Ten Little Indians

Ten Little Indians is one of my favorite episodes. But it's also an episode where Matt Dillon displayed a moment of handgun dazzle. If you never noticed, watch the Marshal's gun immediately after killing Billy Cole. I've never seen him do that in any other episode.. and he nailed it.

This episode is IMHO one of the best of the series. Seldom if ever did you have the opportunity to see Bruce Dern and Warren Oates at the same time.. two of the best in the business. The episode keeps you guessing right up to the end. And for the purists out there remember, this is fiction.

The tension it starts with builds to no pay off. The scenes contained some of the best acting I've seen on a western tv show but they all reduced to a weak come around resolution for the ending. I didn't know Bruce Dern could act, I though he was just a face and a voice for a background bad guy.

Some of these episodes seem to lack continuity with each other, and are confusing. In this episode, John Marley plays Ben Pringle, and at the end of this episode, he claims to be the grandfather of Thad, who used to be Dillon's deputy "couple of years ago."

The character of Thad (played by Roger Ewing) had just been introduced into the show in the previous episode "Clayton Thaddeus Greenwood." Thad helps Dillon bring justice to the gang that killed his father. Thad is not in this episode. So it is bizarre and confusing that John Marley is referring to Thad as having been killed off in a range war a week after Dillon hired Thad to be a deputy. How many Thad deputies did Dillon have? Roger Ewing had been on Gunsmoke once before in Season 10, episode 21 "A Song for Dying," playing a different character.

So five gunslingers are hired to kill off Matt, or were they hired so Matt could kill them, and get perverted revenge for John Marley?? Marley usually played nasty villainous guys, and here he is no exception. The cast of gunslingers starts with Rafael Campos, who was on several westerns and always played an over-the-top bandit, sometimes Pancho Villa (on Have Gun, Will Travel and on Wanted: Dead or Alive he played young Pancho Villa). He talks a big game and calls out Dillon as they cross paths in a gorge, and Matt Dillon smokes him without skipping a horse beat. Then comes Zalman King, who had a lot of bad-ass roles in his early days, but exuded a "disco dude' look. Dillon pops him into the stone age.

Along comes Bruce Dern and Warren Oates, but they spend a couple of disappointing scenes just talking trash to each other, and trying to psych each other out. This is a western. No talking, just shooting (as Tuco- Eli Wallach said in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly). I had hoped to see these two characters face down Matt Dillon, since they were the A guest stars in this episode, but no.

Finally it is fat Nehemiah Persoff, who gets a close-up scene of him laying in bed before the big shootout, and that big belly laying on his side makes it look like he will need a scooter to get out the door and onto main street. Really bad camera angle of the guy laying in bed. Needless to say, there was another episode of Gunsmoke, and Nehemiah Persoff was not in it.

This episode could have been one of the greatest ever, but there was time spent on the wrong things that should have been spent on Matt Dillon kicking ass and shooting bad guys.

Warren Oates, Bruce Dern and Nehemiah Persoff as gunmen out to 86 Matt Dillon. With a roster of baddies like that, how could you possibly go wrong? Well, this episode doesn't. A highly entertaining, suspenseful show that ends with a bang--so to speak.

Great to see the ever-crafty Festus do some sleuthing and spying on Matt's behalf. That good ol' boy may have seemed a bit light in his loafers, but was actually as sharp as a tack.

And in the episode's opening sequence, Rafael Campos' Miguel Semando cuts a pretty fair impersonation of "Gold Hat" from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The slightly demented, smiling schtick comes off well. Of course, Matt wipes that smile away with a .45 slug.

PS--At this point in the series it's becoming pretty apparent that Matt's old friends--in this case played by Persoff--are nothing but trouble. Either Matt was a poor judge of character in his youth or he himself was a pretty shady customer.