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

by Sandra K. Sagala

  Keenan Wynn plays a greedy man in each of the three Alias Smith and Jones episodes he guest starred in. In “Dreadful Sorry, Clementine,” as Horace Wingate, he owns Golden Meadows land and gets fleeced by Clem. In “Stagecoach Seven,” he’s not willing to split the reward money on our boys with the Weaver gang. It appears that some of Wynn’s remarks in this episode, e.g. when they’re in the barn tied up and he complains that his back is bad and his knees aren’t too good either or his “Shut up” to Curry’s protest about his tying the knots good, are really adlibbed remarks to Ben Murphy and to William Smith; they are not in the script. When the boys are digging under the icehouse, dialogue is missing from the script. The lines are rare instances of adlibbed dialogue which Huggins allowed because they don’t alter the story in any way, but are merely Wynn’s comments while watching Ben and Roger dig.

  The Ten Days That Shook Kid Curry

  “I knew [Mr. Jones] didn’t have enough brains or imagination to kidnap someone and rob a bank, so I figured it had to be the other way around.”

  Hannibal Heyes

  STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  TELEPLAY: GLORYETTE CLARK

  DIRECTOR: EDWARD M. ABROMS

  SHOOTING DATES: SEPTEMBER 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 1972

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: NOVEMBER 4, 1972

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: JANUARY 21, 1974

  A posse chases Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry. Pausing to consider their desperate situation, Heyes decides splitting up is their only chance to escape. Curry feels this is one of Heyes’s flabbier ideas, but agrees to meet in Ashford.

  Curry arrives first — dirty, hungry and nearly broke. The distrustful hotel clerk makes him pay in advance before handing him the key.

  After cleaning up, he heads for the saloon and spends his last nickel on a beer. He notices Doc Holliday at a nearby table playing solitaire and joins him, introducing himself as a friend of Joshua Smith, the man who lost $20,000 in that Tombstone poker game. Doc’s curt attitude mellows as he recalls his biggest win. Curry suggests a game and wonders aloud what the odds are that he can make five pat hands out of twenty-five cards. Doc is angry at being thought a sucker, especially since he invented that trick. Curry apologizes and Doc suggests trying it on Jorgenson, a stupid man who doesn’t know he’s stupid.

  Jorgenson is interested in the bet. He’s eager to up the stakes to $100, but Curry refuses. Ten dollars is all he’s willing to risk. After Jorgenson deals the cards, Curry begins to arrange them. An hour later, Jorgenson complains about how long it’s taking. Doc points out to Curry, sadly, this is the one time in ten it can’t be done.

  Judge Morrison fines Curry $10 for trying to pull a con game, but since he doesn’t have any money, sentences him to five days in jail.

  The judge calls the next case, a man accused of being drunk and disorderly. Amy Martin, the local schoolteacher, speaks on his behalf and the judge agrees to send the man home to his wife rather than throw him in jail. Amy then offers to pay Curry’s fine, arguing that his only crime was being hungry and broke. “My, my, the milk of human kindness is getting awfully deep in here,” the judge remarks, but he allows her to pay the fine.

  Amy hurries to the bank to withdraw ten dollars. She informs the teller, Willard Riley, that she’s found someone. Can it be done tonight? Riley agrees.

  Curry is returned to the courtroom and informed of his good fortune.

  Outside, he thanks Amy. She explains that she felt sorry for him and invites him to come to the schoolhouse that night. She might be able to help him again.

  Later, when Curry knocks at the schoolhouse door, Amy ushers him into her private quarters, taking his hat and suggesting he’d be more comfortable if he removed his gunbelt. Not sure where this is heading, Curry obligingly removes his gun and sets it on a nearby table while Amy carries his hat into the bedroom and places it on the bed.

  Riley emerges from the shadows and scoops up the hat. Then, as Curry and Amy chat, Riley bursts into the room, gun aimed at Curry. Riley orders him to turn around, then hits him on the head.

  Riley and Amy have outfitted an old mine shaft as a hideout. Curry is tied to a chair. Amy assures him he won’t be mistreated in any way during the ten days he’ll be held there.

