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Cheyenne

The Storm Riders

Season 1, Episode 8, Aired Feb 07, 1956

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Cheyenne is run down by a hired hand of a nearby wealthy cattleman. Another rancher takes him home to treat his wounds and he learns he has not been the only one attacked.

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Cast & Crew

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GUEST STAR
Barton MacLane

Storm
GUEST STAR
Howard Negley

Ed Jeffries
GUEST STAR
Paul E. Burns

Marty

Russ McCubbin

(Stunt Man For Clint Walker As Cheyenne Bodie)
L.Q. Jones

Smitty [ season 1 only ]
Clint Walker

Cheyenne Bodie

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Warner Brothers recycles two classic movie plots in this 1956 "Cheyenne" with Clint Walker, and the emphasis surprisingly enough is SEX!

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"Perfect"

By maciste, Nov 24, 2005

This extremely interesting episode of the "Cheyenne" must have surely raised eyebrows when it was first aired. The villains catch our protagonist, Cheyenne Bodie, herding twenty horses across their rangeland and warn him that he must turn around and ride off their property. Naturally, our strapping big hero has other ideas until a ruthless cattle king (Storm (Barton MacLane, a veteran Warner Brothers heavy from their 1930s gangster movies)orders his top hand gunslinger to lasso Cheyenne and pull him off his horse. Of course, Cheyenne is taken by surprise, loses his twenty head of horses, and winds up bruised and battered. He rides slumped over in the saddle onto a small rancher John Dembro's property (Regis Toomey) and the rancher's young wife Sheila (Beverly Michaels)and daughter Johnny (Anne Whitfield) nurse big Clint Walker back to health. Dembro offers Cheyenne a job as a ranch hand which our hero readily accepts. Frustrated wife Sheila and the budding 17 year old daughter take one look at Cheyenne's massively muscled chest with a field of dark black hair and swoon. The daughter starts dressing up and behaving like a woman, while the somewhat older wife confesses to Cheyenne that her marriage to an older man isn't what she expected. Meanwhile, the evil range boss offers to buy out the small rancher, but he refuses when Cheyenne challenges the villain's top hand over a matter of money owed him for the loss of his horses. Initially, "The Storm Rider" looks like a familiar rendition of "Shane" with the smaller ranchers trying to survive a hostile takeover from a big rancher. The writers (R. Wright Campbell and "Dirty Harry" scribe Dean Rieser)switch horses in the middle of the stream and focus on the unhappy Sheila whose obvious glimpse of Cheyenne's chest hair stimulates her libido. When Cheyenne guns down the nasty top hand gunman in town in a duel, he awakens the slumbering hope and courage in the small ranchers that if they band together they can repulse the power of the fiendish range boss. In the meantime, Cheyenne spurns Sheila's advances and she grows shrewdish and takes her rage out on her husband who has drunken too much liquor following Cheyenne's shoot-out with Storm's top hand. Now, the small ranchers agree to band together. At this point, the show centers on Sheila's jealousy. She drives her unconscious husband back to their ranch and puts the horse and carriage in the stable. Dembro is so drunk that he cannot unhitch the horse. Sheila becomes irrational and sets fire to the stable with a lantern and her husband dies in the ensuing blaze, but the murder haunts Sheila. Eventually, the authorities are able to lay the blame for Dembro's death on his insane wife. Beverly Michaels is thoroughly convincing as the delusional frontier wife trying to make the best of a terrible situation. The scene where she knowingly leaves Dembro in the barn to burn to death is a plot element lifted from two previous Warner Brothers movies: "Bordertown" (1935) with Bette Davis and "They Drive By Night" (1940) where jealous wives murder their husbands. Again, for a television show aired in 1956, "The Storm Riders" boasts more obviously adult oriented sexual intonations than you'd expect from this landmark ABC-TV series aired in 1956.moreless
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- Clint Walker doesn't take his shirt off in this episode. Instead it's taken off by Beverly Michaels as she plays "nurse." The competition for the big cowboy which then grows up between Michaels and her stepdaughter plays more like something out of Greek tragedy or Eugene O'Neill than a 1950s TV western, making this an unusual "Cheyenne" episode, rooted in psychology rather than action.
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