User Reviews

I've never seen the rest of this series, so I have no way of knowing how typical of it the bizarre deadpan black comedy of Frank R. Pierson & Whitfield Cook's script for this episode is.

Paladin's clients this week are Charles and Charity Trevington, a patrician brother and sister from England unperturbed by the death at the point of an arrow of their cousin while on a party hunting buffalo. Charles (played by Patric Knowles) nonchalantly uses the word "wog" half a dozen times to describe the local Indians; while his drawling-voiced sister Charity has a servant girl who has had her tongue cut out in Arabia, is given to comments like "Cruelty can be a form of refinement, you know", and has a library that includes 'A Short History of the Borgias', 'The Women Behind Napoleon', 'The Care and Cleaning of Guns', 'Poisonous Mushrooms' and 'Strange Tortures of Southeast Arabia'.

Valerie French is deliciously dark and brittle as the wholly inappropriately named Charity; and presumably it's just a remarkable coincidence how strongly the whole situation anticipates Edward Dmytryk's 'Shalako' (1968), in which the late Ms French also appeared.

Patric Knowles was a good actor who was in a lot of interesting movies, such as the 1941 The Wolf Man. By the late 1950s he was also doing television. Here he plays the wealthy British hunter who comes to America to kill buffalo. Knowles in this episode really hams it up as a British Lord type of guy who has no clue.

He has an expedition guide played by long-time character actor William Mims (who disappears in the last scenes). A personal French hunting guide played by Lou Krugman, who was also character actor with a long career.

But the most interesting person on this champagne safari is his sister, played by the incredibly beautiful Valerie French. Valerie had a very dangerous 1950s film-noir look. At this point in time, she had been in a few A movies with such actors as Glenn Ford, Lee J. Cobb. She was married to the brother of Jon Pertwee (Doctor Who), and later married Thayer David (the promoter in the first Rocky movie). Every look from Valerie was danger and heat!

So as every Paladin safari story goes, people are getting killed off. Everyone is blaming a small group of Indians who are just making money from the tourists. Paladin in the only one who can figure out the mystery, but can he save the British Lord from getting murdered?