  The next day Heyes arrives in Ashford, wondering at the excitement in the street, but intent on getting a drink. In the saloon he learns the bank was robbed the night before. Doc Holliday spots him and calls him over, informing Heyes it was his friend Thaddeus Jones who robbed the bank. Doc explains about the con game gone awry, Jones’s arrest and the schoolteacher paying his fine. Then that night, Jones kidnapped the banker’s stepson and forced him to empty the safe, netting $70,000. Not satisfied with that, he then left a ransom note demanding $100,000 more. “It wasn’t Thaddeus Jones, Doc,” Heyes insists. “He hasn’t got that much greed or that much imagination.” All Doc knows is that Jones is gone and his hat was found in the alley behind the bank. Heyes is worried. He asks Doc not to tell anyone he knows Thaddeus, then wonders if the schoolteacher makes a habit of paying people’s fines. No, Doc doesn’t think she does.

  In the hideout, Riley feeds Curry a sandwich. Curry throws himself, chair and all, at his captor. They crash to the ground, where Curry tries to overpower Riley as best he can, but Riley crawls free and grabs his gun, firing several shots. Riley promises to blow Curry’s head off the next time. “You’re going to kill me sooner or later anyhow,” Curry reasons. “So why not now?” Because Amy only agreed to do this if their victim was released at the end. Curry doesn’t believe him. How can they leave him alive to tell what really happened? Riley says Amy feels that Jones is smart enough to disappear when they release him, given the evidence against him. Besides his hat at the crime scene, Riley’s bloodstained coat will be found at the river. Curry agrees he won’t buck those odds but wonders what they’re waiting for. In six days school will be over and Amy’s leaving town won’t be suspicious. This is unwelcome news for Curry and Riley confirms his fears. “That’s right. She won’t be here when you and I say our goodbyes.”

  A man in search of a doctor dashes into the saloon, barreling into Heyes in his haste. Mr. Schwedes is hurt bad, the doctor is needed right away. Heyes asks the bartender if Mr. Schwedes has any children in school and learns he has a son.

  Heyes picks the boy up from school and takes him home.

  Mrs. Schwedes is grateful to Mr. Smith. Heyes notices her shelves filled with books of poetry which Mrs. Schwedes admits she also writes. Heyes asks if she’ll allow him to read some of them.

  That night in his hotel room, Heyes studies her poems. He paces the room, reciting them over and over until he has them memorized.

  The next day Heyes visits the schoolhouse, reminding Amy that they met when he picked up the Schwedes boy. He asks a favor of her. He writes poetry, Heyes explains, but the poems are all in his head. He never learned to write and is hoping she will write them down for him. When Amy agrees, he recites one of the poems he memorized. Amy sits entranced, swept away by the beauty of the words. She’s surprised such an uneducated man has so much sensitivity. She transcribes the poems as he recites them to her. Finally Heyes confesses that he really came to see her. She invites him to return the next evening. As Heyes leaves, a look of shame crosses his face.

  Riley calculates the interest he will earn on $70,000, but Curry points out that he hasn’t calculated the cost of bad dreams.

  Heyes visits Amy again, sharing more poetry. Amy is falling in love with him.

  The next morning, when Heyes enters the saloon, Doc wonders what he’s been up to that makes him so miserable. Heyes says he is worried about his friend Jones.

  That night Heyes once again visits Amy, not for poetry, but for lovemaking.

  The next day Heyes asks Doc how much money he could raise. If it’s in a good cause, Doc says, he could come up with about $7,000. That’s plenty, Heyes assures him. Tonight they’ll play poker and Heyes will win the whole amount. After the game, Heyes will
return the money privately. Doc doesn’t understand, but agrees to the plan.

  Curry works to free his hands while Riley explains the plan was his idea, not Amy’s. If he wasn’t a cynic, Riley muses, he might say he’s in love with Amy. Curry reminds Riley that the plan doesn’t include killing anyone. “Me, for instance.”

  After Heyes “wins” the money from Doc, he pounds on the schoolhouse door, sweeping Amy into his arms when she answers. In three days when school ends, they’ll leave and go to Santa Marta. Amy is hesitant. “We’ll be married, of course,” Heyes tells her. At this, Amy hugs him, but she worries that they have no money. Heyes informs her that he just won $7,000 playing poker. Amy kisses him ecstatically, but Heyes seems not to share her joy.

  Later, he hides in the bushes outside the schoolhouse. Eventually Amy comes out, gets her horse and rides off.

