{"id":2581,"date":"2007-05-24T11:43:32","date_gmt":"2007-05-24T16:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=2581"},"modified":"2018-10-31T15:01:14","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T19:01:14","slug":"incident-of-the-marathon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=2581","title":{"rendered":"Incident of the Marathon"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nI\u2019ve just finished watching the entire first season of Rawhide<\/em>, so kindly provided to us on hopelessly overpriced vanilla DVD\u2019s where the only special feature on each disc is a text biography on Clint Eastwood.\u00a0 Thanks, Paramount.\u00a0 Is that you laughing as you shove deposits into the ATM?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rawhide<\/em> launched in 1959 and rapidly became one of our great western shows.\u00a0 Everybody knows the theme song, of course.\u00a0 It also launched Eastwood\u2019s career, making him the new blood in the western genre that everyone watched.\u00a0 This weird, young guy bouncing around for seven years on the cattle trail on CBS each week who, suddenly, shows up in a trilogy of B-movie spaghetti westerns that turn him into an overnight superstar.\u00a0 \u00a0Most importantly, Rawhide<\/em> wasn\u2019t sappy like the other westerns out there \u2013 I\u2019m looking at you, Bonanza<\/em>.<\/p>\n

No, Rawhide<\/em>\u2019s tough and gritty.\u00a0 A bunch of unhinged cowboys and their psychotic cook dragging 3000 unruly cattle through hard, open country from San Antone up to the railhead in Sedalia, MO.\u00a0 We get the journeyman routine that television loved to pieces up until the early 80\u2019s, and the typical problems with the usual run of guest stars.\u00a0 But there aren\u2019t too many happy endings.\u00a0 All of our main boys need to survive, but each episode has a handful of red shirts just waiting to take an arrow or drown in a stream.\u00a0 That and they\u2019re all trigger happy.\u00a0 The show\u2019s set in 1868, and they\u2019re all a bunch of former Confederates who can\u2019t get a job and have a serious chip on their shoulder as to the outcome of the Civil War (Firefly<\/em> fans will recognize the theme right away).\u00a0 That\u2019s not really a big thing, though, it just comes up every once in a while.\u00a0 Gil Favor was a lieutenant in the CSA, but he\u2019s made his peace with the war.\u00a0 Rowdy Yates spent some time in a Union prison, and he likes to bring that up.\u00a0 All underlying character things, but having the drovers being a bunch of lunatic former Rebels helps the viewer accept the fact that terrible things are going to happen to them\u2026again and again for 217 cattle-filled episodes.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just a story convention to have them consistently run into some sort of problem, though.\u00a0 The show is inspired by the diary of George c. Duffield \u2013 which is the only first-hand account from a trail drover.\u00a0 Duffield and his buddy, Harvey Ray, painfully worked themselves down to Texas where they had the ill-advised idea to take on a herd of cattle and drive it up to Iowa.\u00a0 The drive lasted from April to September, and Duffield\u2019s diary reads like the annals of hell.\u00a0 He only had a few hundred cattle by the time he made it home.\u00a0 \u201cThrough hell and high water\u201d is our legacy from that diary.<\/p>\n

The whole idea of driving cattle 1500 miles is just a fluke of the war.\u00a0 It only lasted from the end of the war to the early 1880\u2019s, when the fevered expansion of the railroads caught up with everyone.\u00a0 The east was pretty shook up after the war, and the railroads in the west had stayed in place during the war years.\u00a0 Right after the war you see two things \u2013 a glut of unemployed soldiers and other disenfranchised freaks heading towards the frontier and a glut of cattle in Texas.\u00a0 So the ranchers had to get their beef east, which meant driving the goddamned beasts all the way up to Missouri, or wherever the shifting railhead was.\u00a0 On a clear, easy day when nothing happened, you\u2019d make eight miles.\u00a0 But those days were rare, if they happened at all.\u00a0 And there you are with a thousand (or many more) cattle and only a half dozen or so drovers to keep them together and deal with the elements for a months-long run through dry range, swollen rivers, and lawless territory.<\/p>\n

Rawhide<\/em> gets that TV touch, of course.\u00a0 It\u2019s pretty.\u00a0 The big stars can get shot as many times as they want and they always walk away by the end of the episode.\u00a0 Clint\u2019s hair is always beautiful, and we get a bunch of white guys who become embroiled in strange adventures.\u00a0 Maybe there are Indians, wolves, a town that hates drovers, or maybe Clint falls for a woman.\u00a0 Women are always evil.\u00a0 Whenever one shows up in Rawhide<\/em>, you just know that trouble\u2019s coming down the pike at 100mph. And they sometimes show up like it\u2019s a sci-fi series.\u00a0 Out in the wilderness \u2013 bang! \u2013 a woman appears.\u00a0 Hi guys, can I ride with you a while?\u00a0 Trail boss Gil Favor never learns that he should say: Fuck, no.<\/p>\n

