1.
The Cabin
February
22, 1958, Written by John Meston, Directed by John Rich, Guest Cast:
Dean Stanton, Claude Akins, Patricia Barry
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Never
has so much quality story been packed into a half hour! A bone chilling
blizzard, two post civil war crazies, eye widening violence, mealy potatoes,
and an abused prairie woman who, in the end, heartbreakingly turns to
prostitution because of intense emotional scars cut from the horror of
her experience. Drama, intrigue, murder, hard reality and black humor
are skillfully interlaced - and Dillon finds an interesting use for a
pitch fork.
Every
war produces its group of sociopaths. World War II produced Hell's Angels
- a debauched macho-imaged motor cycle gang formed from air force recruits
with numbed morality. The United States Civil War produced boarder raiders
and jayhawkers, like Quantrill and Jesse James, who, after the war,
continued to terrorize and burn entire towns. These were men whose morality
was dulled by long term uninterupted exposure to the butchery and gore
of war. Gunsmoke writer and co-creator, John Meston, remarkably captured
the characters of these soulless men on the early Gunsmokes. This episode
is Meston's writing at its best.
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