Western TV Week: Rawhide

Welcome back folks to Day 4 of Western TV Week and boy I sure do hope I haven’t caught you lot at the other end of the cracker barrel!  Yeah I can’t do old west colloquiums so sue me.  This fine day I thought we would saunter into a cattle drive with a stern but fair trail boss Gil Favor.  So throw a blanket on that horse before you saddle it, keep your gunpowder and your pants dry.  This is Rawhide.

 

Jeepers I hates this neckerchief!

 Gil Favor: It’s not the roundin’ up and the ropin’ and the branding of the spoiler that’s the big problem for ranchers. It’s getting’ ‘em to market-  fifteen hundred bone weary miles from the the southern tip of Texas to the railhead at Sedalia.

You know you are in good company with a fella name of Gil Favor (Eric Fleming of Joan of Arc. Conquest of Space, Fright, Queen of Outer Space and Curse of the Undead) one of the best dangnabbit trail bosses this side of the Ponderosa.   Carnswallot I can manage these comments!

Give us your lupines!!!

 With Gil is his trusted ranch hand and dead shot Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood of Ambush of Cimarron Pass, A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, Hang ‘Em High, Where Eagles Dare, Kelly’s Heroes, Dirty Harry and City Heat) and Yates’ sidekick the cantankerous Wishbone (Paul Brinegar of Hell on Devil’s Island, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The Vampire, Copper Sky, How to Make a Monster and Country Boy). As their new herds get in and across the lands, trouble always seems a brewing.  Plenty of cattle rustlers, card sharks and crooked politicians as much as the Cartwrights…the difference being our beef cattle hands were in a new location every episode.    Not to be sticklers on a tight schedule our riders would stop to help settlers from an Indian attack, farm folk that got jumped by raiders and the occasional silver miner that was flogged away from his claim.  

 

Here are just a few notes I made about the series.   This was the competition of Paramount as a Universal Studios production and it lasted 8 years and was the fifth longest running Western show next to exceeded only by 8 years of Wagon Train, 9 years of The Virginian, 14 years of Bonanza and 20 years of Gunsmoke.     The first 3 years of Rawhide were in glorious black and white and then Technicolor reared its evil head and ensnared the show.   Locations had to vary from the standard studio lots of Universal Studios as well as Bronson Canyon, Griffith Park and Simi Valley California for most of the trail shots.  Red Rock Canyon State Park got a fair amount of use during Indian raids against the cattle hands.  Yeah the portrayals of Native Americans from 1935 to 1975 are not the most flattering.    

Well cow, did I fire 6 times or only 5?

CBS Studio Center had a fair amount of sound stages for the local towns but just watch a few episodes and you will notice more than a few similar sets per town.   This is was a big career changer for Eastwood as at the time in question he was better known for Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti Westerns.