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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarky Oracle!" data-source="post: 440693" data-attributes="member: 57984">The 19th season premiere, the two-parter "Women For Sale" is classic on-location GUNSMOKE, helmed by the incomparable pairing of Vincent McEveety as director and Jim Byrnes, the writer. Filmed in Coronado National Forest (near Tucson), the episode focuses on Matt's pursuit of a band of Comancheros who raid the countryside to kidnap the ladies of the landscape in order to sell them south in Mexico and into slavery, headed up by a wicked human trafficker (played as only James Whitmore can). The story opens with a rare narration (from William Conrad, the voice of Matt Dillon on the '50s radio version of GUNSMOKE!) telling us about the premise and the dreaded Valley of Tears where the trading of women and their lives goes on... Looking for gorgeous Kansas blonde (Kathleen Cody) who was taken by these scavengers, Matt spies a single little girl (Dawn Lyn) walking through the badlands -- a nod to a similar scene from Arness' THEM (with James Whitmore!). The girl's mother has been killed, and she's in a mental fog. Matt carries her off, and they eventually run across a seasoned saloon girl with a heart of gold, Stella (Shani Wallis) who'd escaped the villains. The child comes out of her near-comatose state due to the attention of the painted lady and a bunny given to her by the marshal (who never manages to bite the tyke... the rabbit, not Matt). The little girl, named Marcy, develops fantasies that Stella might become her replacement mama, but Stella has dreams of a new life in San Antonio. And domestic life in a rural shack is not exactly Stella's cup of rye whiskey... Meanwhile, the tawny Dodge blonde has wormed her way into the heart of one of the handsome members of the gang (Nicholas Hammond) who then kills his Irish benefactor, Whitmore, to help her escape. But once out of sight of the thugs, she spots Marshal Dillon riding through the brush, and she stabs her rescuer (figuratively and literally) in the back before she rushes down the bluff to the safety of Marshal Dillon -- but she's shot in the back by dying Hammond and killed. (Her actions are fully understandable, but we're made to feel like she's a horrid, opportunistic bitch because of Leonard "all that hate was inside of me" Katzman)... Matt's duty complete, he leaves the little girl with her dazed grandfather outside a burned-out hovel, and a once-recalcitrant Stella sighs, "Awww, hell -- I've been to San Antone...!" and the humbled whore joins the tiny Marcy and her gramps at that hovel, to live together forever... Improbable, the ending, but heart-tugging nonetheless. And Matt rides away.It's a terrific installment. Scored wonderfully by, yes, Mr. John Parker.<img src="https://tse1.explicit.bing.net/th/id/OIP.QhJ-Py_8iSa7IgWem_0V4QHaFo?rs=1&pid=ImgDetMain&o=7&rm=3" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 757px" />   It's a credit to the show that they managed to keep the old, legendary gunfighter motif fresh for two decades (well, Scorpio Rising producers -- they keep the trains running) by focusing on character, mystique and atmosphere... It's also amazing how much better the acting by the principals is in the hour-long episodes (the half-hour shows, while wildly popular, are so abbreviated that someone gets shot in the Long Branch at the top of the installment for some vague reason, and the marshal shoots the gunman dead in the streets in the closing scene only minutes later -- everything is so rushed it's hard to build a narrative that bears any weight).In "The Widowmaker," Wes Parmalee himself (Steve Forrest, in one of his numerous roles as a seething villain -- though not as many as Morgan Woodward, of course) shows up this time as a comparatively benign villain, the reformed gunfighter and Fastest Gun in All The West, Scott Coltrane, who just wants to live peacefully, and anonymously, in Dodge City, he and his beautiful wife settling into a farm outside of town. But when he wipes out a trio of dusty gunmen the very moment he steps off the stage upon his arrival in Dodge City, that anonymity becomes increasingly unlikely. This early display of bloodshed leads to gunfighter hanger-on, Dad Goodpastor (David Huddleston, who seems like just the kind of actor to have appeared on DALLAS -- yet he didn't!) into goading baby-'slinger Kid Chama (Randolph Roberts, who comes off more as horny than homicidal) into drawing on Coltrane, and the boy fares badly.Marshal Dillon, though sympathetic to The Widowmaker's plight to live in harmony, orders the man out of town because of the violent element he draws in. A fight between the two bellowing men occurs in the marshal's office, watched by the worthless townsfolk through the jailhouse window, and Matt tosses Coltrane into the street. Coltrane later returns to face Dillon down and is outdrawn, falling to his death, the gunfighter buried on the Boot Hill graveyard like so many before him... But, in the final moment, Matt rides up to a small farmhouse (which looks a lot like Tucson, a brief location scene filmed out of sequence) and Forrest and his wife appear at the door; Matt has arranged for the gunslinger, still quite alive, to change his identity and thus live out his days in the deserts of Arizona.Music mostly by Jerrold Immel (though the plaintive funeral cue is clearly from Richard Shores -- a composer who should have worked on DALLAS, and didn't).<img src="https://static0.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/steve-forrest-and-barra-grant-in-gunsmoke.jpg?q=70&fit=crop&w=825&dpr=1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="" />And then there's "Kitty's Love Affair" (originally titled "End of The Road." which I'd prefer). An unrecognizably handsome Gerald McRaney, the slimy son of a wealthy family in a neighboring town, draws on legendary gunslinger Will Stambridge (Richard Kiley, who'd emerge as the king of documentary voiceovers) and the young man is killed; after which, his dowager mother rides in and, over her boy's body, offers a thousand dollar reward to the man who kills her kid's killer... As Matt & Kitty take a stage ride to a long-delayed vacation in St. Louis, Matt is informed at the relay station that he must return to Dodge City immediately to testify at a trial. Angry, Kitty intends to carry on to St. Louis alone, but fate again intervenes when her stage is held up, the poor driver is killed as they always are, and her fellow passenger, Stambridge, shoots the crooks and is in turn shot himself. Returning with an injured Stambridge to Dodge, Kitty is wooed by the gunslinger and must now choose between him -- now wanted for the murder of McRaney -- and the marshal she loves.You can guess the rest.Music by Jerrold Immel.<img src="https://static.tvmaze.com/uploads/images/original_untouched/494/1236986.jpg" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 649px" />In both gunfighter episodes, Kitty dons the same orange dress (see post above) she wears endlessly throughout the color seasons of the show. (In the half-hour shows, she's a DYNASTY-esque fashion plate who never repeats an outfit).</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?