The Guilt of Matt Bentell

Here is the usual excellent and very solid story from outstanding Season One of The Big Valley, which has pretty much the best of everything.

This episode has grown and grown and grown on me through the years.

It cannot be considered one of my very most favorites, but it is certainly climbing the ranks.

It is solidly written with excellent dialogue throughout from Paul Savage, his second of three for the series, all during classic Season One.

The main guest star John Anderson as Matt Bentell is very fine in his believable acting performance, and I almost want to feel sorry for him because he is not a bad man, as you will find out if you watch the story.

This was only the thirteenth episode of the series, and it is already the second guest appearance for John Anderson.

He first appeared ten episodes earlier in story number three, "Boots With My Father's Name."

I also love the usual great Season One background incidental music scores here, and I love the beautiful timber country ___location shooting.

I love the entire story idea as well.

Really, there is nothing not to like here.

I kind of chuckle and roll my eyes a bit because I have heard of some fans who have a problem with the "harsh" way Victoria treats Heath in this story, as if it is somehow not believable and just a terrible thing.

Of course, Victoria was acting like the usual great mother, and I would say to those fans, "Get over it. It is only a fictional story, and it is quite a good one, just like all of Season One."

I wish they had half scores, because I would have probably more accurately given this one 8.5, but I rounded it up to nine since it is most likely an 8.5 to 9 range episode.

They should score one through twenty stars, so there is a bit more variety to rank the episodes, but you get the idea.

We have a beautiful story here in many, many ways, and there are many beauties out there..

The episode begins as the foreman of the Barkley's logging company is welcomed at their home. When Heath is introduced to the foreman he welcomes him with a right cross to the jaw. Heath remembers the man as Matt Bentell the commander of a confederate prisoner of war camp in New Mexico. Seems Bentell ran a camp where prisoners will subjected to inhumane experiences.

Even with that information the rest of the Barkley clan, other than Heath, is willing to forgive. Heath, a prisoner at the camp, states that if he ever saw Bentell again he would kill him. This does not set too well with Victoria- she gives Heath a scolding that finally turns his attitude.

Victoria decides to send Heath with Bentell to the logging camp. She believes that once he gets to know him perhaps the hatred will vanish. So Heath and Bentell set off for the logging camp up in the mountains.

When the word get out that the infamous Bentell is working at the logging area it brings out others that want to see him dead. Heath is now placed as the middle-man between people wanting revenge and Bentell.

John Anderson, as Matt Bentell, was a perfect cast. He was good as the former POW Commander that now has to face his past. Martine Bartlett and Morgan Woodward also did a good job on this show.

Very entertaining episode.

Is so painfully obvious here! It's a fairly engrossing episode. Heath letting Bentell have it right in the jaw whilst being 'introduced' in the Barkley living-room is fun.

The guy who played Matt Bentell (John Anderson, in a suitably boorish performance) will be curiously familiar to baby boomers: he sold Janet Leigh her used 'get-away' car in "Psycho".

"Show us what you inherited from your father: show us some of Tom Barkley's guts!" insists Vicki to our Heath (one of her signature lines in the show)

It's an okay episode: Matt Bentell was also Heath's Uncle Matt in "Boots with My Father's Name": nobody really cares about these minor 'goofs' faux pas, whatever.

The show is a winner.

As this Big Valley episode opens Victoria Barkley and her sons are getting a report from the foreman of the lumber mill John Anderson. But when Lee Majors arrives he starts beating up on Anderson. It turns out that Anderson was a notorious commandant of a prisoner of war camp where Heath spent some time. This was a place where the prisoners were starving toward the end of the Civil War as the Confederacy had no provisions to feed their own let alone prisoners. The famous scandal at Andersonville and Libby prisons was proof enough of that.

I have to say that Barbara Stanwyck asked something completely unreasonable of Lee Majors, that he should forget what happened in the past and concentrate on the present. I think most viewers then and now would agree with me.

Turns out there are others who have no fond memories of that prison nor of Anderson. That's where he has his real problems.

Not one of the better Bif Valley episodes.

My main hangup with this episode is that I have trouble believing a man who is supposed to have come to the Barkleys in 1876 at the age of 24 would have been old enough during the Civil War to have been put in a confederate prison. This is a plot line recycled from other westerns (Laramie comes to mind first) but it's not a bad story, even with the basic flaw.

Heath can't accept that the new manager of one of the Barkley logging camps is the former commandant of the prison camp he was in during the war, so he is assigned to help the guy out in hopes the experience will bring him around.. It's a journey of self-discovery for Heath, a side-journey from the one he thought he was on, but one he needed to have.

Also interesting in this episode is that it's Jarrod who gets into the all-out punch-em-out and knock the bar over saloon fight in this episode, minus his brothers. It's a whopper of a fight and for once, the fighting Barkley actually ends up looking like he's had a battle. But he's a Barkley, and even if he is generally even tempered, he cuts loose in this one, aided by a couple of lumberjacks who turn out not to be quite who they act like at first.