Cheyenne

About a year ago the Warner Archive Collection gave us a complete western TV show in HD,  Colt .45. We were impressed with the high-quality transfers, far better than anything we could see before. Back in the late 1950s, the Prime Time TV lineup was jammed with scores of half-hour oaters, each trying to stand out as special.

This new ‘complete’ package from the Warner library covers the entire  Cheyenne The Complete Series.  We all know that title, even if its music theme isn’t as memorable as that for, say, Maverick. Clint Walker passed away in 2018 but he’s still a favorite star for many.

Cheyenne is an hour-long (actually 40 to 50 minute) western show about Cheyenne Bodie, a rather generic frontier hero made distinctive by a very tall and personable actor. Clint Walker has the desired heroic voice, and is heard singing now and then in the show. His Cheyenne has all the virtues of a boy scout plus a naturally decent and gentle nature, that is tested every week in a new conflict. Cheyenne doesn’t stay in any particular town for long. He meets a mostly new cast each week, dropping into an entirely new situation. As this is the 2nd half of the 1950s on television,  Gunsmoke morality prevails: no matter how complicated the moral issue, it is always possible to separate the good from the bad. The clear-headed Cheyenne just does what feels right, which is always the best course. Yet most issues are settled with righteous violence. Won’t those lawbreakers ever learn?

We began by watching the first three shows. The first features actor James Garner in a supporting role. He had been considered to play Cheyenne, and he seems to be purposely underplaying so as not to steal the spotlight from Clint Walker. L.Q. Jones almost has a continuing comic character, but he was dropped after just a few shows. The show’s overall appeal rests almost completely on the personality of Clint Walker. His Cheyenne is quiet, reassuring and stable. There’s danger and action but Cheyenne will sort it out for us, in every show.

Walker never changed his basic character no matter the role. When he signed on for in Robert Aldrich’s  The Dirty Dozen, his character ended up being the Mr. Clean of the outfit, easily cowing the hood played by John Cassavettes. Looking at cast lists for Cheyenne we see that many favorite actors return for two or three episodes, but always as different characters. Perhaps the rationale was for the series to have no continuity, to enable episodes to be rebroadcast or syndicated in any order.

The shows aren’t short-changed for technical quality or basic direction. WB’s production planners took the already- streamlined assembly line for ‘B’ pictures (which TV shows more or less replaced) and made it even more efficient. These shows look like real movies, albeit shorter; the editing and audio work show few signs of corner-cutting. Close-ups are not overdone, as seemed to be the m.o. for Jack Webb’s incredibly cheap  Dragnet. Hour-long dramas like Cheyenne would soon replace half-hour quickie shows with maybe 17 minutes of real story.

Obviously part of the plan from the beginning was to make extensive use of Warners’ stock film library. The studio occasionally recycled ‘money’ scenes from older productions, but WB’s TV shows dug deep in the archive for good action scenes where the stars’ faces weren’t too visible. An already-filmed stagecoach robbery would provide the production value. All that was needed was a reasonably-matched coach and the right color cowboy hats, for close-ups on the back lot or a sound stage. We see the picture quality drop a bit for the older stock shots, something we never could see on old 14-inch B&W TVs.

Cheyenne stayed solvent for an entire seven seasons. No, we didn’t watch everything in the set, or even one-tenth of the contents of the WAC’s fat box. Since there’s no continuity between most shows, we chose our ten episodes to watch by looking up actors we wanted to get a closer look at. Why is James Coburn showing up in a 1961 episode, after his big splash in  The Magnificent Seven?  What does Rod Taylor look like in 1955, his first year in Hollywood?  We then took a gander at favorite actresses … Audrey Totter, Angie Dickinson, Ellen Burstyn, Victoria Vetri even. We’re accustomed to seeing these people in much bigger features, sometimes playing iconic parts. What were they like trying to get somewhere on the Warners TV career treadmill?

Everyone I saw looked very good. The actors include numerous Hollywood veterans looking for solid work after being dropped from studio contracts. TV wasn’t yet considered the place to catch The Golden Ring, but neither did it disqualify standout talent from supporting work in features.

A studio ‘stoops’ to do TV … and to keep the talent in line. 

Cheyenne is said to be the very first hour-long drama shot on film specifically for TV. It’s the first series produced by one of the big 5 studios. Jack L. Warner finally realized that TV wasn’t going away. If costs could be controlled, the tube might be even more profitable than feature films. The first deal with ABC positioned Cheyenne as one title in a revolving show called Warner Bros. Presents. Clint Walker’s show played in rotation with two more new shows based on old Warners movies. Casablanca starred the gruff noir leading man Charles McGraw, and Kings Row featured Jack Kelly and Robert Horton. Each title aired a completed 60-minute show every three weeks. Casablanca soldiered on for a full season, but Kings Row was canceled almost immediately.

