Laredo

'Laredo' was a comedy western with Neville Brown as Reese, the clownish Texas Ranger. He is marvelous in the scruffy role, which he throws himself into with complete, crude abandon. The other two Rangers were more along the lines of the glamorous cowboy TV actors of the period--Peter Brown as Chad and William Smith as Joe Riley. Philip Carey plays Captain Parmalee and Robert Wolders, familiar to me otherwise only as the last companion of Audrey Hepburn, comes in for the third season to be a fancy European cowboy.

It is William Smith, the Joe Riley character, who interests me because he is the only actor I have yet seen for whom bodybuilding actually was an asset and lent an extra dimension to the acting (maybe the other, more famous bodybuilders had no acting to which the dimension of bodybuilding could be added, so it looked like bodybuilding usually does--DUMB. Anyway, they don't deserve mention by name even if everybody does know who they are and culture now seems geared to repeating the same names ad infinitum--or ELSE...)

Bobybuilding actually even makes a man unattractive when it is overdone; of course, this sounds like an oxymoron, because the stereotype of the bodybuilder is always something overdone. Smith looks big, but not too big--TOO BIG begins to take on the ugliness of stupidity, and this never happens to him.

Somehow Smith manages this balance in which his acting works in spite of the bodybuilding as well as being enhanced because of it. It has to have something to do with his personality, which is not all that easy to research: you can see the list of films and gather that he came to Hollywood as a child and was an extra in a number of mainstream films like 'Going My Way', 'The Song of Bernadette', and 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn', among others--he is quite visible in the last of these, the neighbor pal of Dorothy McGuire's son, and you see him once in the hallway of the tenement, and again very clearly you see the Smith child's-face in the cemetery crowd toward the end. Later, in his twenties, he has a bright bit part with Debbie Reynolds in 'The Matine Game', and a dazzling flash as an eyeful whom Shirley MacLaine and her galpals mentally devour in a restaurant in 'Ask Any Girl'--in the scene, he is proof of their inability NOT to think about men--EVER. There are a few facts about his life on websites, none of which are well done or in any way exhaustive. This is unfortunate, but probably normal for a B actor who is not a household word, even though he did have a second period of roles in the mainstream in his mid- to late-40's, with 'ay which Way You can' being the prime example (opposite Clint Eastwood; this climaxes in their big fight, which Smith would have won but wasn't A-List so lost, of course--in the way in which the biggest stars didn't get killed in 'The Towering Inferno', etc.) He also appeared as Lonnie "Lucky Man" Johnson, Cronenberg's so-called "lost movie" which has nice performances by Claudia Jennings and John Saxon as well. Much later still, in 1994, James Garner (with whom he had done some work in THE ROCKFORD FILES, singles him out for some well-deserved special homage.)

In the 'Laredo' series you see a character that is not as usually involved with the ladies as are Peter Brown and Robert Wolders. His costumes are excellent for the Western swagger and dazzling smile that are what we easily imagine--or is it demand?--the ideal cowboy to be; and there is a subtle burlesque that occurs only rarely that is interestingly ephimeral and arresting; and is not the overt exhibitionism one sees in 'Bonanza', among other Westerns with their ambitious young actors of the period.

This body-acting was equally effective in the Hell's Angels movies Bill Smith started making in 1969, beginning with Run Angel Run', continuing with such products as 'Angels Die Hard', 'Chrome and Hot Leather,''Nam's Angels,' and 'CC and Company'(in the latter, Joe Namath calls him "Your Majesty--both sarcastically and not sarcastically is my guess--and when Ann-Margret is kidnapped, Smith strokes the delicate white skin of her neck, caressing her beautiful face lightly...two different but very real STARS cross paths...) In these films, the body-acting is so effective that in 'Angels Die Hard', he is even called "boy" by one of the redneck burghers; how often does this happen--and seem convincing--when the "boy" is 35 years old?

Bill Smith is one of my three favourite actors, and has a fabulously colourful and varied career.

The 'Laredo' series has various appeal to different interests, but finding it is not that easy.

I thought that bloke looked a bit like Clint Eastwood but it was someone else.

Watching the show as a teenager was fun! They were the Three Musketeers, plus D'artagnan. Nice to see the reruns on Get TV.

One of television's most lighthearted looks at the Old West was the series Laredo. It involved three Texas Rangers who to use the description of John Wayne in Fort Apache, would fight over cards and women and liquor, but would share the last drop of water in their canteens on a desert. They also shared a common trait of always trying to put one over on their captain who was played by Philip Carey.

Our three heroes were played by Neville Brand, William Smith, and Peter Brown. Brand who played many a villain on the big screen and was probably best known before Laredo for playing Al Capone in Robert Stack's The Untouchables discovered his vein for comedy. His career took a similar turn to his fellow character actor Jack Elam in that way. Brand as Reese was loud, brawling, and braggadocious. William Smith who later on played some really nasty villains was the brawny one who was raised among the Indians. Peter Brown who had already had one TV western under his belt with Lawman, played the good looking one in the cast to attract a few women to this testosterone driven western.

Later on Claude Akins and Robert Wolders joined the cast as the brawling and the handsome one, but it was not the same without the original three. Laredo only lasted two seasons with public tastes changing from westerns and cast changes as well. But the episodes which were done with a heavy comic flavor are fondly remembered.

If you like such things as John Wayne's McLintock and the Cheyenne Social Club with James Stewart and Henry Fonda, you'll find Laredo to your taste. Don't expect any sophisticated dialog here, just a lot of belly laughs as outlaws meet justice at the end of every episode.

The Texas Rangers of "Laredo" were introduced in an episode of "The Virginian" where they proved enough of a hit to earn their own series that ran for two seasons on NBC. It was a fun, frequently rowdy hour that was a favorite in my youth. The fine cast was headed by Neville Brand as the older Reese Bennett whom the other Rangers often patronized and made the butt of their jokes. Peter Brown was the calm, compassionate but still deadly Chad Cooper, and William Smith was Joe Riley, a half-Indian as quick with a knife as he was with a gun. Philip Carey rounded out the cast as Captain Parmallee, who frequently found the actions of his charges less than commendable. In the final season, European Robert Wolders was added to the cast as the flamboyant Eric Hunter, whose wardrobe might have raised eyebrows in the Hollywood of the 1960s, and would have certainly gotten him killed in the Old West if he hadn't been so handy with a gun himself. Claude Akins also began to make frequent appearances at that time as a Ranger named Cotton, a character bearing many similarities to Reese Bennett, and it appears Akins was put on the payroll only to fill in for Brand whose drinking sometimes made him unavailable. All in all, a memorable show that also had a brief flirtation with the big screen. In 1968, a year after its cancellation, several episodes from the first season were stitched together to make "Three Guns for Texas" which was released to theaters with "The Counterfeit Killer," a Jack Lord starrer that originally appeared on NBC's Bob Hope's Chrysler Theater. A year later, the series's pilot also had a brief theatrical run under the title "Backtrack."