Word: gun
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Talking Horse. Behind the hand that holds the gun is, of course, the hand that strokes the typewriter, and television scriptwriters are frantically trying to find new packages for one of the oldest staples on the shelves of U.S. show business. The new horse operas are generically known as Adult Westerns, a term first used to describe the shambling, down-to-biscuits realism of Gunsmoke, but there are numerous subspecies. First came the Psychological Western, which populated the arroyos with schizophrenic half-breeds, paranoid bluecoats, amnesic prospectors. Then there was the Civil Rights Western, and all the persecuted Piutes, molested...
Good or bad, adult or infantile, psychological or just physical, the TV western is the No. 1 talking horse of the average trail-feverish American. A man in Pennsylvania, angered when his wife turned off Have Gun, Will Travel while he was watching it, ran for his revolver and took a shot at her. (He missed.) In Florida one priest bet another that Marshal Matt Dillon was faster on the draw than Paladin-loser to say early Mass on Sunday. Tie-in sales of toys suggested by TV westerns are expected to hit $125 million this year. And at last...
...perhaps most truly understood as shadows of a larger drama. The western is really the American morality play, in which Good and Evil, Spirit and Nature, Christian and Pagan fight to the finish on the vast stage of the unbroken prairie. The hero is a Galahad with a six-gun, a Perseus of the purple sage. In his saddlebags he carries a new mythology, an American Odyssey that is waiting for its Homer. And the theme of the epic, hidden beneath the circus glitter of the perennial Wild West show, is the immortal theme of every hero myth...
...hammers and greased holsters-could slap leather and spill five shots, all in less than a second. (The modern record is claimed by a Denver butcher named Jim-no kin to Matt -Dillon: draw and shoot in twelve-hundredths of a second.) Most of them, besides, carried a "stingy gun" and were masters of the border shift and the road agent's spin...
...resembled the television character in only one respect: he used to bat disorderly types over the head with a heavy cane he sometimes carried. Otherwise, he was a cautious fellow who hid behind a piano in a bawdy-house when a gunman was on the prowl, later bought a gun in a New York pawnshop, filed 22 notches in the handle and, as a reporter for the New York Telegraph, set about making his own myth...