Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the premiere of "Gunsmoke", so I watched "Return to Dodge". Is this TV movie as bad as some people say it is? No. It's worse.
The story can be briefly summarized as "A lot of people are out to kill Matt, and a few to help him." That's it.
"Kill Matt" was not an uncommon story line, and several excellent episodes were built around it ("The Jailer", "Matt Dillon Must Die"). These episodes worked, because they had dramatic elements that took the story beyond whether Matt would live or die. This is important, students, because... "We know Matt isn't going to die!"
"Return to Dodge" has all the dramatic punch of a thrice-used tea-bag. In addition to the requisite clips from series episodes, most of the story has people running around and shooting at each other, and little else.
It only gets involving in the last five minutes, when Matt has his final confrontation with Will Mannon, in which Kitty plays an important role. (Kitty never took **** from anybody, while remaining "feminine".) It's the only satisfying part of the story, and you have to wait one hour and 55 minutes for it to arrive.
Attention must be paid to the horrible makeup and costuming. Kitty often looks as if she just crept out of the crypt. And it seems some unattractive animal attached itself to Matt's head and died there. * (He wears his hat through most of the second half, likely after seeing a rough cut of the first half.)
I don't understand reviewers' objections to Matt being a trapper. He's fundamentally a loner, unable to commit himself to close relationships -- especially with women.
Ken Curtis didn't appear in "Return to Dodge", supposedly because he was offered less than Amanda Blake. This is probably true, but I wouldn't be surprised if he'd read the script (little more than a rehash of "Mannon") and decided to avoid contact with this turkey.
Given that the production team (including a writer and director who'd worked many years on the series) presumably had more than a decade to work on this story, its abject failure is startling.
* Mountain men, plainsmen, etc, often wore their hair long. Matt's "do" bears zero resemblance to how such long hair actually looked (qv, Custer and Hickok).
