Branded (in color)

Though I almost never watched them, I always loved the theme songs of Westerns in the '60s - The Virginian, Maverick, Death Valley Days, the incomparable Have Gun Will Travel, and this one - a novel in itself, an epic tale acted out every week which was usually better than the episode itself. Chuck Connors stood there, face as craggy and inscrutable as an Easter Island statue, while his medals and stripes and everything that comprised his identity as a soldier and a man was literally ripped off his body. It was a savage ritual which carried an awful whiff of ceremony, of celebrating failure and betrayal, or at least holding it up as an example to scare the others into obedience and submission. The aggressiveness, the casual brutality of it stays with you - and oh, the injustice! "All but one man died, down at Bitter Creek/And they say he ran away." It comes out in the fullness of time that he was protecting an officer and only pretended to run, or something, but that doesn't matter now.  It's one of the best  TV openings ever, and watching it again after all these years did not disappoint. 

And a couple more for good measure. 

Branded!

Just stumbled on this while wasting time and not writing (my fave activity, it seems - writing is for the birds, I'm done with it anyway). It's one of the better themes of '60s TV: a mini-Western in 2 1/2 minutes. Back then, a theme/intro lasted long enough to tell a story, to let it unfold. Whoever directed this was a genius - the stark black-and-white images, one after the other - the drums, the broken sword, the stripped buttons and braid. And Chuck Connors, my God, who remembered this face, he is a GOD! It's not craggy so much as enigmatic, mojo-loaded in its sere stillness like some Easter Island statue about to be toppled. Western heroes were known for not emoting, and he's so good at it that it flips over and becomes its opposite. I did watch a few of these, but I was ten years old, for God's sake, and what did I know of exile? Since then I came to know it by name, I ate that dust over and over again and had my gold braid torn off by any number of varieties of shame. I walked in that desert and went eye-to-eye with snakes and hallucinated with Moses and searched for water in the rock. It changes you, such exile. You never find your way back. Not entirely. That's just not the way it happens.