Everything Is Better With Latin!™, and alias is Latin for “elsewhere”. At least the pilot of Alias Smith and Jones has that going for it. That and the telegenic qualities of the leads are about the only thing in this hour-and-change that didn’t need changing.
The situation. Hannibal Heyes (Pete Duel) and Jedediah “Kid” Curry (Ben Murphy) are the leaders of the Hole-in-the-Wall Devil’s Hole Gang in an unspecified state or territory in an unspecified time—that Neverneverland of midcentury entertainment called “the Old West”. But things are changing in the Old West: safes are getting harder to rob, law enforcement is getting more effective. Heyes & Curry think it’s time to quit. The gang disagrees and they part company.
This is a proven formula for screen entertainment, but the trouble is that the proof had come only a couple years earlier in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). The writers of AS&J‘s pilot steal a bunch of plot points directly from the movie: trouble with newfangled safes, trouble with a train robbery that leads to the gang being chased, using so much dynamite to blow up a safe that it scatters the money hither & yon, etc. To evade actually getting sued for plagiarism, the scenarists change the plot points just enough that they don’t work in the story and are no longer funny or even interesting. Problem solved!
For instance, the Gang finds that they can’t break into a safe on a train, and they have to leave because the law is coming. So they take the safe with them. If they were just going to load the thing onto a flatbed truck and get on the highway, this might somehow make sense. What they’re proposing to do is have their horses drag it behind them as they ride into the mountains. As they’re being chased. It gets dumber from there.
When Heyes and Curry break away from the gang, they look up an old friend of theirs, Lom Trevors (James Drury), a lawman who used to be a crook; they’re hoping he can help them go straight. This is another gobbet ripped from the bleeding corpse of BC&tSK, but in the movie, the old friend is no help. In the TV show, the friend reluctantly undertakes to go to the governor and negotiate for their amnesty.
While they’re waiting for Trevors to return, our heroes take a straight job as bank guards for Miss Porter, a beautiful young bank owner played by Susan St. James, who does what she can with lines like “Not at all! I’m only thrilled you’d consider helping me out in Daddy’s absence.”
There is some modest who-am-I tension as Heyes and Curry resist the temptation to rob the bank instead of guard it. Then the Devil’s Hole gang shows up to rob the bank and, through a set of circumstances too complicated to go into, the bank vault is blown up and its contents is scattered all over town. The money from the bank literally rains down on the town’s main street. Heyes and Curry drive off their former gang, for which the bank owner is grateful. The bank has been saved! Except for the fact that it’s been destroyed and its money is scattered all over town.
Right: Miss Porter hugs “Smith” and “Jones” in gratitude…
I guess because she never wanted to be a banker?
Sheriff Trevors returns and tells Heyes and Curry that the governor is willing to grant them a pardon, as long as they can stay out of trouble for a year. Until then, they have to travel incognito and try to live law-abiding lives.
Verdict: This is not very good. The only takeaway from the pilot is the premise for the series, that Heyes and Curry have to travel incognito in expectation of an amnesty, and you can get that with the voiceover that begins every episode of the series proper.
However, things do get better rapidly with the first episode of the series proper.
Additional notes:
People who ID Heyes and Curry: The sheriff knows them at sight, but he’s an old friend and they’re not incognito yet. A couple of thugs suspect the identity of our heroes in a saloon, but they get out of it by acting unheroically.
#EverythingIsStarTrek:
Don’t take my word for it. Take the world of Claymare. His fellow Organians mocked his innovative, Bozonian hairstyles, so he spanned the wastes of time and distance with the power of his disembodied mind and ended up as a bank teller in 19th C. America where, he was told, people were crazy about clownish haircuts. Tragically, he had been misinformed.
In this episode we also meet Morla of Argelius II. Convicted on his homeworld of the crime of sexual jealousy, he fled in shame through time and space, finally settling for a while as a gunman in the Old West, where his retrograde morals were more acceptable.
Universal Garner:
In the opening montage of Heyes and Curry’s misdeeds, we see Madame Orr’s House explode, a clip borrowed from the climax, as it were, of Support Your Local Sheriff. The theme song sounds a lot like the “Support Your Local…” movies, too. I was expecting Cherokee Productions, James Garner’s company, to be listed in the credits, but it wasn’t. This wouldn’t be last time Universal lifted something from Garner without proper accounting. One of the gunslingers who confronts Heyes and Curry in the bar later ends up on an episode of The Rockford Files. Coincidence or destiny?
Poker facts: none here, but they’ll come up in future episodes.
Crimes committed by the reformed outlaws: Breaking and entering; destruction of private property; wasting our time.
