TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM (17)

By: Erik Davis
August 17, 2018

One of 25 installments in a series of enthusiastic posts analyzing and celebrating a few of our favorite TV shows from the Fifties (1954–1963).

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HAVE GUN — WILL TRAVEL | 1957–1963

A geographic paradox lies at the heart of the American Western. Oaters were made by Californians, often shot in the Golden State, but very rarely set in California. Like Jews, who were everywhere behind the camera but nearly absent from the saloons and stagecoaches and arroyos in front of it, the erasure of California from the Western was a condition of the genre’s phantasmic possibility. Don’t look at the man behind the sagebrush curtain.

But Paladin, a freelance gunfighter whose charismatic half-hour exploits carried Have Gun — Will Travel for six hit seasons, is not only a Californian. He is a San Franciscan. Played by a craggy and confident Richard Boone, Paladin is the anti-cowpoke: a West Point-trained marksman with bespoke suits, a taste for fine ladies, a problematic Chinese Stepin Fetchit servant named Hey Boy, and a propensity to quote Shakespeare and Aristotle. Even his gunfighter gear is cool and calculated. A proto-Johnny Cash man in black, Paladin keeps his Colt .45 in a holster emblazoned with the same logo as the business card we see — with a Bernard Herrmann noir fanfare in the brasses — each episode: a silver chess knight. It is a sign of elite and noble violence, and an excellent brand — in the marketing rather than rancher sense.

Paladin kills mean white men, but he mostly solves problems, like a cross between a gumshoe, a social worker, and a benevolent trickster. He also helps Armenians, Indians, Chinese, pacifists, and women claim their piece of the American pie. But though Paladin’s code is keyed to the Great Society just around the corner, he is also a ruthless entrepreneur, scanning the newspaper for trouble he might exploit and charging a hefty grand per job — cash he spends on his sybarite lifestyle. For all his charm and intelligence, Paladin is an icon of neoliberal postwar American power: an educated hedonist whose sovereign authority and violent skills support an inclusive vision of multicultural Western possibility that just happens to fill his coffers to the brim.

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TUBE YOUR ENTHUSIASM: Series Introduction | Luc Sante on LOONEY TUNES | Chris Spurgeon on THE THREE STOOGES | Adrienne Crew on MY THREE SONS | Barbara Bogaev on ROCKY & BULLWINKLE | Devin McKinney on THE TWILIGHT ZONE | James Hannaham on THE NAT KING COLE SHOW | Mimi Lipson on THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES | Jessamyn West on THE JETSONS | Gary Panter on THE OUTER LIMITS | Peter Doyle on THE MANY LOVES OF DOBIE GILLIS | Mark Kingwell on ROUTE 66 | Josh Glenn on THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW | Lynn Peril on THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW | Rob Walker on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER | Dan Reines on DAVEY & GOLIATH | Adam McGovern on HIGHWAY PATROL | Erik Davis on HAVE GUN — WILL TRAVEL | Greg Rowland on THE PHIL SILVERS SHOW | Annie Nocenti on THE AVENGERS | Elizabeth Foy Larsen on GUNSMOKE | Sarah Weinman on NAKED CITY | Douglas Rushkoff on THE HONEYMOONERS | Kio Stark on ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS | Gordon Dahlquist on PERRY MASON | Brian Berger on CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU? | CODA: Crystal Durant on Marc Anthony & Pussyfoot shorts | CODA: Mike Watt on “A Stop at Willoughby”

MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

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Codebreaking