Bad Guys

[Sue Sue Applegate]

Everyone mentioned so far, and...


Ben Johnson as Bob Amory in One-Eyed Jacks, of course. His first unrelenting villain and one of his best. Though when it comes to Ben's bad guys (and he played many of them through the years), the one that really shivers my timbers is his racist rapist in the Gunsmoke episode "Quint-Cident."

A whole slew of character actors in b-westerns -- Kenneth MacDonald, Pierce Lydon, Terry Frost, Harry Woods, etc. -- usually they were townie types with sinister slickster mustaches, backed up by a bunch of familiar faces playing their henchmen, guys like Charlie King, Roy Barcroft, Marshall Reed, and Lane Bradford (though I saw Bradford playing a nice guy just the other day). There are literally dozens of these fellows making trouble for the B-western heroes and virtually all of them are great fun to watch. The head villains and their boys (and sometimes their equally bad girlfriends whom they truly love) often form extraordinarily entertaining outlaw families with their own internal dramas and backstabbing.

Lee Marvin in The Man Who Was Liberty Valance. Oh, how I want to pound his face into that steak he throws on the floor! A walking id or superego or whatever you want to call it. He's a great big oversize demon baby.

Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West. The coldest blue eyes ever.

Bruce Dern. HE KILLED JOHN WAYNE. *gasp*

Glenn Ford in 3:10 to Yuma. One of those villains who uses the truth to screw with your head. Gives me the creeps. (Russell Crowe is pretty good in the remake, though the original is still by far the best.)

Charles Kemper in Wagon Master. That unctuous fake-polite tone masking a deep and abiding nastiness... ick! Kemper could play sweet fellas too... just a great all around character actor.

William S. Hart. He was bad... until he was good. Usually because he fell in love with a sweet young lady and he would then see the error of his ways.

Great comments, Paula. I will have to hunt down that Gunsmoke episode. I've never seen it.
Henry Fonda really scared me in OUATITW. Ooh. Baaaaaaaad man.

[MissGoddess]

They aired that very episode of "Gunsmoke" Paula described today on Encore.

[pvitari]

Ya beat me to it, MissGoddess... I was just about to post that they had just aired "Quint-cident" today. Sue Sue -- this episode actually runs fairly often, so be patient... it will turn up again before too long. I would have offered to make copies for everyone, but our upstairs DVR -- the one connected to the DVD recorder -- had a nervous breakdown and erased everything. We replaced the DVR, but I didn't bother to re-record "Quint-cident" today. Though "Top Hand" is safely stashed on the new one. ;)

Ben plays S.O.B.s on all three of his Gunsmoke episodes, but as the creepy Crown in "Quint-cident" he's an especially nasty piece of work. He takes pleasure in needling Quint (Burt Reynolds) with racist comments and later in the episode returns to the cabin of a lonely widow (Mary La Roche), with something nefarious in mind, as you can see. You can practically see him licking his chops, and he's enjoying himself. UGHHHHHH.

The episode was written by Kathleen Hite, the first female screenwriter at CBS and one of the top writers for Gunsmoke.





















He moves quickly and prevents her from shutting the door, enters the cabin and -- the rest is up to one's imagination, though we see her the aftermath; she's all beaten up. :(

[JackFavell]

Eww, he's so slimy in this one. As I recall he starts out abrasive but you still aren't sure he's a villain. That makes it all the worse when that scene you posted comes up.

[pvitari]

Yeah, it's a little ambiguous at first. That he's a racist is not in question -- but he's served his time for his past crimes and he's pretty adamant that he's done so and should be left alone. But then he goes back to the widow's cabin and all ambiguity flies out the window. It's a real shocker, actually. I was even hoping that when he first showed up there that he was actually kind of lonely too and hoping to get to know her better -- in a nice way, that is. But no.

People say that today is the "golden age" of television -- that the smart writing today is in TV rather than features -- but watching these old westerns and crime shows, one can enjoy some fantastically good writing (acting, directing, etc.) in television of yore. Which I guess isn't too surprising, as a lot of the people working in television in the 1950s and onward moved there from making features, when B-westerns and noir on the big screen fell out of fashion.

[tinker]

People say that today is the "golden age" of television -- that the smart writing today is in TV rather than features -- but watching these old westerns and crime shows, one can enjoy some fantastically good writing (acting, directing, etc.) in television of yore. Which I guess isn't too surprising, as a lot of the people working in television in the 1950s and onward moved there from making features, when B-westerns and noir on the big screen fell out of fashion.

That is so true Paula.

Ben wasn't the only fantastic actor to play villians in those old tv shows.

One of my favourites is L. Q . Jones who must have played the villian in every western made ( several times) except The Virginian because he had a regular role as good guy. And noone does crazy evil like L.Q. who is still alive and well and often appears at western festivals.

Lee Marvin got to be a villian in a number of shows. There is a wonderful Wagon Train episode where he is the bad guy, a villanious ex soldier who dies bravely, plus a plain evil one who terrorises Judge Garth in The Virginian.

Another regular bad bad bad man in many shows is James Anderson ( Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird), so is Leo Gordon the bad guy from Hondo and Rod Cameron makes regular appearences often as the conflicted bad guy. Russsell Johnson (the proffesor from Gilligan) was also a regular at playing slimy bad guys. And the three really bad guys from High Noon Robert Wilkie (that is an evil face if ever there was one) Lee Van Cleef and Sheb Wooley ( pre Rawhide) also turn up in numerous series. Jan Merlin is another one who must have been appearing as a bad guy in every western ever made.

Its amazing how many of those television western villians had one or two movie roles that were unforgetable but their bread and butter work is often jsut as good.

[JackFavell]

The creme de la creme of bad guys, tinker!

[Western Guy]

Never found good ol' L.Q. to be the most hissable of Western villains. In fact, I think I found him at his most despicable in CASINO.

[movieman1957]

Try L.Q. in "The Jack Bull." But he was a charming kind of guy in the first couple of "Cheyenne" episodes.

[MissGoddess]

I've actually associated L.Q. with rather sweet boys, LOL. I've been watching a different set of movies and TV shows, I guess.

Though I can see he has a rascally twinkle in his eye.

Western Guy: I agree about Donald Pleasance in WILL PENNY....eeeeeew!! He made me furious!!!

[Western Guy]

Well . . . yes, but Donald was made to pay penance in his eternal attempts to bring down Michael Myers. Serves him right after WILL PENNY.

[MissGoddess]

I'm clueless! Who's Michael Myers?

[Western Guy]

Michael Myers was the masked killer Donald Pleasance's character of Dr. Loomis tried to stop in film after film in the HALLOWEEN series.