We get plenty of feminism in Rawhide<\/em>.\u00a0 Half the women complain that they aren\u2019t equal (it\u2019s 1868, girls!) and the other half, while eye candy, are simply wicked.\u00a0 On average, there are more strong-willed and indignant women in the 1959 season of Rawhide than we see on TV today.<\/p>\n

The show\u2019s formula is simple.\u00a0 Gil Favor, played by Eric Fleming, is the father figure.\u00a0 He\u2019s the down to earth, no nonsense, get the job done guy.\u00a0 Fleming was killed filming a movie in 1966, which resulted in the premature end of Rawhide<\/em>.\u00a0 Though I doubt Eastwood would have stuck around much longer, even if the show could have survived.\u00a0 By 66, though he stuck with Rawhide<\/em>, he had finished the trilogy with Sergio Leone and was dancing at that super-stardom level.<\/p>\n

Eastwood plays Rowdy Yates, a sort of de facto second in charge, even though he\u2019s a brand new hire on his first cattle drive in the pilot episode (by mid season, he\u2019d been with Favor for over a year, and was pretty solidly in place as the number two).\u00a0 Yates is the good son, in the formula.\u00a0 He\u2019s Data to Gil Favor\u2019s Picard, except he\u2019s not a stiff-backed geek.\u00a0 He\u2019s a brawling, gun-crazy psychopath.\u00a0 A role Eastwood would define up until the 1990\u2019s when he just got too old.<\/p>\n

Wishbone, the dangerously crazy cook, is the mother figure.\u00a0 He\u2019s played by the character actor Paul Brinegar who is a strutting, weird-ass freak if I ever saw one.\u00a0 Wishbone can\u2019t cook, he gives everyone a hard time (there\u2019s a good chance he\u2019ll pull a gun and make you wonder if this is the episode where Clint Eastwood gets written out) and his whole world view is so weird it can\u2019t be explained away unless you acknowledge what I believe to be a fact:\u00a0 Rawhide\u2019s<\/em> writers were all intensely bitter monsters drowning in gin and cocaine.<\/p>\n

We get the other good sons \u2013 the scout, and the two other named characters who do nothing for the story except to have the occasional line.\u00a0 The scout, Pete Nolan, is played by singer Sheb Wooley.\u00a0 He has an inexplicable rivalry with Rowdy Yates and sort of acts as the second son.<\/p>\n

With this team, and endless stock footage of a cattle herd (they actually worked with a ranch to make their own stock footage, so you can make it through the entire first season without thinking \u201cI\u2019ve seen that before\u201d), we\u2019re off for adventure, mystery, murder, ghostly riders, and lots and lots of fireside fisticuffs.<\/p>\n

Oh, yes, it gets old here and there.\u00a0 Same old, same old.\u00a0 Especially when they try to hand a story to one of the second-tier folks because, from the get-go, you want the story to be all Clint Eastwood all the time.\u00a0 And that\u2019s not just hindsight talking.\u00a0 Clint made Rawhide<\/em> his show right out of the gate.\u00a0 Everyone knew it then when he was a big old nobody.\u00a0 You can see how this guy was destined for greatness as he struts across soundstage and Arizona desert, outshining the cardboard co-stars, the strictly written Gil Favor, and the lame comic relief.\u00a0 Paired against a guest star, it was still all Clint.\u00a0 And the great thing about those old shows was that you knew the guest stars.\u00a0 It\u2019s not like today where you go, oh, hey, it\u2019s\u2026that guy!\u00a0 No, you get to see Dr. McCoy, the Skipper\u2026 all those guys who would go on with the studio in the 60\u2019s and become cultural icons in other woefully dated TV shows.<\/p>\n