Jack Warner’s plan was to do what Walt Disney had done, use a weekly TV show to promote his studio’s feature product. The first shows were only 40 or so minutes in duration, leaving the balance of the hour (minus commercials) for what were basically commercials for WB. This new ‘content’ was hosted by star Gig Young, who presented specially-filmed interviews and staged behind-the-scenes ‘moments’ from big 1955 releases like  Helen of Troy and  Giant.  Some of these making-of bits have been used as extras on WB home video presentations, such as  Land of the Pharaohs and  The Searchers.

The WB Presents concept collapsed after the first season, but the conversion of ‘B unit’ filming to TV production was a success. William T. Orr became the czar of WB TV, with the marching order to keep costs down as low as the Guilds would allow. As TV was a new medium, the negotiations for Guild contracts raged in a fifteen-year battle recorded on the front pages of the trade papers. The idea of residual payments for TV appearances wasn’t fully resolved in 1955. That presumably kept supporting players working for minimums. William Orr wasn’t signing any established stars, and instead leveraged the paucity of starring opportunities to sign its initial headline players to very harsh contracts. They resembled old-school studio contracts: the stars’ lives were dedicated to filming at a breakneck pace, and their downtime was taken to fulfill a busy publicity schedule, dictated by the studio.

But the deal did not necessarily include the old-time perks that created the ‘star treatment:’ drivers, assistants, and other dedicated support people. The only way forward was to be so successful and popular that the studio couldn’t replace you. James Garner eventually earned his place as a feature film star, but his initial contract period didn’t pay a great deal. He’d be able to cash in only much later, returning to TV with enough clout to demand a proper slice of the pie.

Until the Guilds got the upper hand around 1960, Warners and executive producer Orr had a lot of control over their TV productions — and their stars. It must have been rough on newcomers surprised that they had become TV stars known coast-to-coast … but without life-changing compensation or even more control of their daily lives. When the star of Colt .45 held out for more money, he was replaced. Roger Moore didn’t like his WB setup, and returned home to England to continue his TV career.

Clint Walker was very smart casting. He had been plucked out of nowhere to play Cheyenne Bodie; his only previous screen credit was in a 1954 Bowery Boys movie, Jungle Gents, although he may have already filmed his scenes in  The Ten Commandments. Walker also chafed against his contractual strait-jacket, and in the third season there were a few weeks when it looked like he might be replaced. Ty Hardin was the possible new Cheyenne, but peace was reestablished. Hardin got his own series, Bronco. Walker stayed on with Cheyenne for 7 full seasons. Although he got the opportunity to star in some feature westerns, when speaking of Cheyenne he usually said he’d be happy if it went on forever.

We’re told that writer-producer Roy Huggins was the main man in charge of the creative launch on Cheyenne and its success in the first season. Huggins wrote his share of films noir, comedies and westerns before making a huge mark in television. He had his flops, but he’s also known as a key creator for the TV shows 77 Sunset Strip, Maverick, Run for Your Life, Baretta and, with Stephen J. Cannell, James Garner’s  The Rockford Files.

“… Kookie, Kookie, lend me your comb …” 

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Cheyenne The Complete Series is a genuine monster box with a price that doesn’t seem steep when one realizes how many hours of entertainment are included. It’s a full 107 episodes that begin at about 42 minutes in duration and then expand to 52. The episodes include all the original titles and ‘bumpers’ acknowledging the sponsor, General Electric.

The first season is 15 episodes and most of the following seasons are twenty episodes. Each year comes in its own keep case, 30 discs in all. That adds up to 90 hours of programming … and some collectors out there will want to see them all. It may be a form of snobbery, but I never liked watching old TV shows as presented on cable TV stations — most have been time-compressed to fit in more commercials. These Blu-ray episodes look better than what we saw back in the day, with music and sound work to match. We’re told that some Cheyenne music was repurposed from Max Steiner’s score for  The Fountainhead.

All remastered from 4K scans, the shows look immaculate. When watching an episode, one must remember that original TV audiences didn’t see the wider and taller frame we see here, because TV monitors were adjusted to over-scan, cropping part of the image on all four sides. When Warners converted a couple of episodes into a feature film (Gold, Glory and Custer, 1964) a 1:85 scan may not have cropped away anything essential from the top or bottom of the frame.

The one extra is a good 2006 featurette, in SD only, that gives Clint Walker a nice platform to talk about his experience on the show.