"Have Gun--Will Travel" Ages Well

With hockey over by 8PM every night, and most of the baseball I care to watch doing the same, I have some time to check out DVDs. Chuq and I ordered the first set of episodes of "Have Gun--Will Travel" from Netflix. I just finished the first DVD last night, and I have to say that the series has aged very well. One of the things that struck me was the ability to inject a lot of moral ambiguity into the stories--there's more than one time where "Paladin" (nom de guerre? This and a lot more was left unanswered throughout the series) bends words or uses logic arguments that would have shamed Melvin Belli to get what needs to be done, done. Paladin is on the side of the Angels, and that may or may not be on the side of the law.

BTW, take Paladin, darken the character about 100 times, and you have Col. Douglas Mortimer from "For a Few Dollars More." Right down to the Colt 45 custom job.

Have Gun--Will Travel shows what you can do in the constraints of telling a story in 22 1/2 minutes. You can tell that with some of the writers (including a pre-Star Trek Gene Roddenberry) that they hadn't quite gotten over writing for radio. Especially in the pilot, there are pregnant pauses in the dialogue that would have been filled with expository dialogue, so the radio listener would know where Paladin was at the time. And I was happy when they lost the music bridge at the end. The standard "this is a western" song just doesn't work with the Bauhaus qualities of the rest of the production.

It also shows that 50's television can't be broken down into two classes--"Requiem for a Heavyweight and Ernie Kovacs were genius material" and "My Gawd, there was a lot of crap in the 50's". There's good stuff out there, and with any luck more of it gets released. From what I've read, CBS has been dealing with copyrighted music, a problem that has been blocking releases of other old programs.