How is it possible that some weird ass cowboy show from 1959 can stick with us and not be so repellant that we want to hide the DVD\u2019s from friends and family?\u00a0 After all, the stories are simple. Gil Favor and Rowdy Yates might get shot up, but they always get back on the trail.\u00a0 The impossible horrors work themselves out\u2026 Or, if they don\u2019t, well, we quietly gloss it over.\u00a0 1959 was a different world.\u00a0 Back then, there was a United States of America, and cannibalism wasn\u2019t socially acceptable, like it is today.\u00a0 As I write this from the Earth colony on Europa, I\u2019m reminded of how innocent we were back then.\u00a0 And how primitive TV was.\u00a0 An hour long show in 1959 ran for 50 minutes.\u00a0 In 2007, it\u2019ll make 40-42 minutes.\u00a0 So you get these old shows that have an enormous block of time \u2013 almost an entire act, during which they can build up characters, or advance the plot into a fine, intricate story without having to create a multi-part serial.\u00a0 The competition is low \u2013 Rawhide<\/em> was CBS, and all they had to worry about were two other networks.\u00a0 You\u2019d get yourself a winning show, and you could just hunker down and go on and on and on.\u00a0 That\u2019s why you get things like Gunsmoke<\/em> running for 20 years.\u00a0 Rawhide<\/em> itself \u2013 seven seasons driving cattle back and forth along the same 1500 mile stretch?\u00a0 You can only swallow so much\u2026 But all of the shows could really draw out well past their freshness date because you didn\u2019t have half a dozen competing networks and the teeming cable\/satellite barbarians at the gates.\u00a0 It allows for some TLC from the writers and producers.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s money.\u00a0 A certain, strange humility on the part of the actors.\u00a0 Rawhide<\/em> opens with the theme song, but no title sequence besides the name of the show.\u00a0 Fleming, Eastwood and all the others show up in the end credits.\u00a0 They\u2019re working a job, and they\u2019re trying to do it well.\u00a0 Money is also absent from the production itself.\u00a0 Rawhide<\/em>, for the time, has extraordinarily high production values, but the natural limitations of the time mean that you can\u2019t wow the audience with super gunfights and the general glitzy computer wildness of modern TV.\u00a0 The poor bastards had to act their way through the story.<\/p>\n

Then throw in the generic innocence of the Old West that was the standard of the genre up until, well, Eastwood created Ye Olde West Generation Two \u2013 everybody hangs, everyone\u2019s bad, and people shoot revolvers really fast (Eastwood was mastering that speedy revolver trick in Rawhide<\/em>, so it\u2019s always thrilling when he freaks out and gets to fire a volley into somebody).\u00a0 Back before that, the west was John Wayne.\u00a0 We\u2019d get dark stories, but it was playground stuff.\u00a0 Cowboys and Indians.\u00a0 You\u2019d get your The Man<\/em> Who Shot Liberty Valance<\/em> and High Noon<\/em> stuff, and a few other artistic oddities telling deeper tales than the genre expected, but, overall, it was the Duke, pilgrim, and that\u2019s the west.\u00a0 Birthing sappy shows, or ridiculous do-gooder shows like Cheyenne<\/em>.<\/p>\n

By the 70\u2019s, the Old West had become gritty and scary.\u00a0 Quite a fascinating evolution: From the cavalry riding over the hill in the 50\u2019s amidst cheers from the audience to Deadwood <\/em>in the 21st<\/sup> century.\u00a0 That\u2019s quite a long ride in just 60 years.\u00a0 A total sea-change for the genre where most of TV\u2019s standbys \u2013 sci-fi, sit-coms, drama \u2013 have never really changed in all that time, except to reflect minor social progress.<\/p>\n

Rawhide<\/em> was the first baby-step towards that evolving new western.\u00a0 It occasionally borrowed pages from the early era of Gunsmoke <\/em>\u2013 a woeful, lost America suffering under the thumb of progress \u2013 but mainly had to deal with just how dreadful it was to be a trail drover. \u00a0\u00a0An unglamorous old west. \u00a0$100 for six months of hard riding, with death around every corner, to deliver cows that averaged $30 a head. \u00a0Hard to tell what\u2019s more valuable \u2013 the men or the cattle?\u00a0 Drowning, rustling, anthrax, heat death, rogue Indians, criminals, stampeding\u2026 You name it.\u00a0 There\u2019s not much room for glittering happiness.\u00a0 Just eat the dust, stink of the trail, and imagine what you\u2019ll do with your earnings if you make it to Sedalia.\u00a0 No amount of glitz can make that story happy.\u00a0 So, though these are all strong 1959 people acting out scripts that speak from a different America, a forgotten world left far behind, the show is one of those stunning gems in television history that, somehow, manages to speak clearly and still entertain from the haunted black & white past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[352],"tags":[403,353,354],"class_list":["post-2581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gsarchive","tag-cult-culture","tag-gs-archive-2004-2008","tag-rawhide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2581"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2621,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2581\/revisions\/2621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}