for them to run bootless, protective gear was put into the actors’ socks because no actor could perform well while running over rocks.

  When Heyes reminds Curry he wanted to die with his boots on, a nice throwback to the old western cliché, Curry’s scripted reply was “Heyes, sometimes I wonder why I like you. And the times I wonder, I don’t like you.” [11] The line was deliberately cut during editing. Singer believes the producers “didn’t want to muddy the waters, that ‘I like you’ was enough of a sour joke at this particular time.” The argument over who would play decoy appears to reflect the tension between the two actors, but Singer didn’t see it that way. “If somebody showed me this show and I’d never seen it before, I would assume that they were good friends who had a kind of running argument about who takes the chances and who cons the other out of whatever. But I would not assume that there was any real unhappiness between them as people.” To add to the conflict, Ben, Roger and Singer all vividly remember how hot it was during that scene — about 120 degrees. Because it was actually dark in the gully, the crew used huge lights, raising the temperature even more — enough to make anyone testy with those nearby.

  In The Young Country, Roger Davis played an innocent guy who was kind of shy. “Smith and Jones was not that at all. But,” he believed, “if I’d brought that [shyness] to the role it would have been interesting and more in contrast to [Ben].” Rather than both of them trying to one-up the other, “it would have been better if I’d stayed with that character.” All actors eventually learn the effort to outdo another actor is self-defeating. “What we were doing in Smith and Jones could have, in a way, kept us from really being great…I think that Ben and I had some really wonderful moments in Smith and Jones; nobody ever talks about them much, but in that ditch was one of them. I know it. And there were others.” [12]