"The Photographer" was the first of two episodes for legendary scene stealer John Carradine, playing the title role of photographer Abel Goss (with moustache), a close friend of the McCains. Abel is trying to take a picture of young Mark McCain (Johnny Crawford), when he is challenged in the street by Col. Jess Whiteside (Raymond Bailey). Two shots ring out, and Abel is arrested for murder when Lucas finds two bullets fired from Abel's gun, and Col. Whiteside shot dead in the back, no bullets fired from his rifle. Sidney Blackmer has a nice part as the judge presiding over Abel's subsequent trial, where he is revealed to have been Col. Whiteside's tortured prisoner during the Civil War. Determined to prove Abel's innocence, it is Mark who remembers the photograph being taken at the exact moment the shooting occurred. Carradine would play a different character in his next entry, "The Mind Reader," another whodunit story.
3 Reviews
John Carradine steals the Show
gordonl5620 January 2014
Warning: Spoilers
THE RIFLEMAN –The Photographer - 1958
This is the 18th episode from the 1958 to 1963 western series, THE RIFLEMAN. Over the course of 168 episodes we follow the life of Lucas McCain and his son, Mark. They have just moved to the small western town of North Fork where they hope to start a new life. Chuck Connors headlines the series with Johnny Crawford as his son. Connors is a world class hand with a Winchester rifle which of course ends up getting him in no end of trouble.
John Carradine guest stars in this one as an old photographer friend of Chuck Connors. He and his wagon tour the various western towns and take pictures for the locals, for a small fee of course. He is in North Fork for a few days and agrees to take Connors' son's photo.
While in the middle of this picture taking, an old enemy of Carradine, Raymond Bailey, steps up and challenges Carradine. Carradine shoves Crawford down to the ground for safety and yanks out his gun. Shots are fired and Bailey is killed. When Sheriff Paul Fix inspects Bailey, he finds his gun unfired, and that he had been shot in the back.
Carradine is brought up on murder charges. A business partner of Bailey, Robert Ellenstien is the main witness against Carradine. The boy, Crawford thinks there is something fishy going on and has a look at the scene. In the best tradition of Perry Mason etc. he discovers that Ellenstien is the real killer. He calls the man on it in court. Ellenstien pulls iron but is quickly put down and tossed in jail. It seems Ellenstien wanted to pull a fast one on his business partner. He had shot Bailey in the back with a rifle after sending him to talk with Carradine.
Carradine is released and Ellenstien is charged for the murder. Some will recall Raymond Bailey from his years as the money pinching Mister Drysdale, on the long running, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES. (1962-71)
This is the 18th episode from the 1958 to 1963 western series, THE RIFLEMAN. Over the course of 168 episodes we follow the life of Lucas McCain and his son, Mark. They have just moved to the small western town of North Fork where they hope to start a new life. Chuck Connors headlines the series with Johnny Crawford as his son. Connors is a world class hand with a Winchester rifle which of course ends up getting him in no end of trouble.
John Carradine guest stars in this one as an old photographer friend of Chuck Connors. He and his wagon tour the various western towns and take pictures for the locals, for a small fee of course. He is in North Fork for a few days and agrees to take Connors' son's photo.
While in the middle of this picture taking, an old enemy of Carradine, Raymond Bailey, steps up and challenges Carradine. Carradine shoves Crawford down to the ground for safety and yanks out his gun. Shots are fired and Bailey is killed. When Sheriff Paul Fix inspects Bailey, he finds his gun unfired, and that he had been shot in the back.
Carradine is brought up on murder charges. A business partner of Bailey, Robert Ellenstien is the main witness against Carradine. The boy, Crawford thinks there is something fishy going on and has a look at the scene. In the best tradition of Perry Mason etc. he discovers that Ellenstien is the real killer. He calls the man on it in court. Ellenstien pulls iron but is quickly put down and tossed in jail. It seems Ellenstien wanted to pull a fast one on his business partner. He had shot Bailey in the back with a rifle after sending him to talk with Carradine.
Carradine is released and Ellenstien is charged for the murder. Some will recall Raymond Bailey from his years as the money pinching Mister Drysdale, on the long running, THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES. (1962-71)
cue "Park Avenue Beat"...
grizzledgeezer19 June 2013
Warning: Spoilers
In this not-very-clever whodunit, Mark plays Perry Mason. (Does that make Lucas Della Street? More likely Paul Drake, I suppose.)
In an attempt to create ambiguity about who-shot-whom, the writer (Ken Kolb) throws logic out the window. If one believes Mark's testimony that Whiteside was "making like" he was about to draw on Goss, how does one then explain how Whiteside could have been shot in the back? Worse, as Whiteside /was/ actually shot in the back from a window on the second floor of the hotel, the bullet that killed him must have passed through and been the bullet Goss says whizzed past him. But it was fired from a high angle, making such a path essentially impossible.
(Erle Stanley Gardner did this sort of thing much better in "The Case of the Singing Skirt", in which the victim is killed with a gun that could not possibly have been the murder weapon.)
There's one clever turn at the end, in which Lucas pulls a Mason-style trick. I anticipated it, on the assumption it /would not/ be used -- but it was.
The writer apparently didn't do research to learn what photographers charged. A tintype or ambrotype cost about $1 during the Civil War. For Goss to charge Mark 50 cents for a full-plate 8x10 photo is absurd. Also, Eastman didn't start selling dry plates until 1881 (about a year before this episode takes place), so it's likely the photographer would still have been using wet plates, not the dry plates shown. (Oddly, the potassium cyanide Goss tells Lucas to use to fix the image /was/ used with wet plates.)
In an attempt to create ambiguity about who-shot-whom, the writer (Ken Kolb) throws logic out the window. If one believes Mark's testimony that Whiteside was "making like" he was about to draw on Goss, how does one then explain how Whiteside could have been shot in the back? Worse, as Whiteside /was/ actually shot in the back from a window on the second floor of the hotel, the bullet that killed him must have passed through and been the bullet Goss says whizzed past him. But it was fired from a high angle, making such a path essentially impossible.
(Erle Stanley Gardner did this sort of thing much better in "The Case of the Singing Skirt", in which the victim is killed with a gun that could not possibly have been the murder weapon.)
There's one clever turn at the end, in which Lucas pulls a Mason-style trick. I anticipated it, on the assumption it /would not/ be used -- but it was.
The writer apparently didn't do research to learn what photographers charged. A tintype or ambrotype cost about $1 during the Civil War. For Goss to charge Mark 50 cents for a full-plate 8x10 photo is absurd. Also, Eastman didn't start selling dry plates until 1881 (about a year before this episode takes place), so it's likely the photographer would still have been using wet plates, not the dry plates shown. (Oddly, the potassium cyanide Goss tells Lucas to use to fix the image /was/ used with wet plates.)
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