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Chuck Connors gave us the sensitive Western hero in ''The Rifleman.'' Here's what the critics had to say
"I'm the good guy, and I hope to stay that way," Connors said.
Sensitivity is an often-overlooked trait that deserves more appreciation than it gets. It's not enough to be conscious of the feelings of other people, you need to be aware of your own. Remember, you've got to be sensitive to yourself as well.
The very idea of sensitivity seems like it may contradict a Western hero. However, when he starred in The Rifleman, Chuck Connors wasn't concerned with making his character like every other Western star there ever was.
In an interview with The San Francisco Examiner, Connors explained that he worked with producer Jules Levy on the show's developmental process, ensuring that the emphasis was placed on the man, Lucas McCain, rather than his weapon.
"Jules got the concept of a man living in the West with a rifle rather than a sixshooter," Connors said. "We made him a legendary figure with feet planted in reality."
Another notable difference between Lucas McCain and other Western stars is his loving relationship with his son, a characteristic that Connors was also conscious of. "We established the forgotten fact that there is such a thing as a warm relationship between father and son," Connors said. "It happens all over the world. Our background was the West. Put them together and you have The Rifleman."
Connors' efforts weren't for naught. Critics noted The Rifleman's new perspective. "I'll take this one, if only because Chuck Connors looks genuinely sorry after he shoots a bad guy...it isn't the weapon that makes this show different, it's the spirit."
Ultimately, Connors was proud of his character, as well as his work on the series. "I'm the good guy, and I hope to stay that way," he said.
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"Another notable difference between Lucas McCain and other Western stars is his loving relationship with his son, a characteristic that Connors was also conscious of."
It was an entertaining show, and the cast was very good. But Connors seems to have missed the point: the show was ALL about a father raising his son in sometimes difficult circumstances; that it took place in the Old West and Lucas McCain carried an odd-looking rifle was irrelevant.
And those difficult circumstances extended far beyond Lucas's being widowed, with Mark not having a mother to teach what mothers teach sons. The truth of the matter is that the Old West was a hard place in which to live. Life was hot, cold, rough-to-brutal and, above all, relatively short. There was nothing glamorous about it.
People back then didn't spend their time drinking and playing poker in saloons, punching cows, taking on outlaws and holding gunfights in the streets. All of that, especially the whole idea of guns somehow being the shining swords of a new breed of knights errant, was invented by western writers like Owen Wister and Zane Grey, then later taken up and glamorized further by Hollywood, in feature films, and then the innumerable Western TV shows of the 1950s, like "The Rifleman."
Just as today, when rabid gun-owners always cite "crime" and "criminals" as the reason they embrace their firearms, very, very few of them will ever confront, or be confronted by, a criminal, nor does their possession of their guns dissuade others from trying to make them the victims of crime.
So it would have been with Lucas McCain: all the armed aversaries thrown his way, week after week after week, were the inventions of the show's writers to keep it interesting and to give the character the illusion of a larger purpose: keeping the town of Northfork safe from marauders when kindly-but-aging Marshal Mica Torrance simply wasn't up to the task. But that's fiction, while guns are real; then, as now, a scourge on society. Too bad the show never did an episode about a kid Mark's age, or Mark, himself, taking his father's gun and shooting up a schoolroom full of his classmates.
Of course, THAT kind of thing DIDN'T happen back then, as it so often does NOW. But it would've been a good allegory and accurate depiction of the REAL America as it exists today.
