Love is a many splendored thing
Anton (Tony) Leader "leads" his Virginian directorial debut with this fourth season opener loaded with action and emotion.
Matt (Robert Lansing) is a long-time resident of Medicine Bow with a wife Ellen (Jan Shepard) and a teen son Andy (Kurt Russell) and everyone who knows him holds him in high esteem. Matt has apparently worked as hard and as honestly as he knows how and has earned a solid reputation among a wide circle of friends. He has a younger brother Will (Andrew Prine) whom he raised from a pup but who never seemed 'good'--Matt always gave him help and the benefit of the doubt. Now here we are years later, Little Will is screaming his innocence from a military jail because the army isn't as forgiving. Big Brother Matt believes Will is guiltless but has exhausted all legal avenues and sees only one thing more he can do- break him out. The guard (Loyal Lucas, who passed away in 2001 at the age of 96) was surprised, not because he was struck from behind- because he wasn't- but because this good man, Matt, was going to do this lawbreaking thing that nobody would have expected in a million years.
After Matt has freed Will from prison bars, they disappear into the night, but in the morning before they make for Canada they have to pick up Matt's wife and son, who decided they would rather brave the rigours of escape than stay behind and worry. On their tails will be the Army, led by Sgt Cohane (Myron Healey) to recover their escaped prisoner Will, and Ryker (Clu Gulager) to recover his friend Matt who aided and abetted said escape. Complicating matters is Sgt Cohane's belief that Ryker knew about Matt's plan to break Will out of jail from the beginning and is using his sheriff's badge to block the Army from finding them and bringing them to justice.
And that's just the first ten minutes.
The whole show imo explores the power, the strength, the depth and breadth of Love: love in a family, love in a wife, love in a community, love in good men for other good men, love in a country and its laws, love enduring against whatever because it must.
Dick Nelson has writing credit for this one (he also wrote Laramie's the Barefoot Kid, another of my favorites) and imo he killed it. The director Directed, the Leader led- and it shows- because everybody keeps moving, the story keeps unfolding, your emotions keep changing. It's one of my favorites though it's not one i could watch every day.
Clu Gulager's range is phenomenal- i barely missed Trampas and the Virginian (they pop up). It would be great to have him listed again as a special guest star during times like these when he can open up. He more than kept up with Lansing and he does it again (more and better) a couple years later in Star Crossed S06E04 with Tom Tryon.
And who would ever have thought to cast Robert Lansing for the part of Matt? He always seemed more of a military guy or a detective to me. He was a gunfighter on a previous Virginian- here he's a big brother in a big hat. Lansing was under his own eyebrows the whole show, permeating his character Matt with musk and testosterone, using hard edges in leather coverings to forge new paths to right and might for himself, his family and the people he cared about. He played a heavy, it's what he does, he did it great. His last handshake was perfect- it had to have been real somewhere in his life because i felt it in mine all these years later.
Myron Healey is just right in his part, like Goldilocks- he doesn't take over and he doesn't disappear. The familiar faces of Hal Baylor and Brad Weston round out his section of the story.
The production schedule for this series is grueling and some stories are better than others- this is one of the good ones.
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