Night in a Small Town

On the way by stagecoach to Tucson for a horse auction the Barkleys are stopped by a town ladies citizen's committee similar to the one that ran Claire Trevor out of town in Stagecoach. The good women want to rid themselves of saloon girl Susan Strasberg and in her best red dress she leaves on the coach with Barbara Stanwyck, Lee Majors, and Linda Evans.

From the frying pan to the fire is the route for Strasberg who in the next town runs into James Whitmore an old gunfighter, friend of Lee Majors and now town marshal. He runs a mighty puritanical town and he's the only one carrying weapons.

As more and more of Whitmore is revealed that he's a bully with a badge is abundantly clear. The towns people are scared to death of him. But Whitmore has bigger issues than that and it's Strasberg who brings it all to a head.

A plot very much borrowed from W. Somerset Maugham's Rain moved out west Whitmore's Marshal/Reverend Davidson is truly a terrifying figure. He's the main reason to see this Big Valley story.

In this episode Heath, Audra and Ms Barley are traveling by stage-coach to Arizona. On the way they pick up a saloon type woman-of-the-night that is being forced out of a community by local women.

Anyway for the night they pull into a town that is run by Marshall Tom Wills (James Whitmore) who happens to be an old friend of Heath. The problem is that he runs the town with an iron fist. It is his way or the highway. And he wants no loose women in his town. And makes it clear she is not welcomed.

As the story goes on we find that Marshall Wills is not mentally fit to be a law-man. By his actions we find out that he cares not for people in his town and only wants to rule by force. It goes from bad to worse when he tries to force himself on the saloon woman.

So it comes down to Heath trying to rid the town of his disturbed old friend.

There is some good acting in this episode. Susan Strasberg that plays Sally, the loose women, does a good job of making us feel for her situation. And James Whitmore is great as the Marshall Wills. He starts off as a good character and slowly changes into the villain step-by-step until even the viewer knows he must go.

Good episode to watch.

Whitmore is always worth watching, as savvy an actor, as powerful a presence as you can get. On his ability to attain great stardom a writer in the early Sixties wrote that Whitmore did not pan out as "the next Spencer Tracy." No, but in that age of teen idols could Tracy himself have been the next Tracy? This episode of The Big Valley shows just how easily Whitmore could leave a lasting impression by mining the depth of a character's psychosis up to the very end, where he tops a grinning performance with a maniacal mug showing how nuts he really is and always was. It is not the kind o guy he played in his many brilliant performances over many years, yet aptly this is a Western, for this deeply intelligent, richly acute acting force of nature was the Wallace Stegner of actors.