Zane Grey Theatre “Miss Jenny” (January 7, 1960)

An arc of the lyrical, unsentimental revisionism that would drive Sam Peckinpah’s iconic feature films a decade later can be traced through his stints on The Rifleman, The Westerner, and The Dick Powell Show.  The finest of these early works is “Miss Jenny,” a discomfiting vignette about a city woman (Vera Miles, rarely this good), her diffident and drunken settler husband (Adam Williams), and the backwoods sociopath (Ben Cooper) who comes upon them and announces his intention to simply take the man’s wife, by force, as his own.  Jenny’s husband ends up gut-shot, but not mortally, and as she tries frantically to get him medical care, Peckinpah (who directed and co-wrote the teleplay with Robert Heverly) conveys the danger and uncertainty of frontier life with a palpable urgency that’s missing from most TV westerns.  Peckinpah has no interest in clear-cut ideas of right and wrong: Jenny’s impatience with her husband’s lack of ambition and survival skills, and her initial attraction to the man who will soon abduct her, are conflicts that plague her with guilt.  The audience must come to terms with these ambiguities, as Peckinpah insists on compassion for all his characters.  “He was just lonely and wanted somebody to live with,” is Jenny’s eulogy for the violent man she’s finally forced to kill.  “He went about it all wrong.”