Elisha Cook Jr. does not appear until the last fifteen minutes of "Hung High" (1964), but he is such a gosh-darn delight that he walks off with the episode and despite the co-starring presence of such other luminaries as Ed Asner and Robert Culp, well he should.

Being more conversant with the original radio version of Gunsmoke (1952–61) starring William Conrad than with the epic television run of Gunsmoke (1955–75) starring James Arness, I have no idea how normal it is for the latter's Marshal Matt Dillon to find himself in the kind of predicament in which he enters the town of Jetmore, namely framed for murder by one gang of villains and escaped from another equally ready to see him hang for it and facing the prospect of a double showdown with nothing more on his side than the horse he rode in on, but it is welcome standard practice for syndication that an apparently incidental idler on the porch of the sheriff's office should be played by a legendary character actor, meditatively chewing on a matchstick and answering questions the stranger hasn't asked yet. "My name's George. You don't have to tell me yours." He has the philosophically tatterdemalion air of a silent clown in his scuffed derby and ragbag coat and modestly explains himself, "I'm a bum. Every dollar I get, I spend on hard liquor. I'm the most worthless fellow you ever saw," having just cold-read the incognito marshal like a frontier Holmes, casually identifying his quarry, appraising his situation, and preemptively assessing his next move all without sounding like it's any skin off his own nose. "Well, a man like me, he's got to have some talent, don't he?" It's a marvelous turn by Cook, especially since it gives his second-guesser's voice and his anxiously crooked face—further creased by now with decades of crimes and capers never working out—to a character who seems impossible to fluster, correctly forecasting the marshal's chances of selling his horse or buying a gun, unceremoniously ejected from the saloon to dust himself off like an indignant cat and report back the information successfully gleaned by his wistful loitering. The slightly incredulous appreciation with which the mountainous Matt regards his diminutive donor figure may be shared by the audience, all the more as it becomes clear that there's no twist or catch to his cooperation unless casting against type counts. In his mild-mannered, alley-stray fashion, squinting thoughtfully at a man who's in worse trouble than he thought, George is rock solid. He produces a couple of hard-boiled eggs from nowhere and nicely salts them to share, throwing in with a gunless marshal against a known trio of stone killers with a lackadaisical shrug and an afterthought dash of luck over his shoulder: "I ain't doing nothing today."

Cook doing comedy at a slight existential tilt should not surprise anyone who ever caught him as the resigned screenwriter of Hellzapoppin' (1941) who just wants to grow up to be older, but the effect is usefully off-kilter in "Hung High." The episode to this point has been notably tough for a small-screen Western, leading with the back-shooting murder of one of Matt's mentors and escalating into the cold-blooded hanging of the man who did it, an inventively grim centerpiece staged like dark-humored horseplay right up to the point where it sets a shadow swinging across the sudden tableau of a stage-greyed, coolly vindictive Culp holding a stoically outraged Arness at rifle-point: the scapegoat hanged in his chains as the marshal is left cold-cocked and whiskey-drenched for the cavalry who aren't coming to the rescue. Gunsmoke in its radio incarnation had been famous for its bleak, immersive treatments of Western themes, pushing its revisions of its quintessentially American genre as hard as anything onscreen in its decades and in some cases, thanks to the latitude of its medium, further. Ten unprecedented seasons in, expanded to an hour-long format but still shot in black-and-white, its TV counterpart could demonstrate that it had not become totally domesticated, which means that sharp-eyed, self-effacing George is an instantly endearing character whose actor's dust-biting track record combined with the real, sordid violence on offer braces the audience to lose him in some redemptively heroic or just poignantly stupid fashion. Score one for averted clichés. Whatever his weaknesses where liquor is concerned, he's got nerve enough for a front-row seat to a bar-clearing gun brawl and loses none of his offhand, offbeat helpfulness in the aftermath, patting soldiers who chose the right side—at one point there were three—encouragingly on the back as they take their directions from a newly reinstated, tin-starred and gun-belted Matt, whom he gives a decent space of authority before half-admiring, half-scolding, "You took an awful chance." It's no surprise that Elisha Cook Jr. got a broader range of roles in television than the gun punks and fall guys of his formative film career, but it's still a pleasure to see him so comfortable, raggedy, steadfast, with a surprisingly elfin grin when he wastes no time accepting an invitation back into the bar, plenty of business for his beautiful hands and looking the whole time like some kind of penniless clurichaun. "I'll wait outside," he reassures Matt on the steps of the general store, settling down with his matchstick for exactly as brief a time as he expects.

I got this indelible little sketch from Pluto TV and I have to say that watching it in between episodes of Bonanza (1959–73) and The Virginian (1962–71) did give me a touch of tonal whiplash, which should be taken as a credit to writer and series co-creator John Meston and then-fledgling director Mark Rydell. Seeing as Elisha Cook Jr. made four episodes of Gunsmoke, I'm sure in at least one of them he did something criminally doomed, but I still celebrate him when he turns up as an eleven o'clock show-stealer, cockeyed on the side of light. This talent brought to you by my traveling backers at Patreon.