Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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movieman1957
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

Post by movieman1957 »

Oh, the irony. I saw two minutes of one last night and there standing over a sickly Ward Bond was John McIntire. I doubt he was playing the character that would return and lead the endless train as he looked different but it was odd knowing what was coming.
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

Post by klondike »

movieman1957 wrote:Oh, the irony. I saw two minutes of one last night and there standing over a sickly Ward Bond was John McIntire. I doubt he was playing the character that would return and lead the endless train as he looked different but it was odd knowing what was coming.
Chris, not to wax too secular, or sound too serendipitous, but often when I note JM's knack for stepping-up in the wake of departing icons, I'm reminded of the medieval motto of Clan MacIntyre: PER ARDUA - which is Latin for "Through Difficulties" . . .
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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movieman1957 wrote:Oh, the irony. I saw two minutes of one last night and there standing over a sickly Ward Bond was John McIntire. I doubt he was playing the character that would return and lead the endless train as he looked different but it was odd knowing what was coming.


The same thought occurred to me.

Moira,
I saw that episode and enjoyed your re-cap. Cathleen Nesbitt really broke me up with her newspaper "chronicle". Lovely seeing the oldsters get their moments. Jane Darwell has been in a couple lately, her roles very limited but in the John McIntire one they gave her a nice, close-up reaction shot to his sermon. She looks a bit ill in these appearances, and I cannot help but lament the paucity of her roles after that marvelous, Oscar win in Grapes of Wrath. In one show, Cheyenne or The Rifleman, I think, she barely has one line and plays a housekeeper or maid. I thought: here she is, surrounded by all these people in the cast...but SHE is the only Academy Award winner. Talk about irony.

I love that colleagues like Bond (and Ford) kept giving her work, I fear she would not have been able to survive without their help.
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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MissGoddess wrote:
movieman1957 wrote:Oh, the irony. I saw two minutes of one last night and there standing over a sickly Ward Bond was John McIntire. I doubt he was playing the character that would return and lead the endless train as he looked different but it was odd knowing what was coming.
The same thought occurred to me.
I actually started to worry when Ward Bond got sick in that episode! I thought that McIntire was getting ready to take over!
MissGoddess wrote:Moira,
I saw that episode and enjoyed your re-cap. Cathleen Nesbitt really broke me up with her newspaper "chronicle". Lovely seeing the oldsters get their moments. Jane Darwell has been in a couple lately, her roles very limited but in the John McIntire one they gave her a nice, close-up reaction shot to his sermon. She looks a bit ill in these appearances, and I cannot help but lament the paucity of her roles after that marvelous, Oscar win in Grapes of Wrath. In one show, Cheyenne or The Rifleman, I think, she barely has one line and plays a housekeeper or maid. I thought: here she is, surrounded by all these people in the cast...but SHE is the only Academy Award winner. Talk about irony. I love that colleagues like Bond (and Ford) kept giving her work, I fear she would not have been able to survive without their help.
In addition to the help she received from Bond and Ford, did you know that when Robert Osborne first made his way to Hollywood after finishing his schooling, he lived with Jane Darwell? I believe that RO met her when he was appearing in a play in Seattle after graduating from the University of Washington with a journalism degree in 1958. Osborne explained to one interviewer that “The actor I was doing the play with was Jane Darwell, who’d won the Academy Award for playing Henry Fonda’s mother in The Grapes of Wrath. And she said, ‘You should come to California.’ I could stay at her family’s house, and I had some friends there.” Soon he landed a six month contract at 20th Century Fox, found himself hired by Paul Henreid when he was directing a program, and eventually met Lucille Ball, who directed him away from acting, telling him "you're too nice for this acting business."
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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Oh, that's so lovely to know, thank you Moira! Sounds like Jane was as motherly as she seemed.
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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Today's episode is so sweet. It stars that little man with the glasses, the one who always plays shy, bookish types. WALLY COX. The Major's being so mean to him!

It was really a funny episode and Wally got the best of it in the end. :D
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

Post by klondike »

moirafinnie wrote: I believe that RO met her when he was appearing in a play in Seattle after graduating from the University of Washington with a journalism degree in 1958. Osborne explained to one interviewer that “The actor I was doing the play with was Jane Darwell, who’d won the Academy Award for playing Henry Fonda’s mother in The Grapes of Wrath. And she said, ‘You should come to California.’ I could stay at her family’s house, and I had some friends there.”
What gratification to know that the beneficent Jane Darwell was just as much a living treasure off the screen as she appeared to be when on it.
I can't imagine any film appearance of hers (and I'm still finding more, here & there, every year that I watch for her) whereby she didn't raise the wattage of every scene that included her . . she just had that yes-child,-I-already-know essence to her, that patient face that bespoke a heart bigger than the houses she occupied, and yet, too, that little arch of her matronly brow to remind us all, albeit silently, just how reliably she'd speak right up, or even hasten to "cut a switch", before she'd let a wrong go unaddressed.
Of all the untarnished, memory-sealable dialogue she accrued in her list of most-cherished roles, the reply which she gave to a grousing James Craig in The Devil & Daniel Webster springs fastest to my mind's ear:
"Hard luck? Why, Son, New England's built on hard luck - that, and codfish."
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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klondike wrote: Of all the untarnished, memory-sealable dialogue she accrued in her list of most-cherished roles, the reply which she gave to a grousing James Craig in The Devil & Daniel Webster springs fastest to my mind's ear:
"Hard luck? Why, Son, New England's built on hard luck - that, and codfish."
The sacred you-know-who presiding over the Mass State House, as he has since 1784.
Image

