Alias Smith and Jones

Butch, Sundance, and Gondorf for good measure ride week after week for your amusement. It bespeaks to the prevalence of television in my life that I’ve seen so much of this show that no one else my age seems to have heard of. This is a show that was so cool you’d literally celebrate the random luck of finding an episode every two years or so back in the pre-cable slow days of six maybe seven channels.

The best reason to watch the show was Pete Duel.

For right now the show is on Hulu. If you can’t afford that, the Pete Duel episodes are currently here. This is one of the best “Smiler with a Gun” and actually features the one who sadly had to replace Duel as the bad guy.

But this is the best episode to start with even better than the pilot and for now it is here and there are no commercials: “Exit From Wickenberg.”

Criminally I can’t share the brilliant opening credits with you for some reason, but here is at least the audio of it with some stills.

Pete Duel takes on Paul Newman’s Butch Cassidy persona and somehow manages to predict Newman following it up with The Sting’s Henry Gondorf. Duel seemingly pulling off the big store wire grift here a full year so before The Sting even came out! I’d almost like to think Newman and Redford were so impressed by Duel’s charming con men that they stole from him for their follow up. It would be like the Beatles stealing a riff from the Monkees.

OK, stay with me now because this is going to be confusing.

Duel is Cassidy, but his name here is Hannibal Heyes. Heyes tells people that his name is Joshua Smith.

Ben Murphy is Sundance but his name here is Jed “Kid” Curry. Curry tells people that his name is Thaddeus Jones.

See Heyes and Curry are the ultimate Rock Stars of the West. They are this legendary pair of outlaws, worshipped by the rank and file for robbing trains and banks without ever killing anyone. No one respected banks back then.

Unfortunately, Hayes and Curry saw what happened to Butch and Sundance down in Bolivia and decided to cut a deal with the Governor of Wyoming, who promises them amnesty, which like the castaways getting off the island they never seem to earn (God knows after almost getting themselves killed like the 27th time you’d think they deserved it.). For all I know the Governor of Wyoming was just fucking with them or something. Where the hell is all the money they stole? They are always broke. I can never figure out if they had to give it back or spent it like they were Elton John and Redd Foxx out on the town for too long.

Essentially to earn their pardons they have to go straight. In the meantime they are forced to shed their killer cool rock star names for the dork names, and do their best not to get turned in or killed for the $10,000 that’s still on their heads. Every once in a while the Governor gives them some sort of suicide assignment just to make things interesting. By the end of every show, there are usually at least three different parties that are chasing them ragged and onto the next town.

It’s sort of like if Elvis, instead of faking his death, just slipped out of Graceland one day and pretended to be John Burrows from town to town until someone finally put two and two together, at which point he’d move to the next town and do it all over again. Once they figured out who he was he’d sing a song or two and race out of the city limits. Hey, that actually sounds like a decent show to me. He’d even still be touring. Luckily for Heyes and Curry, they never posed for any of the 8 million photographs that Elvis did. Promotion wasn’t nearly as important to the gig back then.

The great thing is that Hayes and Curry, who somehow are the most honest and trustworthy guys in the whole West, still sort of get to be hustlers, thieves and con-men. They just don’t get anything out of it other than another week out of jail. Instead of pulling the big score for loot they do it week after week for their lives. Butch and Sundance ran for like a third of the movie. These guys did it for 34 episodes in the first season alone.

Sadly, Pete Duel got his pardon before the second season when he took his own life. The show continued with Roger Davis as Heyes, but that’s really like replacing John Lennon with Peter Tork, and I don’t really even mean that much of a disservice to Davis. It’s just that had Duel not been so fragile, he would have been huge. The guy nearly dies in every single episode, someone is black mailing him or pointing a gun at him every thirty seconds of his life and he never loses his immense likeability, charm, or cool. Hayes and Curry put up with like ten times as much adversity as Job in the first ten episodes. Is there anything more entertaining than two guys constantly in peril, who refuse to let it stop them from having fun? Hayes still gets to play poker, charm ladies, and hustle the hustlers. Curry still gets to scare the shit out of somebody with his gunmanship, charm the ladies, and basically be Heyes’ wife. I’m guessing they would have been let down if they ever really got pardoned.

The only downfall of the Duel episodes, is like Maverick they wanted to pump them out so fast that they often filmed two at a time and separated them, which given that the show was about the epic friendship and chemistry between the two is epically stupid and sad. So I am too stupid, since Ben Murphy was also amazing on the show to talk most about Duel. But sometimes sheer star power needs to be recognized and demanded to be noticed.

Roy Huggins the same guy who produced Maverick and the Rockford Files added to it and he was the king of telling stories about con men, gamblers, and grifters. Glen Larson created it and the premise was clearly 100% stolen from Butch and Sundance, but it and enough and was good enough not to matter.

Here’s how my grandfather would describe it, and his favorite show was the Rockford Files. You get a little bit of story, a great theme song, some pretty women, you get to see a bunch of scenery and wild animals, and then at the end they have some gunfights, horse chases, and a closing joke. What could be better?

For something so forgotten CBS is very protective on YouTube. You can find the full episodes for free all over the internet, but not even a sort clip of Duel’s brilliance and charm on YouTube. There are hundreds of tributes there, but they are all marred with music.

Just to show you how insane this all is the following clip is on YouTube and shows a bit of Duel on the show, and of course Cavett being Cavett ruins it by talking about nothing, but himself. Find the episodes and make sure the first ones you see are those that star and feature Duel.