John Sinnott reviewed Have Gun - Will Travel's first season when that boxed set was released in May 2004. By all accounts the program's second year is even better. As before, Richard Boone stars as a gunfighter known only as Paladin, and like his name he is paragon of chivalry. Between jobs he resides at an exclusive San Francisco hotel, where his cultured intelligence is visually at odds with the dressed-in-black gunman he becomes while on a job. Perusing the region's newspapers, he finds clients in need of his unique services and, in the show's iconic image, offers them his business card: a white knight chess figure with the words "Have Gun Will Travel. Wire Paladin. San Francisco."

The show then is a quasi-anthology, with Paladin the only major continuing character. (A stereotyped Chinese, embarrassingly called "Hey Boy" and played by Kam Tong, turns up briefly in most episodes.) The looseness of the show's premise allows for a wide range of locations and situations, one of the program's strengths.

A big part of Have Gun - Will Travel's greatness is Richard Boone's introspective killer-for-hire, a man of great intelligence and morality but also capable of crushing violence when he deems it necessary. Boone's craggy features - and he was the very definition of craggy - the deep lines in his face, the blotchy skin, and a soft, melodious voice that contradicts his appearance, made him extremely difficult to cast effectively. He was sometimes typed as sadistic villains or larger than life historical figures (he played both Pontius Pilate and General Sam Houston) but didn't quite fit either. One of his best roles, ironically enough, was as a combination Frank Buck-type big game hunter/Howard Hughes-esque billionaire tracking The Last Dinosaur, a 1977 TV movie.

Andrew V. McLaglen, a genre veteran, directed two-thirds of the season's 39 episodes, though Buzz Kulik, Ida Lupino (the actress-turned-auteur was the first woman to direct a TV Western), and Lamont Johnson helmed several fine episodes apiece. Although Gene Roddenberry, Gene L. Coon, Fred Frieberger (all later associated with Star Trek), Shimon Wincelberg, Bruce Geller, and Irving Wallace wrote second season shows, the best scripts were almost always the work of one man, Harry Julian Fink, who later wrote the scripts for Major Dundee (1965) and Dirty Harry (1971). He also wrote for Boone's much-acclaimed but short-lived anthology series, The Richard Boone Show (1963-64), and the John Wayne film Big Jake (1971), which featured Boone in a disappointingly shallow role.

Fink's credits here include season highlights "The Manhunter," in which the three brothers (including Martin Balsam) of a killer shot dead by Paladin seek vengeance. The episode also features a fine portrait of an aging sheriff, played by Joseph Calleia (Touch of Evil). Fink also wrote "Death of a Gunfighter," in which a ruthless killer (Christopher Dark) in a blood feud is shown to be both sympathetic and untamable; and "The Man Who Lost," an extremely dark episode in which Paladin is pressured to turn over an accused killer (and coded rapist) to the victims' brothers (Jack Elam and Ed Nelson) so they can kill him. Paladin insists on bringing the man (Mort Mills, the highway patrolman in Psycho) in for a fair trial, but is he worth saving?

Other fine shows include Frank D. Gilroy's "The Protegee," a great episode in which Paladin teaches a young man (Peter Breck) to stand up to the gunman that has run him out of his own town. Wincelberg's "In an Evil Time" is a fine character study of an old bank robber (Hank Patterson) with decades of robberies behind him but little to show for it.

Shows like "In an Evil Time," in which Paladin interacts with one or two characters, work best. In these scripts, the characters discuss and act upon their conflicts with Paladin, while he is often faced with moral dilemmas with no easy answers. The worst shows over-emphasize Paladin's penchant for classical literature or, worse, literally adapt same with a Western setting. "The Man Who Wouldn't Talk," for instance, is dreary, unamusing and quite unbelievable lifting of Cyrano de Bergerac, with Charles Bronson as a shy and uncultured man trying to win the love of the upper-class rancher's daughter.

But bad episodes like these are rare. When one considers that back in 1958-59 shows were expected to crank out nearly twice as many shows per season as a network series does in 2005, a few turkeys here and there are easily forgiven.

Like a lot of programs from this era, Have Gun - Will Travel overflows with great character actors. Besides Bronson, the show's second season includes appearances by such familiar faces as Robert Armstrong, Dick Foran, Harry Morgan, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, Jr., Patricia Medina, Suzanne Pleshette, Clu Gulager, Frank Gorshin, Susan Cabot, John Emery, Alan Reed, as well as genre regulars Harry Carey, Jr., Jack Elam, Don "Red" Barry, Denver Pyle, John Doucette, Robert Wilke, and Roy Barcroft.

Video & Audio

Have Gun - Will Travel looks acceptable, but less than good. Generally shows are about on-par with Image's first release of Twilight Zone episodes. In other words, these are old, ancient almost, TV masters in need of a major overhaul. The results are watchable but little more than that. Some episodes use end titles that come from an even more inferior source, 16mm syndication prints from the look of them. On the plus side, the episodes appear complete and are not time-compressed, with six-to-seven episodes per single-sided disc. There are no chapter select options, but each episode is encoded with about five chapters so one can skip around a bit. The English mono sound is as weak as the image, but it, too is serviceable if nothing more than that. Optional Spanish subtitles are included.

Extra Features

The lone supplement is a Wire Paladin option on each episode, providing short bios on a guest star or two and, more infrequently, background on the episode itself, its writers and directors.

Parting Thoughts

There's been a dearth of pre-1964 TV releases from the major labels. Have Gun - Will Travel has been an exception, and the high quality of the show deserves the kind of sales that'll eventually get all six seasons in stores and lead to more DVDs of this vintage. Have Gun - Will Travel stands as the most consistently good Western show of its era, and still holds up well today.

For Further Reading

Andrew S. Fischer's Have Gun - Will Travel website was of considerable help to this neophyte viewer. Check it out here.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.