User Reviews

This episode is bad in so many ways! A real disappointment in a season with a bunch of real gems. Betty Hutton plays a woman from Massachusetts who comes to Dodge with her son (dressed almost ludicrously in a Little Lord Fauntleroy traveling ensemble!) to meet her husband. The woman is the famous actress Betty Hutton, who's a bit over the hill to play this role, I think.

It turns out that her husband was killed in a shootout with a posse led by Dillon while rustling cattle. Dillon tells Hutton that her husband died in a shooting accident, presumably to spare her the humiliation of knowing her husband died as a cattle rustler.

Well, no good deed goes unpunished. I guess he figured she'd collect her son and head back east. But instead she starts asking the townspeople for the "real story" and her husband's former business partner, played by the ever-reliable (and sometimes sleazy) Claude Akins tells her Dillon killed her husband. He leaves out the part about cattle rustling. So Hutton starts accusing Dillon of being a murderer and while Matt denies the murder part, he really doesn't explain anything, which is a big mistake. Then he leaves on one of those "three week missions" which always conveniently allow problems to fester while he's gone.

Akins is sweet on Hutton and perversely he figures fanning the flame of her desire for revenge will somehow get her to reciprocate his affections. Hutton has run out of money so she gets Kitty to give her a job singing in the saloon. At first, she dresses and sings like someone attending a church social and that goes nowhere. But Kitty loans her a sexy outfit and encourages her to sing some good ole saloon songs ("Coming Round the Mountain") and Hutton struts her vaudeville skills and soon becomes a big hit.

Meanwhile she buys a six-gun and decides to practice enough to be able to gun down Matt Dillon for revenge, (Here's where it gets really bad!) Akins encourages this and even becomes her shooting trainer, mainly because it gives him an excuse to be close to her. He's also part owner of a competing saloon so he encourages her to leave the Long Branch and join him at the Oasis where her singing and dancing goes over big time.

Hutton openly states that she's going to gun down Dillon when he gets back. Incredibly, this encourages some of the town's citizens to attend her practice sessions with Akins, ROOTING HER ON! I HOPE this is just the blood-lust of bored Dodge City denizens looking forward to seeing their marshal gun down a clueless city slicker, even if she's a woman. You'd LIKE to think the average good citizen of Dodge isn't in favor of someone gunning down the only source of law enforcement for 100 miles! Hutton also owns up to Kitty about her plan and when she realizes that Matt is Kitty's "special friend", she admits her debt to Kitty (for getting her started in the saloon dancing biz!) but refuses to forego her plans for vengeance.

Akins finally admits to Hutton that he encouraged her shooting practice for his own lustful reasons and that she has zero chance in a fair fight against Matt Dillon. NO KIDDING! Tell us something we don't know. But Hutton figures that Matt would never fire on a woman, so this evens the odds! But she's determined, so since Dillon has conveniently ridden back into Dodge, she marches from the practice field into Dodge, tailed by Akins and about 20 good bloodthirsty citizens to confront Matt and call him out. Ever calm and controlled, Matt is fixing the saddle of his horse and just turns his back on the woman, reasoning that he knows she isn't capable of shooting a man down in cold blood. Well, Matt's instincts may be better than mine, but I wouldn't turn this back on this nut-case, especially where she's already shown evidence of being capable of firing off her gun even when she doesn't want to! But Matt is correct and she dissolves into tears. The noble townspeople dissolve into laughter. Akins feels her pain and calls out Dillon himself (a reckless act, for sure, since he's already admitted he isn't in Dillon's class.) Matt is through suffering fools so he knocks him down with the saddle and then beats him up a bit. He's about to toss him into jail when Hutton agrees to head back to Boston and Akins begs Matt to let him go with her. Dillon's always a big fan of settling problems by banishing people and keeping his jail cells nice and empty so he agrees. Hutton, who has rejected Akins every which way up till now, finally realizes that calling out a marshal says "true love" in every way so she links arms with Akins, and as a last afterthought, with her ever-patient son, and they march down Front Street, presumably to pack their bags and grab the next stage out of town.

This episode surely wasn't intended to be taken seriously. You can tell by the upbeat silly music that attends Hutton's march down the street to challenge Dillon. The plot development is devoid of logic. For example, Doc Adams breezes into the marshal's office at the very end, right after Matt returns from his three-week trip, and mentions off-handedly that Dillon didn't kill Hutton's husband. Then he relates the story of the autopsy and the rifle bullet. Gee, maybe if this had come up three weeks earlier a lot of trouble could have been avoided! And I can't accept that these ordinary citizens of Dodge would root on a crazy woman's attempts to shoot down their marshal. Of course, those were crude, bloodthirsty primitive times, when a hanging was cause for families to gather and enjoy "the fun."

I agree with those who criticized Betty Hutton's scenery chewing performance. Her exaggerated responses to everything that was said might have worked on stage or maybe in the silent movies but were too much for sound movies and way too much for the intimacy of television. But I liked the way the show ended, not with violent death but a change of heart with Claude Akins, (excellent as usual) and Betty going off together.

I have something else I'd like to talk about, (Message Board RIP). In the fabulous book about this series by Suzanne and Gabor Barabas, (page 134), it says this: "Ken Curtis observed 'Because of the (John) Mantley anthology change we all had less of an impact on each story, which in my opinion lead eventually to the demise of Gunsmoke'. When guest stars were first introduced, Milburn Stone grumbled "We're Matt, Kitty, Doc and Festus. we have no other identity. A Jean Arthur, a James Whitmore, a Betty Hutton are one-shots. their fans will tune in, but not necessarily again."

I've been bingeing the black-and-white era of this show for the last few months, in chronological order and it's my observation that the 'anthology' type of episode, with the regular characters in support of a 'guest character' began when they went to an hour in 1961. They weren't using ex-movie stars at that point but using episodes that didn't focus on the regulars was one of two things they did to deal with the impact on their production schedules of doubling the time of the same number of episodes, (36 in those days), The other thing they was to have more episode that focuses on Chester, (later Festus, Doc and Kitty with Matt in the background. These moves allowed them to film multiple episodes at once because James Arness didn't have to be in all the scenes and the other regulars didn't have to be in all the scenes in the guest character episodes. because there were more episodes featuring the supporting cast, (and don't forget Quint), they actually got more screen time than they did in the half hour era. These changes also made it a better show, with a much wider range of stories that could be told. The use of former movie stars in a handful of episodes in the mid 60's really had nothing to do with this.

And it certainly didn't cause the 'demise' of Gunsmoke, which went on until 1975 with a series of TV movies in the 1980's. They did have a ratings dip in the early 60's, largely, I think to the introduction of NBC's 'Saturday Night at the Movies' in 1961. Gunsmoke rallied from that to move back to #2 in the ratings when they moved to Tuesday night.