  In the hideout, as Riley sleeps, Curry works harder on his bonds, struggling to free his hands. His efforts cause the chair to scrape across the floor, breaking the silence. Riley wakes, wondering what he heard. You’re just having one of those bad dreams I told you about, Curry suggests. Amy’s arrival interrupts further conversation.

  She tells Riley she’s not going through with their plan. Dumbfounded, he demands to know why, as Curry, his hands free at last, leaps for Riley’s gun on the table. As the two men fight over it, Amy picks up a crowbar and hits Curry until he’s forced to drop it. With an arm around his captor’s throat, Curry urges her to leave Riley to him, but she holds the gun unwaveringly, threatening to shoot. Reluctantly, Curry releases his stranglehold. Amy extends the gun to her accomplice, but a voice intrudes. “I sure wouldn’t take that gun,” Heyes advises Riley, urging Amy to give the gun to him as he moves closer. Curry is delighted to see his partner.

  Heyes apologizes to Amy. In case she hasn’t figured it out, his ruse was a way to save his friend. Heyes ties up Riley, then outlines his plan. Riley will turn himself in, clearing Mr. Jones but making no mention of Amy’s part in the robbery. Riley has no intention of taking all the blame, but Heyes points out that doing it his way will get Riley out of trouble as well.

  In the morning Riley and Curry cause quite a stir in Ashford as they ride into town and enter the bank.

  Heyes sees Amy off on the stagecoach wondering if she will ever be able to forgive him. She assures him that she can, because he taught her that she is capable of loving someone. She hadn’t believed she could fall in love before this. Heyes says goodbye and sadly watches as the stage pulls away.

  As they ride out of town Curry notices that Amy got a lot closer to Heyes than he expected. Heyes admits Amy will probably get over him sooner than he’ll get over her. Then Curry changes the subject. How did Heyes deduce that the schoolteacher was the answer? You just can’t explain genius, Heyes brags. Of course, it helped when the stableman told him Curry rode out toward the schoolhouse the night the bank was robbed. Curry exclaims, “Heyes, you are a genius!”

  GUEST CAST

  SHIRLEY KNIGHT — AMY MARTIN

  EDD BYRNES — WILLARD RILEY

  BILL FLETCHER — DOC HOLLIDAY

  BARBARA BOSSON — MRS. SCHWEDES

  RALPH MONTGOMERY — CLERK

  FREDERIC DOWNS — JUDGE

  TED GEHRING — JORGENSEN

  BILL QUINN — HOTEL CLERK

  STEVEN GRAVERS — BARTENDER

  JOHN MCDONALD — MR. SHAEFFER

  RANDALL CARVER — YOUNG MAN

  MONTY LAIRD — STUNT DOUBLE, RILEY

  JIM NICKERSON — STUNT DOUBLE, CURRY

  “There is a theme in this story which is something about love,” Roy Huggins noted in his original outline. [37] For a story about bank robbery and kidnapping, this is a startling statement. But, in truth, this story is about love, or more accurately, about what love can drive a person to do. Love drove Riley to rob a bank, Amy to betray her partner and Heyes to prey on a vulnerable woman.

  Amy Martin has always thought herself incapable of love. Rather than admitting she has just never found the right man, she assumes her soul is lacking the necessary emotions and settles for a life of well-heeled companionship with Willard Riley. Riley, who has his own issues with love, considers himself incapable of feeling love, and also of being loved.

  The kidnapping plot hinges on the fact that Riley knows his stepfather wouldn’t pay ten cents for him, let alone the $100,000 ransom. When Curry questions his mother’s reaction, Riley is convinced she would make only a token protest by threatening to leave her husband, an event the man would most likely welcome. With his fate a matter of indifference to his family, Riley can stage his own murder and disappear with Amy and the money, secure in the knowledge he will never be sought.

  Riley and Amy made their plans carefully, content to wait for a drifter who would fit their purpose. Naturally this drifter must be alone in life, just as they are. Amy mistakes Curry for such a man, not realizing that Curry does have someone who cares for him — Heyes.

  Heyes’s arrival in Ashford adds a twist to this odd love story. With the schoolteacher the only clue in Curry’s disappearance, Heyes searches for a way to force her to lead him to his partner. The weapon he chooses is love. Making Amy fall in love with him will lead her to betray Riley, a man who truly loves her despite his cynical claim that their relationship is only a profitable, life-time arrangement.

