“The Marshal”: Season 1, Episode 4 of the Legendary TV Western The Rifleman, Guest Starring Paul Fix, Robert Willke, Warren Oates and James Drury, and Written and Directed by Sam Peckinpah

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
 

The best TV dramas typically featured one major guest star each week, but this episode had four, three of whom would spend most of their careers as members of the “I-know-the-face-but-not-the-name-Club.”

Paul Fix was a legendary character actor who was John Wayne’s first friend in Hollywood, who taught Wayne what would become the distinctive “John Wayne walk,” and who would remain a dear friend of the big guy until the latter’s death in 1979. Thanks to The Rifleman, for five seasons millions of fans learned Fix’ name. (IMDB.com lists Fix as standing 6’ tall, but appears to have added at least two inches to his height.)

In “The Marshal,” Fix plays the eponymous role of Micah Torrance, a once-legendary lawman who has fallen on hard times, and become the town drunk.

Willke, Oates, and Drury play a gang of robbers, the former two of whom are brothers who come to town looking to settle a score with Torrance.

“The Marshal” is about redemption.

Although Bob Willke was a member of the “I-know-the-face-but-not-the-name-Club,” he was also one of Hollywood’s greatest heavies. He was big, broad, homely, scowling and, with a perpetual five o’clock shadow and a deep voice, his phone was always ringing with offers for work in pictures and later, TV.

You saw him in High Noon as a member of the Frank Miller Gang, in From Here to Eternity as one of the sadistic sergeants riding Montgomery Clift’s character, and in The Magnificent Seven as a man who thought he was fast with a knife.

According to IMDB.com, off-screen, Bob Willke was one of the nicest men in Hollywood, a natural athlete and a great golfer who made a fortune playing high-rollers in private matches. He was fast friends with another legendary character actor, Claude Akins.

For a time, Warren Oates was one of the busiest actors in TV, guest starring on a different popular show each week, until he made it in pictures and didn’t have to work so hard. White trash was his specialty.

Though James Drury was classically trained, he wasn’t as accomplished an actor as the other men cited here, but he became the biggest star—for a time. In 1963, he began a run as the star of one of the best and most popular TV Westerns, in the eponymous role of The Virginian.

As was so often the case, however, in those days, one big hit led nowhere. Drury was cast as the captain in Firehouse in 1974, but the show was cancelled after only 13 episodes, and although he was still young and handsome (and only 40!), that was all she wrote. TV producers proved themselves fickle, capricious men. James Drury went into the oil and natural gas business, and has intermittently returned to small and big screens for cameos ever since. (IMDB.com lists Drury as 6’ tall, but he appears to me to have been closer to 5’9” in his prime. The Web site is unreliable about heights—and much else, too!)

R.G. Armstrong also guest starred in “The Marshal.” Armstrong was another popular but unknown to the viewing public character actor whose calling card was his rich, sonorous voice, and who often played weak or hypocritical authority figures.

Drury, Oates, and Armstrong were all reunited by Sam Peckinpah in the latter’s Western masterpiece, Ride the High Country. Peckinpah wrote roles for Drury and Oates in High Country that would very similar to those they played in this episode of The Rifleman. Oates’ name would for a time become inseparable from Peckinpah’s as friend and collaborator, though the two drunken, drug-addicted, short-lived wild men would eventually have a break.
 

“The Marshal”
 


 

Published on Aug 2, 2014 by The Rifleman.

The Rifleman is an American Western television program starring Chuck Connors as rancher Lucas McCain and Johnny Crawford as his son, Mark McCain. It was set in the 1870s and 1880s in the town of North Fork, New Mexico Territory. The show was filmed in black-and-white, half-hour episodes. The Rifleman aired on ABC from September 30, 1958, to April 8, 1963, as a production of Four Star Television. It was one of the first prime-time series on American television to show a widowed parent raising a child.
 

Previously, at WEJB/NSU (Complete Episodes, All Presented Without Commercial Interruption):

“The First Episode Ever of the Classic Western Series, The Rifleman, Starring Chuck Connors and Johnny Crawford: ‘The Sharpshooter’ (1958)”;

“Classic TV: The Rifleman: ‘Home Ranch’; Season One, Episode 2”;

“‘End of a Young Gun’: Season 1, Episode 3, of the Classic TV Western, The Rifleman, Written by Frank Gilroy, Directed by Jerry Hopper, and Co-Starring Michael Landon”;

“Unforgettable TV Music: Two Themes from The Rifleman, Composed by Herschel Burke Gilbert”; and

“Classic TV Western Themes from Bonanza, Rawhide, Wagon Train and The Rifleman, with Pics of Young Clint Eastwood, Michael Landon, Lorne Greene, Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, Chuck Connors, John McIntire and the Great Ward Bond!”