The Savage Hills

This is two-thirds of a first-rate episode. Diane Brewster could not be more delightfully charming as that consummate con-artist Samantha Crawford. Her syrupy southern drawl and winsomely coy manner are enough to charm the whiskers off General Grant. Here she's up to some business with counterfeit plates, with enough twists and turns to confuse a snake charmer. Peter Whitney as a government agent is on her trail, but Bart's too confused most of the time to know which side he's on. Their little scene in the hotel room is chock-full of innuendo and goes about as far as any TV entry of the day, especially with her undressed under the bed covers.

It's all slick Maverick tongue-in-cheek, recalling some of the best traits of the series. However the sequence with Bart and Samantha escaping the Indians is clumsy and out of sync with the rest of the hour. The series was seldom at its best when supposedly in the wilderness, which usually consisted of the back-lot at Warner Bros. and a few cheap outdoor sets, as is the case here. Nonetheless, it's a showcase for Brewster and a nice bit of work by Kelly. And what a superb twist ending, something few other TV Westerns would have risked.

This one puts Bart and Samantha Crawford in the Dakota Territory. They end up on an island besieged by Sioux Indians. Samantha reveals her past. Her parents were killed by Arapahoe when she was 12, and she learned to survive on her own. Now, Bart understands her. There is chemistry between them. Diane Brewster as Samantha is the main female character in Maverick. She oozes with charm, feigns her southern accent. "Fiddle-dee-dee!" She tells one lie after another. She sneaks into Bart's hotel room to rob him, thinking he is a Secret Service agent. He catches up to her on a riverboat, and she jumps overboard. Bart follows her into the water, and they eat buffalo meat. They kiss! Sam shows she can rough it and shoots an Indian. She massages Bart's temples and pretends to fall in love. Brewster was beautiful with her hair down. She died in 1991 at age 60.

The opening scene where Samantha is trying to get the plates is a total gem. The script is witty and literate and the actors play it perfectly. Besides wonderful chemistry between Brewster and Kelly.....But of course it's the 50's so while there is kissing...one can never, ever imply that sex might come after kissing.

But here there is a wonderfully witty implication of sex using a series of prepositions that very much imply sex. Bart is going to get the sheriff and is locking Samantha into his room. "First I lock you IN, then I bring the sheriff UP, and your husband can get you OUT." Ah the sex act itself...while all they while they lean in toward each other and arch back and forth.

It is delightful

Of course he comes back to find her naked under the covers...and more disrobing goes on in this episode than anywhere else in 5 years of episodes.

Of course Jack Kelly has 3-5 different speech patterns and registers s he goes from pretend southerner mocking her to jailer to just a nice guy.

At this point in the series Jack Kelly is a very accomplished actor and James Garner is not so accomplished an actor. Garner does not have the range of voices and attitudes that Jack Kelly has already. Garner improves his range as an actor. We see that in his films and most certainly in the Rockford Files. He has something else but not a full range.

And I am baffled as to why Kelly was not considered funny. In many of his other movies like Bamboo Prison and the Audie Murphy movies he is hysterically funny. Garner got his first choice of scripts and so he benefitted from that a lot. For instance Black Fire is a great script blessed by Hans Conreid's presence. Kelly would have brought so much more to pretending being Homer Eakins than Garner did.

Of course he lucked out with this script as it was essential to the script that the Maverick in this episode NOT know who Samantha Crawford was. So it had to be Bart. It is a wonderful episode.

This episode begins with Jack Kelly finding Diane Brewster in his room trying to rob him. She of course tells him she's Samantha Crawford and Kelly remembers that his brother told him something of his experience with Samantha Crawford several episodes back. Not enough though.

Crawford tells him that she's now a Secret Service operative, news to real operative Peter Whitney whom she also cons.

It's all a merry chase looking for some counterfeit plates. The final scene with Judge Thurston Hall who hails from the south and Brewster employing her best Brenda Lee Johnson mush mouth southern drawl is hilarious.

Unlike James Garner, Jack Kelly gets romantically involved. Not too deep though. He's a Maverick all right.