Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Fifteen Ways to Lose Your Love Interest (Or, the TV Western Writer’s Guide to Disposing of Female Guest Stars)

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If you’ve watched classic TV Westerns for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed something about the recurring characters of any given series: they can’t seem to make a romantic relationship stick. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the Curse of the Cartwrights, but it is by no means limited to that one unfortunate family. (Or perhaps the Virginian was just a distant cousin of theirs; I don’t know.)  If “the hero gets the girl” was a cliché of the Western film, serial television turned it on its head and took it to the opposite extreme—even the most heroic of heroes just couldn’t make it to the altar. The real-life Old West must have had its share of bachelors, surely, but they couldn’t possibly have been jilted, bereaved and left in the lurch as many times as the cowboys of the small screen.


But it wasn’t really the heroes’ fault, of course. The blame lies with screenwriters who seemed to be allergic to the notion of marriage for recurring characters. We all know the real reason for this, of course: they wanted the opportunity to write romance episodes as often as they liked, and a steady love interest—let alone a wife—would get in the way. This meant that they were forced to get quite creative in thinking up ways to get rid of their female guest stars once they’d gotten the requisite number of romantic scenes out of them. The following is a list of methods, ranging from the cliche to the highly original, for a love interest to make her exit. Lest you think I’m just romancing (pun intended), let me add here that most, if not all, are drawn from actual TV Western episodes that I’ve seen myself:

1. She transfers her affections to someone else.
2. She decides that the West isn’t for her and catches the first train back East.
3. She never forgives you for having to shoot her no-good father or brother.
4. She gets caught in the crossfire of the climactic gunfight.
5. She dies of a fatal illness.
6. She turns out to be married already, and her husband suddenly turns up.
7. She turns out to be part of the outlaw gang. (Variation 7b., a con artist.)
8. She reveals a secret about her past that makes you change your mind.
9. She is offered a lucrative position and decides to eschew marriage in favor of a career.
10. She is told she has talent and decides to eschew marriage in favor of becoming an actress, singer, artist, etc.
11. She decides she’d rather stay with the Indians who captured her.
12. She enters a convent.
13. You promise to “come back for her,” but inexplicably never do.
14. It turns out that she doesn’t actually exist.
15. She simply changes her mind.

Have I forgotten anything?

So far as I know, the only TV Westerns that included a married couple among the regular cast of characters were High Chaparral and the last few seasons of The Virginian, when the third owner of Shiloh Ranch was a married man. Does anyone know if there were any others?

Saving the Ranch

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Ranch near Laramie, WY, 1941 (photo by Marion Post Wolcott)

Anyone who is well acquainted with the Western genre is probably familiar with the plot device of the ranch in peril. Many Western films and stories feature a pretty girl and her father, or a widow, or perhaps a family, trying to keep their mortgaged ranch from being foreclosed upon by the villain of the piece. It’s up to the hero to raise the money, or, alternatively, expose the crookedness of the man holding the mortgage. It’s a plot seen often enough to have become a cliché of the genre. Looking a little closer, though, the time period at which this type of plot became prominent is interesting. From what I’ve seen, it’s not so prevalent in earlier Western fiction (e.g. 1900 through 1920s). Land was sometimes endangered, yes, by range disputes, the elements, and so on, but the mortgage theme in particular had not yet become a cliché. But as I noted in a book review last summer, some collections of Western short stories from the 1930s through the ’50s featured the ranch-in-peril plot in a significant number of the stories.

Several years ago I read a very interesting article (regrettably no longer available to read online) titled “Through the Great Depression on Horseback: Lawyers in Western Films of the 1930s” by Francis M. Nevins Jr. One particular paragraph struck me as illuminating, since I’d watched plenty of the B-Westerns Nevins is referring to, and his comments on the ranch-in-peril theme made perfect sense:

Dozens of Western films of the thirties dealt with the evil banker foreclosing or about to foreclose the mortgage on the ranch that the young lady and her father own. Today we laugh at this as a cliché, but I believe we must keep in mind that this story line wasn’t at all entertaining for the people who were watching these films in little towns in the western and southern and middle states of America during the 1930s. Losing their homes to a bank was the threat that dominated their lives; for many of them, it was reality. These little Western films, remember, were made by people who didn’t have much money, who weren’t making much money, and for people who didn’t have much money and weren’t making much money.

The point about the evil financier is very true. If you’ve watched any amount of this type of Western you’ve probably seen it lots of times, but it takes on new significance if you consider it in its Depression-era historical context. Many of the chief villains were bankers, lawyers, and slick businessmen of one sort or another, often masquerading as honest citizens for most of the film. (My siblings and I inadvertently coined our own term for this type years ago: suit-villain. The kind that always wears a suit and spends most of his time behind a desk scolding his henchmen for their inefficiency. Sometimes wears a thin moustache and often has a derringer hidden in his inside coat pocket.) A sterling example of the crooked banker in the B-Western is 1940’s Texas Stagecoach. Here a banker convinces the owners of a stagecoach line to borrow heavily from him to finance an ambitious road construction project, then has his accomplices maneuver them into a feud with a rival company and sabotage their work so he can eventually foreclose.

