User Reviews

Jack Kelly stars as Bart Maverick in this episode which has Bart rubbing wrong snobbish San Francisco millionaire Fredd Wayne who has two Barbary Coast associates I. Stanford Jolley and Terrence DeMarney shanghai Bart for a long sea voyage round the horn to New Orleans.

At the same time Wayne and his two henchmen are planning a really big con game involving discovery of a diamond field in America. One natural resource that the USA was never blessed with.

When Bart makes it New Orleans he teams up with exiled French nobility Lily Valenty and Jacqueline Beer. He wants to get back at Wayne and these two will guarantee him entry into San Francisco society.

Being a Maverick he smells something fishy in the diamond find, especially after he recognizes DeMarney and Jolley as the two who helped him on board the New Orleans bound ship.

The episode is based on a real occurence in San Francisco in its adolescent American years. Of course no one named Maverick was really involved.

Best in the episode was amiable, laughing captain of the ship Sig Ruman. He actually sympathizes with Jack Kelly's plight and gives what turns out sage advice.

Maverick fans then and now enjoy this one.

Near classic early Maverick. Bart gets shanghaied to New Orleans where he hooks up with two penniless countesses. Now he's out for revenge on the rich guy who shanghaied him. Funniest thing, but a load of uncut diamonds has been discovered on the desert, and so a plan takes shape in that fertile Maverick brain.

Most Westerns of the day take place among roughnecks in cheap saloons, usually ending in gunplay. Not with Maverick. The best ones take place among the scheming well-to-do inside polished salons with well-coiffed ladies and dandified gentlemen, and end in a battle of wits. As this one does. The only thing lacking here is one of those slippery Maverick associates, like Dandy Jim Buckley (Zimbalist) or Samantha Crawford (Brewster), to spice up matters. Nonetheless, Kelly does particularly well in his droll role. All in all, this is the kind of entry that separated the series from its competition.

(In passing—if I remember my geology class correctly, raw diamonds are found in only one area of the US, the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas.)