“’Have gun, will travel’ reads the card of a man. A knight without armor in a savage land…”

Those words ended every episode of Have Gun Will Travel, sung by Johnny Western in a time that such words could be sung without irony. Outside of Richard Boone’s black-clad, craggy, Rhett-Butler-gone-to-seed gunfighter, that song was all I could really recall about this venerable Western from television’s golden age. Would it, like so many revisited shows from my youth, ultimately disappoint? Or would it hold up fifty years after it was originally broadcast, viewed as it would be by the far more jaded, cynical man I’ve grown into?

What are you willing to do to save the life of someone you love? Would you sail across an ocean? Battle a cyclops or fire-breathing dragon? Or maybe smuggle a substantial amount of drugs across the United States-Mexican border. In Crossing Point, one man is pitted across immeasurable odds to accomplish such a task. Young lovers Michael and Olivia are enjoying a vacation in Baja with close friends. A clear romantic, Michael is ready to leave behind his club days and commit to the love of his life. Their happily ever after is derailed after Olivia is abducted by a drug cartel, and Michael is tasked with smuggling their product across the border into the United States in 12 hours.

With no resources and no assistance, he must figure out how to accomplish this task. Meanwhile, Jesus Valencia, a police detective, is investigating a string of suspicious deaths of visiting foreigners and stumbles upon the operation. In order to complete his task and save his Olivia, Michael must bust the police, coyotes (not the animals), and rival cartels, all while the clock continues to count down.

I was entirely too young to remember even the syndicated run that my mother was watching in the late 1960’s. Under more normal circumstances that would not matter as I could introduce myself to this world with the DVD release. That was before 1987 and the release of Brian De Palma’s classic film. Honestly, I simply can’t watch these episodes without thinking of that movie. For an entire generation that film has defined these characters and that time. It’s unfortunate, really, because this 1960 series had a lot going for it, particularly when you look at what else was on television at that time. Never before had such brutal violence in such a starkly real world graced the black and white sets of America. When I read articles about the controversy surrounding these depictions, I am forced to smile a little. By today’s standards these shows are quite tame. Still, the flurry of protests the show spawned were quite real. Italians were also vocal in their belief that the show went too far in portraying nearly every bad guy as being of Italian descent. I have to admit some of these accents make Father Sarducci sound good. Complaints went as far as the US Attorney General. My, have things changed. I am also of Italian heritage and gladly sit down to an hour of Tony Soprano, eating it up about as fast as a bowl of tortellini and gravy. While there are still those of us who feel racially exploited, most of us embrace the mob mythology of The Godfather and Goodfellas. We can accept the difference between reality and fantasy. And so I watch these episodes as if I were some remote viewer, not only from a different time, but a different place.

The Untouchables took on a perhaps too convincing appearance of reality. Remember that the audience was made up of folks who grew up getting their news from newsreels at the local theater. It was a stroke of genius to have real life news reporter Walter Winchell narrate the series. Everything from that narration to the gritty dark photography carried a documentary style feel to every minute of the action. You can only imagine why too many Americans thought it was too violent. The show wasn’t too violent. It looked and felt too realistic. Robert Stack literally becomes the persona of Elliot Ness. The show was also based on a book that was co-written by Ness himself but was highly fictionalized by the time it reached millions of homes each week. In truth Ness’s team didn’t exist long after bringing down Capone for tax evasion. In the series the team becomes a strike force of sorts against an entire mug book of criminals real and imagined.