Bonanza: The Hunter (1973) – Review

Running fourteen seasons, Bonanza is the second-longest Western series – only eclipsed by Gunsmoke which lasted twenty seasons – so the fact that the writers of either show would dip into the classic story “The Most Dangerous Game” is not at all surprising, sadly, this episode titled “The Hunter” would also be Bonanza’s swan song.

The plot of “The Hunter” kicks off with the introduction of the episode’s antagonist, Corporal Bill Tanner (Tom Skerritt), who is in prison after facing a military tribunal. He was a tracker for the army but whose taste for hunting humans turned him psychotic, resulting in him murdering women and children, and his defence of “It was my duty” is a key piece of understanding that this man isn’t right in the head. Unfortunately, he easily escapes from prison and before you can say “gun control” he has murdered again and acquires a horse and rifle. Enter our hero. Joseph ‘Little Joe’ Cartwright (Michael Landon) who is sent on a delivery run by his father Ben Cartright (Lorne Greene) and it’s while on route that he encounters Bill Tanner. Over a plate of beans, we get a little insight into the mind of Bill Tanner.

Tanner: “Anyone can track an animal down, cougar, deer. I don’t hold to killing animals. A man’s different. That’s the real test.”
Little Joe: “Test of what?”
Tanner: “Survival. Intelligence. Killing is natural to all animals, man is just the smartest animal, that’s all.”
Little Joe: “Come on, you don’t believe that. An animal doesn’t kill for pleasure it kills for food.”
Tanner: “It’s alright to kill for food then?”
Little Joe: “That’s the way nature planned it, I guess.”
Tanner: “Yeah…I guess.”

 

“You’re going to hunt me in the morning, aren’t you”

Little Joe wakes up in the morning to find his horse and supplies stolen. At first, he assumes that Tanner simply robbed him but that would have been great compared to Tanner’s real motive. It seems Tanner wants to prove two points, that he’s a good tracker and that animals don’t just kill for food – believing humans are animals and that Little Joe will eventually turn and try and kill him. It should be noted that if he’d been tracking someone like John Rambo he may have been proven right but that’s not the case here. Little Joe’s declaration that “We are men not animals” only gets a laugh in response, as well as the information from Tanner that he is “Giving you four hours to get away then I’m coming after you. Four hours!”

 

I’m getting the impression he’s not quite right in the head

Stray Observations:

• This episode was remade on Gunsmoke as “Matt Dillon Must Die” which while not the last episode in that series, it was the opener for its last season.
• There are absolutely no women in this episode, which was not something that tended to happen during Bonanza’s fourteen season run.
• Tanner coldly murders this hapless Mexican but then feeds the dead man’s dog. This action makes Tanner a more interesting psychotic killer and certainly not typical of what would be found on 70s television.
• One of the more interesting elements of this episode is the haunting whistling of “Frere Jacques” by Tanner, it gives his character an extra bit of unworldliness.
• Tanner gives Little Joe a four-hour head start, a considerably bigger lead than the fifteen minutes given to Gilligan in the episode “The Hunter” or Kelly and Scott in the episode of I Spy titled “The Name of the Game”
• Little Joe’s booby-trap sends a wooden spike through Tanner’s calf but the injury doesn’t seem to slow him down at all, we see him jogging at full speed in no time, which puts him in the category of unstoppable killers like Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees.

 

“Ki ki ki, ma ma ma, Tanner, Tanner, Tanner.”

Not only does this episode star Michael Landon but he wrote and directed it as well, and he does an admirable job on all fronts. Throughout this episode we get to see Little Joe broken into this wounded animal on the run, who only comes out on top when he utilizes the cunning of man, and he does a great job at building tension and the pacing never flags for a moment. This particular take on Richard Connell’s short story “The Most Dangerous Game” doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it doesn’t need to. Landon knew that to make this premise work all that was required was to provide compelling characters and with Tom Skerritt’s crazed Bill Tanner, we have that in spades. His psychotic obsession with tracking, something ignited and fuelled by his time in the army, gives us a villain with a distinctively darker edge and is a compelling figure. He’s not some big game hunter looking for a new challenge, he’s a cold-blooded killer with a thirst that can only be extinguished in death. His eventual defeat by Little Joe, while expected, has an extra layer of tragic pathos. Was this man always a monster or was it his time in the army that created him?

 

A surprisingly sad ending for such an evil man.

This was the last episode of Bonanza and arguably one of the best, the performances by both Michael Landon and Tom Skerritt were fantastic – though Skerritt does have the showier part and he gives us a truly disturbing and memorable villain – and while the premise of “The Most Dangerous Game” has been used in both movies and television this particular outing is especially noteworthy, in fact, tack on an extra thirty-minutes and you’d have a solid movie. Overall, this is a great and unusually dark episode of Bonanza and one I highly recommend.