Synopsis
The Tall Man stars Barry Sullivan as Pat Garrett and Clu Gulager as Billy the Kid though Gulager was thirty-two in 1960, eleven years older than Billy the Kid was at the time of his death in 1881 at the age of twenty-one. The highly fictionalized series provides a more humane image of the Kid than has history itself. Garrett eventually shot Billy dead in a night-time ambush at a farmhouse in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, but no concluding episode depicting the grim conclusion was filmed. Set in and about Lincoln, New Mexico, the series opens with a view of the extremely long shadow cast by Sullivan on a western street, hence the name "the tall man".
In the premiere episode, "Garrett and the Kid" (September 10, 1960), Garrett arrives in Lincoln, depicted in the series as a gold-mining boomtown, as the new deputy sheriff, only to learn that a crooked saloon owner, Paul Mason (Robert Middleton), dominates the community, including the marshal, Dave Leggert (Denver Pyle). When he sees his power threatened, Mason tries to hire Billy to kill Garrett, unaware that the two were then on friendly terms. Vaughn Taylor is cast in this episode as Judge Riley, and King Donovan appears as a Mason henchman.
Marianna Hill was cast in several episodes as one of Billy's girlfriend, Rita. In one episode, Robert Lansing played the frontier dentist, gambler, and gunfighter John H. "Doc" Holliday.
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