WOMEN WITH WARPAINT    

 


REBEL RANGE  

          Other than the crux in Laramie's beautiful theme 
when the buckboard crosses the creek, 
and other than forceful music punctuating 
the oval cameos being pinned on the screen 
during that Gunsmoke opening, 
there's no more rousing moment in tv western intros 
than when the announcer says:  
"From out of the West!  Dick Powell's...  Zane Grey Theatre!"  
          'Rebel Range,' the only episode Kathleen Hite ever wrote 
for the Zane Grey Theatre, was an adaptation of a Joseph Chadwick story.  
          Although Hite may not have conceived every idea 
on which she built a script, what stories she chose to adapt 
fell in with her own like sisters. 
          War widow Stella Faring (gotta love that last name, 
and note the occurrence of Stella here, three years before 'Kitty Cornered') 
returns to reclaim her home, now owned by Union veteran Cass Taggart. 
This is not by any means the first internal restaging of the war 
and the first dramatization of the ravages of that war on hearts and homes; 
listen, for example, to Tom Hanley's 'The Librarian,' 
an episode of the radio series Frontier Gentleman. 
          Hite, however, characteristically makes it an all-or-nothing 
emotional last stand for her female character. 
And Joan Crawford, in less than half an hour of tv time, 
gives a performance that would do any woman, or homesteader, proud. 
As a matter of fact, in facial expression and body language, 
she manages to immediately embody all the qualities 
of the Kathleen Hite agonist female, 
an undertaking that usually takes other actors an hour to accomplish.  
          Scott Forbes holds his ground in this battle of wills drama, 
and proves he's not just the jolly handsome face 
from The Adventures of Jim Bowie. 
Ironically, the powerful presence of John Anderson—  
a superb actor here given a standard baddie role—  
proves to be a distraction. 
          No insult to Forbes, but had Hite gotten rid of the stock villains 
which were presumably from Joseph Chadwick's original story, 
and reduced the elements to an Antony Ellis-like two-person play, 
and had John Anderson played the Cass Taggart part, 
Rebel Range would have had thrice the weight and power. 
Nonetheless, anyone who follows Hite's works 
will not be disappointed by her—and Crawford's—Stella Faring. 



October 5, 2005 


Copyright © 2006-2011 E. A. Villafranca, Jr.  
All Rights Reserved