Have Gun - Will Travel (TV Series) Ambush (1960) User Reviews

Have Tension, Great Episode

[zsenorsock · 9/10 · 20 March 2007]

Really excellent episode directed by Richard Boone starts with Paladin on the trail returning a prisoner. When they arrive at a ferry crossing, they find a dead ferryman and a half crazed Frenchman named Devereaux, who holds a shotgun on them and takes them prisoner. Paladin discovers there are three others already being held--a young trooper and a couple who have run away from her controlling husband. Nobody has any idea why Deveraux is holding them--including the Frenchman, who is acting on orders from a man named Gundar.

Boone wrings all the tension he can out of this "Lifeboat" kind of situation. We learn about all of the characters little by little, until finally we meet the blind Gundar, who is after the person who killed his son.

There's a great face off between Devereaux and Paladin as the Frenchman dares Paladin to go for his gun while he holds a shotgun. Dan Barton does a great job as the son of Gundar, who knows none of these people killed his brother--but also knows his father won't be satisfied until he gets his revenge. At one point Paldin ends up beating a man to death with a table leg.

One of the best season three episodes I've seen!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

[garysteinweg · 5/10 · 16 February 2022]

I've been revisiting old western of my high school days (late 50s) and find them to be "different" from how I remember them. More moralistic, it seems. The previous reviewer provided an excellent synopsis of the episode, but his overall assessment is far kinder than mine. The entire episode is a suspense build-up of a wild-eyed crazy capturing individuals at a wilderness river crossing as they come along and holding them at gun-point in the river crossing shack - for what we don't know for a while. Then the ringmaster of this weird situation, a blind old man with his son, show up and the old blind man starts demanding that the son identify which of the hostages is the one responsible for his other's son's death. In the process of all the drama, two of the "hostages" and the Mr. Crazy end up dying before the old man's son confesses it was he that killed his brother (the old man's other son). In the end, the blind old man rides off with his son in a buckboard, and those hostages (including Paladin) left alive ride off into the sunset (so to speak). WHAT . . . This is BS. Why didn't Paladin perform a citizen's arrest on the old man and his son, tie them up, and take them to the nearest town to stand trial for multiple murders?? I have to admit, though, that I'm finding a LOT of these old westerns putting up with a LOT of nonsense from gun wielding bad guys. Wait, it took Clint Eastwood to fix a lot of this. Never mind.