  Heyes’s plan, while clever, is less than admirable. Desperate to find Curry, he steals Mrs. Schwedes’s poems. Then, reciting the poems with great intensity, Heyes convinces Amy that he’s a sensitive and romantic man who loves her. Riley’s love for Amy led him to rob his stepfather’s bank; Heyes’s love for Curry leads him to deliberately play on her emotions. As Huggins explains, “This woman had never been in love in her life…But she falls truly in love for the first time now — and that is the thing that lifts this story, because Heyes is doing something cruel for his friend.” [38]

  In most love stories the lovers go off to live happily ever after. Not so here. Amy has learned to love and “is a completely different human being.” [39] She happily goes off alone to start a new, more promising life. Riley, devastated to learn that Amy never truly loved him, agrees to turn himself in and returns to his loveless existence. Heyes is left suffering from an unintended consequence of his scheme — he “has fallen a little in love with [Amy]. Having gone through all this, he couldn’t have gone through it coldbloodedly.” [40] The only relationship to remain intact is that between Heyes and Curry. They leave Ashford, inseparable as always.

  Gloryette Clark had worked on Alias Smith and Jones since the first season, but as a film editor, not a writer. Her first foray into writing had come several years earlier when she pointed out a newspaper article she felt would make a good story for the Lawyers segment of Huggins’s show The Bold Ones. Huggins insisted she write a treatment and then bought it, giving Clark her first story credit. From then on, if Huggins needed a writer in a hurry, he would often turn to her. Huggins first told the story of “The Ten Days That Shook Kid Curry” to Juanita Bartlett but, as she was still busy with her first script, “The McCreedy Feud,” he needed another writer. Since third season shooting had not yet commenced, Huggins turned to his favorite film editor. “He knew that I was there and available, so it was at his behest,” Clark recalls of her sudden script assignment. “Naturally, he wanted me where I could be most useful, so it was never when he wanted me in the cutting room.” [41]

  Both Huggins and Clark loved poetry and continued to share their favorites with each other until Huggins’s death. However, the fast pace of television production precluded the writing of original poetry for Heyes to recite. Instead, they turned to nineteenth century poems that are in the public domain, among them “The Dream” by Caroline Norton, granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and “Twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity” by John Keble.

  The Day The Amnesty Came Through

  “Heyes, I hope you know what we’re doin’.”

  Kid Curry

&n
bsp; STORY: JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  TELEPLAY: DICK NELSON AND JOHN THOMAS JAMES

  DIRECTOR: JEFF COREY

  SHOOTING DATES: OCTOBER 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1972

  ORIGINAL US AIR DATE: NOVEMBER 25, 1972

  ORIGINAL UK AIR DATE: JANUARY 28, 1974

  Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry ride into Fort Morgan, Colorado, and soon are playing poker in the saloon. They consider taking a job cutting two thousand railroad ties for $150, but a reply to their telegram to Lom Trevors changes everything.

  “What you have been waiting for so long has finally come through!” it reads. Elated, they ride hard to meet Lom at the Nolan ranch.

  Instead of happy congratulations on receiving their amnesty, Lom notifies them that the president removed Governor Francis Warren from office. Over what should have been drinks of celebratory champagne, Lom tells them about the new governor, George W. Baxter. He promises to get the same amnesty deal for them from him.

  At midnight in Cheyenne, Wyoming, dressed in their best suits, Heyes and Curry are hiding in an alley lest they be recognized and tossed in jail. Lom finds them and escorts them into an audience with Governor Baxter, who is surprised to see the two men who don’t look at all like his concept of outlaws. He is inclined to go along with Frank Warren’s promise to them. The thing is…

  Baxter has a friend named Eric Anderson whose daughter is missing. Anderson thinks she’s been kidnapped, but Baxter has information that she ran off with Ed Starr of the Red Sash Gang. If Heyes and Curry will ride into the Little Bighorns and check out the situation, Baxter will consider their amnesty and won’t make them wait two years. He just wants to know if she’s there of her own free will or if she’s been kidnapped and he should send the militia in to rescue her. Their knowing Charlie Taylor of the Red Sash Gang will help.