User Reviews

If Bret and Bart had really thought about it they would have gone into the Chinese restaurant business and put all those Pappy sayings in fortune cookies. Confucius say, they would have cleaned up.

From their Sabine River border town in East Texas comes young Troy Donahue to get the Mavericks because old Pappy instead of marrying Donahue's mother Virginia Gregg is marrying some nice 18 year old girl from a Creole family across the river in Louisiana. Kaye Elhardt is a lovely young thing who Donahue is carrying a torch for. But her dad and brothers, Henry Daniell, Michael Forest, and Adam West are one snooty crowd.

There is an ulterior motive of course, but you watch the episode to see what's really going on.

This was season 3's opener in the Maverick show and it's a dandy. And speaking of that Bart gets to pretend he's Dandy Jim Buckley. And pappy is none other than James Garner in a dual role.

Both Brett and Bart Maverick used to quote their "pappy" all the time. "As pappy used to say....." etc. In this episode, young Troy Donahue ("Dan") tracks down the Maverick boys to get them to talk sense into their pappy, who is planning to marry an 18-year-old girl. He convinces them to make the trip south to Texas.

Along the way down to Texas, they run into two brothers of the bride-to-be. One of them is played by Adam West who, less than 10 years later, will gain huge fame playing Batman on television. Here, he's a Frenchman named "Rudolph St. Cloud."

Another famous actor guest stars in this episode. He is Henry Daniell, a man who was prominent in many famous feature films of the 1940s and many times played the villain, which he does here, too. He plays the elder St. Cloud.

The story involves that evil St. Clare family planning on killing Pappy "in a fair fight" after the wedding announcement. The motive: creed, of course. There is big money involved. The ironic thing is that the man offering the money for the kill - the elder St. Clare, (obviously) unknowingly offers it to Bart, thinking he is someone else. As you can tell, there are lot of deceptions in this story, which keep in interesting, along with some crisp and often humorous dialog: a trademark of this television series.

In another twist, Garner plays both himself and Pappy ("Beau Maverick"). The tinge of gray hair helped but I wasn't really a convincing dual role. I think they would have been better off leaving Garner to play just Brett.

Whatever it is with the Mavericks, it's in the genes, as this episode shows. Yup, it's two generations of low-down connivers, when Pappy Maverick (Garner) gets engaged to a nubile 18-year old (no shotgun involved). So Bret and Bart head Louisiana way to find out the score and on the way run in to two ornery characters who turn out to be the girl's brothers. It's a whole lot of amusing nonsense from there on, with Garner's trademark sly humor in a dual role, (good make-up job).

As I recall, this was a talked about show because of the clever spin-off on the usual characters. For the studio, it was a chance to get exposure for young contract player Troy Donahue before the release of the box-office blockbuster "A Summer Place", along with another up-and-comer Adam West. Good to see that formidable actress Virginia Gregg as Gida and Chubby Johnson as the flea-bitten bar-keep. However, ice-cold Henry Daniell, the hatefully snobbish villain from a thousand costume dramas, is simply too humorless to fit in with the spirit of things. Nonetheless, this is A-grade Maverick, the kind of entry that distinguished the series from the hundred other horse operas of the day.