Today, we look at how fascinatingly bleak 1958’s Gunsmoke episode, “The Cabin, was
This is “All the Best Things,” a spotlight on the best TV episodes, movies, albums, etc.
This is a Year of Great TV Episodes, where every day this year, we’ll take a look at great TV episodes. Note that I’m not talking about “Very Special Episodes” or episodes built around gimmicks, but just “normal” episodes of TV shows that are notable only because of how good they are.
I figured I’d open with the excellent Gunsmoke episode, “The Cabin,” from its third season, which came out in February 1958.
One of the important things to note about early episodes of Gunsmoke is that A. It followed the successful Gunsmoke radio series and B. The Gunsmoke radio show was intentionally created to be a “mature” Western, and as such, actually was sponsored by CBS itself for its first two seasons, so it would not have to answer to sponsors. As a result, Gunsmoke the radio show could get DARK.
Well, when it made the transition to TV in 1955, the show had to soften a LITTLE bit, but it was still a relatively dark show. At the same time, though, the show mostly adapted episodes of the radio show, giving the program an extraordinarily high level of quality in the early seasons, since the show could pick the best radio scripts to adapt.
These two things came together to give us the brilliant “The Cabin,” in Season 3, adapted by John Meston from his own earlier radioplay.
Matt Dillon (James Arness) is caught in a blizzard while on the way to another city for some reason or another, and is forced to take shelter in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Once there, he discovers that two outlaws on the run, Hack (Claude Akins) and Alvy (Harry Dean Stanton) have been hiding out in the cabin for over a month. They murdered the owner of the house, and have been brutalizing and raping his adult daughter, Belle (Patricia Barry), for 35 days.
They hold Matt hostage, with plans to kill him, but in a way that will look he died in an accident, so as to not draw any attention to their hideout (Belle initially tries to hide that he is a marshal). In any event, obviously, with Belle’s help, Matt kills both of the outlaws (the show as a half hour at the time, so it’s amazing how tense the story is for being set in a relatively short time frame).
However, in this “happy ending” with the two murderers both dead (at this point, Matt had already killed nearly five dozen people on the series), we still have a young woman who had been subject to horrors for a month. She asks Matt if he’s married. He says his job is too dangerous to get married, and she has an amazing line where she thanks him for phrasing it that way.
She then notes that she will, “Sell my three horses and buy some pretty clothes, find me a place….won’t be hard after this”. Daaang.
She tells him to look her up the next time he’s in Hay City. He tells her, “Don’t let this make you bitter. There are some good men left in this world,” but, well, that’s easy for you to say, Matt! Now, like I said, Gunsmoke was a dark show in its early days, to the point where the rule of thumb for the early episodes is to EXPECT a sad ending (as time went on, it became a toss-up whether an episode would have a happy ending, finally, it was almost a certainty that an episode would have a happy ending by the final seasons). However, there’s tragedy, and there’s the sheer BLEAKNESS of this poor woman seeing her father murdered, raped and beaten for a month, and now that she’s free, plans to move to town to become a prostitute. It’s a whole other level of bleakness for even the darkest Gunsmoke episodes of the era, and it’s amazing that this was pulled off on national TV in 1958.
So yes, shockingly bleak, but also a sign of the greatness that modern audiences don’t quite understand that Gunsmoke was capable of for many years (before it slowly became relatively watered down, but still better than most TV shows).
Okay, if I’m going to have 365 of these, I could use suggestions, so feel free to email me at brian@poprefs.com!
