Year:  1987
Rating: 5.5

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During my entire childhood the show Gunsmoke was a major constant part of the TV landscape. It ran on TV from 1955 to 1975 for 635 episodes. Before that it had been a radio show with William Conrad (Cannon) doing the voice of Marshall Matt Dillion. On TV for all 20 years Marshall Dillon was portrayed by James Arness (brother of another TV star, Peter Graves). Arness was to appear in some other TV shows after Gunsmoke - How the West was Won and McLain's Law - but he was and still is identified with that iconic Western TV show. Millburn Stone as Doc also was on the show for 20 years and Amanda Blake didn't drop out till she had 19 years to her credit. Dennis Weaver did 290 episodes and Burt Reynolds was on it for 50 episodes.


I will admit that back then I didn't watch it - it was an astonishing fertile period for Western TV shows - as I was more of a Maverick, Have Gun Will Travel fan. But recently I started watching a few episodes from the first season when it was black and white and 30 minutes and I began to realize why I didn't watch it. It was for grown-ups really with adult themes, a serious approach, a fresh-faced Marshall who used his gun only when absolutely necessary and a main character who runs a brothel. Each show in the first season begins with Arness walking through a graveyard looking at the tombstones saying he put some of the people here but regrets it.


Some shows never quite die - Perry Mason came back for a number of TV movies, Murphy Brown is even back this year as is Magnum- and so 12 years after Dillon handed in his badge, 13 years after Kitty left Dodge for New Orleans and seven years after Milburn Stone passed away, Gunsmoke came back for a TV movie. A few regulars of the show are back as well - Arness looking a bit troll like but still as big and tough as a bull, Amanda Blake as Kitty who comes back to Dodge when Dillon is stabbed, Buck Taylor as Newly who has been promoted to Marshall and Fran Ryan who had replaced Blake as the bar/brothel owner when she left the show.


It is a decent show though its TV petticoats are clearly showing. Dillon is now a fur trapper, but when a convict is released and comes gunning for Dillon he has to go back to the business of killing. The ex-convict is played by Steve Forrest all in black who was a western TV stalwart in the 1960s as well as The Baron. This show plays off of a TV episode from 1969 in which Forrest plays psychopath Will Manning and he beats up Kitty and gets bested and sent to prison by Dillon. This is told in flashback using footage from the 1969 episode - and which has one scene in which he forces Kitty down on her knees to put on his gun belt that was creepily sexual especially for 1969.


There are a few other sub-plots as well with Earl Holliman as a prisoner who escapes to warn Dillon that Manning is coming for him and who is married to an Indian woman with a daughter, an Army trooper who is searching for Holliman and falls for the daughter, Kitty wondering why she and Dillon never hooked up, some bounty hunters also looking for Holliman - it all leads to a decent show. There were to be four more Gunsmoke TV movies in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1994.