The Cats of Paradise

After saving Mona Freeman from drowning in Sacramento, Bret Maverick decides to back her in a new line of work. She's collecting feral cats. from one and all in Sacramento to take them to the small mining camp town of Paradise where the rats and mice are overrunning the place. But when they make it to Paradise she double crosses Garner in a most undignified way.

As in the previous Maverick story where Jack Kelly is conned this proves once again that the fatal Maverick weakness seems to be thinking with the male member. Though I have to say there really was no great reason to try and con James Garner out of his earnings. Just pay him off and he's out of her life and he has a fresh grubstake for poker which of course is why he went into the feral cat business.

But Freeman has other con games in mind. Familiar folks like Buddy Ebsen as the sheriff and Richard Deacon as the undertaker are in the cast.

Mona is some piece of work.

In "The Cats Of Paradise," Modesty Blaine wants to buy cats to sell to a mining town besieged by mice. Bret resorts to the thousand dollar bill pinned inside his coat. Naturally, Modesty cons Bret, even tries to have him shanghaied. We learn that eights and aces are the "dead man's hand." Wild Bill Hickok supposedly held these cards when he was murdered in Deadwood. Bret was always quoting his pappy, and those words of wisdom became known as pappyisms: Bret says, "A man who sticks his head in the sand makes an awfully good target." The women in the series left much to be desired. Whether it was Modesty Blaine, Melanie Blake or Samantha Crawford, they were always trying to make off with the money.

Not every script can drop in "perfidy" without trading in the action for a dictionary. This is an offbeat screenplay that humorously manages to keep us interested without need of a college degree. In passing-- I remember as a boy in a small western mining town how important cats were to keeping down the rat population. It's little known facts like this that can turn an good episode into a memorable one.

Once the series' light-hearted approach was established, coming up with teleplays that kept that approach for a full 60 minutes must have been a challenge. Many later episodes unfortunately veered from humor to more conventional seriousness, which is understandable since the series was breaking new ground in a genre where conventions were almost literally set in sacred stone. Producers must have agonized at times over how many liberties could be taken with the unconventional Maverick "hero". After all, they were, in a sense, tinkering with John Wayne.

Here Bret is trying to dodge a devious woman, a murderous sheriff, and a "friend" willing to sell him out for a measly $200. His future is none to bright since everybody has an angle that doesn't include him. But as long as he's got a tombstone to hide behind, 13 male cats, and a can of shoe polish, he'll probably be around for the next episode. Fine work from Buddy Ebsen as the surprisingly mean sheriff, Lance Fuller as a parody of Have Gun, Will Travel's Paladin, and that most unlikely Westerner Richard Deacon as the undertaker, along with a hilarious shootout that likely put the series on the Humane Society's do-not-watch list. All in all, 60 minutes that never once veers from a humorously light-hearted approach.

Yes, I know this is intended to be a comic episode. And I am partial to cats, but this episode did not amount to much more than one and a half good "cat" scenes.

There was no apparent mistreatment of any cats, either in the story or in the production. Just the idea of cat auctions in a rat-infested town is funny. More could have been made of the actual auction. The idea of all 200 cats had to be male, to avoid fights. I guess no one gave any thought to maybe ten cats of each gender. And in a random collection of 200 strays, I'd say at least twenty would be black without the need to paint any.

The best scene was a wagon loaded with frontier cat carriers. With everyone meowing. Contemporary cats are usually opposed to car travel, and one can only imagine what transporting a wagon load of them would be like.

The rest of the plot is droll at times, but might have been much better.