User Reviews

I think the coffee conversation was meant as a joke because Doug McClure did at least one "unhappy husband" coffee commercial that is available on YouTube.

Most of the Shiloh regulars have a part to play in this episode about the complications of an arranged marriage, but what I liked most was the vignette featuring Randy and Trampas - in town to collect supplies - and Ryker. It begins with an embarrassed Randy struggling with a full size dressmaker's dummy outside a store. From him the camera pans to two pairs of booted feet resting on a hitching rail outside the Sheriff's office. It seems to be the boots speaking when a voice says, "Emmett, I've been meaning to talk to you about something." The camera pans left to reveal Trampas sitting on the sidewalk with Ryker. They are both idle and nursing mugs of coffee. "What's that?" Ryker asks. Trampas: "Your coffee. Are you sure you haven't been cleaning your gun in it." Ryker, looking directly at Trampas, his voice level and gruff: "It's perfectly good coffee. As a matter of fact, exceptionally good coffee. You don't have to drink it you know. You could be giving Randy a hand over there with that stuff." (Gulager's delivery is so deadpan it put me in mind of Tommy Lee Jones in the brilliant 'Men in Black'. It's been said Gulager was an actor out of the same stable as James Dean. Not at all, He was a forerunner of Jones at his best.) The scene becomes a three-hander when Randy joins the two men, Trampas' laziness being the focus of the conversation. And despite the earlier deadpan delivery, there's a moment when both Gulager and Boone seem to have trouble keeping straight faces.

Michael Constantine is the guest star in this Virginian story of a Greek widower immigrant who comes over to America with his two small children and homesteads in Medicine Bow. He intends to be a fig tree farmer as in the old country, but neighbor Russ Conway isn't letting him needed water.

But that's not the only problem. Conway's son John Allen Hayes is trying to make time with Louise Sorel, the considerably younger girl that Constantine brought over from the old country. Back there it was arranged by her family that she marry the much older Constantine. But he's conscious that this is a new country with new ways and Constantine wants to win her on his own.

Between the two issues the folks at Shiloh ranch from Judge Garth on down are caught in the middle And it does eventually become a matter for the law.

Some rather off the wall situations develop, but the performance of Michael Constantine makes this one an episode to watch.