I love the Golden Age of Television, but it was hard not to notice that a fair amount of the recurring "character" actors were horrible. You had to wonder how they kept getting parts?
Jacques Aubuchon, like Edgar Buchanon, Chill Wills, Andy Devine, and many others, was a horrible actor. In this episode of Gunsmoke, he plays the incredibly nasty derelict bum who has a family living in a wagon for years because he just drifts from town to town stealing food, etc.
Aubochon plays the most craven character on Gunsmoke in a while. He steals a baby from a nearby wagon, he wants to use the baby to go into Dodge and pretend he has a growing family. He also wants to use his wife to carry the baby when he robs the bank, so that she and the baby can be human shields if the Marshal tries to shoot at him.
Aubochon is constantly referring to his wife and son in degrading terms, and he plans to dump them once he gets the bank money. Really crass lowlife who acts like he is some kind of criminal genius, and he just makes the entire episode even worse than it should have been.
His moronic son is played by Hampton Fancher, whose acting is equally horrifyingly bad. Fancher shows how dumb he is by walking around with his arms swinging from side to side. I wonder what acting school taught him that?? Twenty years later Fancher wrote the screenplay for Blade Runner (with Harrison Ford) and some of its sequels (including the cartoons).
The only bright spot is the sour-faced Virginia Christine, who is perfect for the role of Aubuchon's victimized wife. When Aubuchon decides to steal a baby in order to go to Dodge and use the baby as a decoy to rob a bank, Christine is put in charge of the baby. Thanks to her miserable personality, Christine looks like she is suffering through hell taking care of the child. On a few occasions she also makes some remarks that highlight that she knows what a horrible lowlife her husband is.
Into what is already a sordid mix of bad writing and bad acting is Harry Carey, Jr. And Gail Kobe, who plays his wife. For a woman who just had her baby stolen, she is pretty ho-hum about it.
Carey on the other hand, decides it must be Indians, so he spends the entire episode verbally and physically attacking Quint Asper (Burt Reynolds) and yelling bigotry at him. Towards the end, Reynolds recovers the baby, and Carey says that is even more proof that Reynolds is a vile half-breed.
Since this was Reynolds last episode, he should have ended his role by cutting Carey's guts out with his hunting knife, and leaving him on the ground with his entrails squirming. Burt Reynolds should have left Dodge as a fugitive, vowing to return to his native people as a warrior.
I never understood how Gunsmoke brought attention to racism by promoting it constantly in numerous episodes. There was rarely any accountability for the racist characters. Quint Asper got viciously abused by racists on several episodes during his brief stint on Gunsmoke, and he never got to raise a hand against the abusers.
There is a fair amount of action towards the end, and finally there is some measure of Justice delivered to some of the trashy people that pollute this episode.