Don't get too excited, Klon, but guess who was in today's Wagon Train episode?
Image
He played a burly blacksmith. Yes, dear Big Boy had put on a few lbs. since his day's playing "Marblehead" opposite Errol Flynn in 1940's Virginia City, but he still was a convincing personification of Longfellow's "smith, a mighty man is he,/ With large and sinewy hands;/And the muscles of his brawny arms/Are strong as iron bands."

Williams' task in this show was trying to fix the wagon wheels after several came apart during a hard trek across a Northern route (Big Boy Williams told Ward Bond the wheels had been poorly made in the first place). The rest of the episode, "The Vincent Eaglewood Story," centered around Wally Cox as an Old West Mr. Wizard proving repeatedly that brains can often (but not always) do better than brawn.
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

Post by klondike »

Wow, Moira, thanks for the scoop!
That is one "WT" ep I haven't seen, but would really like to, for a number of reasons.
First, I really dig depictions of, or elements of, any form of old-style hand-to-wood craftsmanship, like cartwrighting, wheelwrighting, and the uber-cunning alchemy of master cooperage . . . remember the Oregon GI from A Canterbury Tale, chatting up the village lumberman about breeds of trees, and the time-honored rhythms of harvesting them? Or that first, seminal episode of Spielberg's "Into The West", that featured the family of Virginian wagon-builders, the Wheelers, and how all the brothers labored around the work-barn's chain hoist as they set the spoke arcs for another high-in-demand conestoga wagon-wheel, and the father's lectures about how the science of building iron rimmed wagon wheels was the pinnacle of the coopering arts?
Great stuff!
And of course, I always dig catching the Big Boy . . though I gotta observe that he could be nearly mistook in that screen cap for a middle-aged Pat Hingle, were one unfamiliar with the age of the series . . poor Guinn just looks so, ummmm, compacted :| . . and inflated :( . . .
Of course, given the year of that ep, he only had a year or three left anyway . . before dying, likely, in high discomfort of something as brutal as uric septocemia . .
Guess we can just hope ol' GW's afterlife involves beer, and football, and humor, and horses . . and lotsa of horseplay . . :wink:
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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I love that colleagues like Bond (and Ford) kept giving her work, I fear she would not have been able to survive without their help.
Don't forget Uncle Walt, he hired her to portray the Bird Woman in Mary Poppins, the catalyst for Michael Banks rebellion against his father and the bank!
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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Oh yes! One of the most lasting images from that whole film!
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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Hey! Ann Blyth is playing her own mother and daughter in The Jenny Tannen Story, today's episode of Wagon Train.* Ann gets to play her famed singer mother who is a recluse in San Francisco after taking a tumble down a staircase. Ann the Daughter is a great singer too but after an accident she is going blind! Mom and daughter haven't seen one another since she was a baby. It's all Maj. Seth Adams can do to bring these two troubled canaries back together.

Blyth gets to sing on this show too, and her clear soprano is lovely. I really like the verve with which Ann as the Marked Mom makes her bitter remarks to Seth (Ward Bond, who gets to wear some "Sunday-Go-To-Meeting" clothes in San Francisco). I hope that others have a chance to catch this show.


* Guess they couldn't get Celia Lovsky to play "Mom" again as they did in that classic Twilight Zone episode "Queen of the Nile."
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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I did see this and enjoyed seeing Ann...and couldn't help but notice Ward seemed to enjoy her presence, too. A lot. :D I don't believe I ever saw him make such a fuss over a girl before, and he didn't look like he was acting. :D

Miss Blyth has one of the prettiest smiles.
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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Miss Goddess wrote:I did see this and enjoyed seeing Ann...and couldn't help but notice Ward seemed to enjoy her presence, too. A lot. :D I don't believe I ever saw him make such a fuss over a girl before, and he didn't look like he was acting. :D
I think that Ward's enjoyment of Ann Blyth's presence was summed up in his statement that "She's The Kind Of Girl I Want To Take On Every Train West."

I also thought that when he was telling Charlie Wooster about Blyth's Mom, he really meant it when he said emphatically, "She must have been a really beautiful, beautiful woman."

I didn't get to see the end of this epi. I'll have to check it out on Netflix soon.
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Re: Wagon Train on the Encore Western Channel

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SPOILER!

I'm sure he meant every word. In fact, all the fellows seemed to light up around her so that I remain dumbfounded at that one sourpuss who was so mean as to jerk the wagon on her, causing her to fall. I kept waiting for someone, the Major, anyone, to chew him out for that but they let it go. It didn't look as much like an accident so much as churlishness, and why so, they never explain. Poor little thing.
"There's only one thing that can kill the movies, and that's education."
-- Will Rogers
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