The ranch-in-peril was already considered a cliché by the late ’40s, if you go by the criteria that it was ripe for satire. Songwriter Jack Elliott took a poke at it in the tongue-in-cheek number “I Love the West,” sung by Dale Evans in the movie Bells of San Angelo:

…Where the hero, strong and styling
Keeps the little gal from harm.
Fightin’ twenty thousand Indians
Or paying off the mortgage on a farm…

I find it interesting that this plot device persisted even after the Depression ended. Did this plot device became an accepted and integral part of the Western genre because it had been particularly relevant at the time when the genre was developing and rising to great popularity? I‘ve always held that a film (and to some degree, a book or other work of art) bears the mark of the time it was created in some way, whether it’s costumes and hairstyles that reflect the popular fashions of the day instead of the historical period they’re supposed to be from, or, more subtly, the attitudes and opinions of the characters anachronistically reflecting the filmmakers’ modern sensibilities. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy reading old books—they have a flavor of their own time that even the best historical fiction is hard pressed to beat. While 1930s may not have been the only factor in the popularity of the ranch-in-peril plot, it’s fascinating to consider how they may have helped to inform and influence Western film to the degree that they shaped the standards of the genre even afterwards.

Some material in this post is drawn from one published a few years ago on a now-defunct prior blog of mine.

Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies: North West Frontier (1959)

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Film poster, with U.S. release title

North West Frontier (also known in the U.S. as Flame Over India) has several ideal ingredients for a good story—a small, diverse group of characters brought together in close quarters on a dangerous journey across forbidding territory, with both outside and inside threats to contend with along the way. If any of that sounds familiar, yes, this is a film that has often been compared to Stagecoach, and referred to as “the British version of a Western.” Those familiar elements are all employed well, and the more exotic setting makes an interesting twist on the story.

The film is set in British-occupied India, in 1905, where Moslem rebels are bent on killing a six-year-old Hindu prince, the heir of the people opposed to the rebels. The task of smuggling the boy out of a besieged garrison town and across hundreds of miles of hostile territory to safety is assigned to a plucky British officer, Captain Scott (Kenneth More). The last train has gone, but Scott manages to find a small, dilapidated old engine, nicknamed “Victoria,” in which to make their escape. Victoria, who is just about as much a character in the film as anyone, leaks water and steam in all the wrong places, requires much loving care from her devoted engineer Gupta (I.S. Johar) and has a habit of letting off her whistle unexpectedly at just the wrong moment, but she’s the only option. Besides a couple of native soldiers under Scott’s command, a handful of civilians are along for the ride—the young prince’s governess, American widow Mrs. Wyatt (Lauren Bacall), the British governor’s wife, Lady Wyndham (Ursula Jeans), an elderly diplomat (Wilfrid Hyde-White), an arms manufacturer (Eugene Deckers) and a Dutch newspaper reporter (Herbert Lom).

Their journey is fraught with perils, from dynamited railway lines and a damaged bridge to the bands of rebels on their track. Personally, I think the passengers in Stagecoach had an easier time of it—they mainly had to sit tight until the big battle, which didn’t come till late in the film. The passengers of North West Frontier have a much closer acquaintance with sweat, grime and bullets, as they take an active part in several fights and the effort to keep Victoria rolling. Meanwhile, the atmosphere inside the coach is occasionally strained by personal and political differences among the occupants. Eventually it becomes apparent that someone on the train also has designs on the young prince’s life. The audience becomes aware of this fact before the other passengers, adding further to the tension.

There’s plenty of humor running through the film as well, to balance the more serious elements. I.S. Johar steals every scene as Gupta the engineer, with his devotion to his beloved Victoria and his delightful mangling of the English language (if you got a kick out of the “Ten watch” scene in Casablanca, you’ll love listening to Gupta). Wilfrid Hyde-White’s Mr. Bridie also adds a lighter touch of quintessentially dry British humor, and proves unexpectedly valiant in tight places as well. And the cinematography is striking through the whole film—the location shots were filmed in Spain, standing in for India, in deserts and mountains that are barren and yet bleakly beautiful, in their way.

The romance which naturally develops between Captain Scott and Mrs. Wyatt is nicely understated; it doesn’t feel tacked on or in the way of the main story. It’s nice, for a change, to begin with characters who are already somewhat acquainted and get along well instead of starting off by despising one another, although they do have their differences along the way. My one quibble with the movie is with Lauren Bacall’s hair—why did filmmakers of the ’50s and ’60s insist on historically inaccurate loose hairstyles for women in period films? In the early scenes Bacall wears an elegant and period-correct updo, but once the train journey starts her hair is worn loose. (Personally, if I were travelling across the desert in a stuffy railway coach I’d want my hair up off the back of my neck anyway.) My mom says that her light-colored dress stayed much too clean, considering everything she went through on the trip, but to be fair, on second viewing I did see a few stains.

North West Frontier is available on DVD, on Netflix Instant, and is currently viewable on YouTube. This is an entry for Tuesday’s Overlooked Movies, a weekly blog event hosted by Todd Mason.