frankfob

I've always been a fan of "The High Chaparral", even more than I was of "Bonanza", but this particular episode I found to be mediocre at best. Steve Forrest is Johnny Rondo, a notorious gunfighter who has hung up his guns and is on his way to California with his teenage son (Kurt Russell). He gets a job at the Chaparral to make some money for his journey, but three brothers are following him to get revenge for his killing of their fourth brother. Forrest is OK, Russell is OK, the story is OK. The whole episode is just OK--except for the extremely irritating "Ballad of Johnny Rondo" that gets sung almost every few minutes (it seems) by Faron Young for no apparent reason; it does nothing to advance the story and pretty much repeats the same lines over and over, about "16 holes in 16 souls from the guns of Johnny Rondo" and some other lines that are even more trite. It had the same effect on me that the hideous "It's a Small World After All" caterwauling you hear at Disneyland.

As another poster has noted, the episode looks more like a busted pilot for a spin-off than anything else. One of the things I liked abut the series was that much of it was shot on location, but much of this episode seems to have been shot on a soundstage, which makes it look cheap. All things considered, this isn't one of the series' better episodes.

I've always found Pete Smith's nasally voice and wannabe smart-alec delivery to be the worst part of his series of shorts, and this one is no exception, but the great footage of commercial and sport fishing makes up for it. The shots of Chinook Indians hauling in salmon from precarious perches on the rocks alongside a raging river in Oregon are fascinating, and there's a spectacular shot of a sport fisherman battling a great white shark that was so big--750 pounds--it had to be towed back into the harbor after it was caught. There's footage of another sport fisherman landing a marlin in the waters between the California coast and Catalina Island, and some terrific shots of tuna fishermen using huge bamboo poles to catch huge tunas and fling them over their shoulders into the boat's hold, over and over and over; I had always thought tuna were caught in huge nets dragged behind the boat but I had never heard of nor ween this method before.

Overall, one of the better Pete Smith shorts I've seen. It's we3l worth a look.

William A. Seiter was an experienced comedy director, who guided such classic films as Laurel & Hardy's "Sons of the Desert", but he fell on his face with this one. This forced, unfunny comedy about a goofy navy lieutenant who wins a free wedding in a department-store promotion is beneath Seiter's considerable talents. The script is pure hackwork, with painfully obvious, predictable and unfunny "jokes", the laugh track is incredibly annoying and unnecessary, the performances by a cast experienced--for the most part--at comedy are not particularly good and not helped at all by Seiter's heavy-handed direction. The whole thing looks suspiciously like a failed sitcom pilot, and if that's the case it deserved to fail. It's a complete dud and embarrassing to watch.