The Jess MacAbee Story

If you're a big fan of Andy Devine you'll probably love this Wagon Train episode. But sad to say it's a rather unrealistic story that depends just too much on his comic talents to put it over.

Robert Horton is looking for food for the Wagon Train as supplies are running low. He stumbles across a hidden valley much like Omar Sharif in The Proud Valley. But there's no 30 Year War on the outside. It's the private preserve of Andy Devine and Glenda Farrell and the five daughters they've raised.

And Devine does not like no outsiders at all, he chases them away with fake Indian raids. But Flint McCullough doesn't take 'no' for an answer. And being he's the only man these young ladies have ever met they're all falling in love with him.

One has to wonder about these people, especially Glenda Farrell married to this lazy lout. When we first meet the McAbee family all the women are hard at work doing farm chores and Devine is supervising from his hammock.

Andy and Glenda came to the area 20 years earlier and Glenda asks about the good health of President Polk. They managed to miss the Civil War altogether. One wonders how they managed to not be invaded by unfriendly Indians all that time. Or now that at least two of the girls are growing up that they haven't just up and left the place.

More outside people do come to alter the situation permanently in the end. What happens is for you to see. The episode funny as Devine and Farrell are, is a bit too unreal for me.

I enjoyed this episode, it is different and very predictable, but a nice change of pace for me. The isolation of some of the first settlers of the west was very real, sometimes by choice. Flint handles the adoring daughters very well without hurting them, as requested by their mother. The father is an embarrassment, but loved by his family and I have certainly seen family dynamics like this in real life. For the time this was made this show reinforces some stereotypes such as a woman doing the cooking and it breaks some stereotypes such as a daughter plowing the field.

It could have gone in different ways to more comedic or more serious (dark, like many modern movies) but, I smiled as I watched it and remembered some of the innocence of my own childhood, infatuations with older people. The ending leaves us at a moment in time where everyone in the episode is happy.