Royal Dano spent 50 years in Hollywood, playing bumbling oafs, inbred hillbillies, ignorant yokels, cowardly soldiers, mean-spirited alcoholics, and other broad stereotypes. In this episode of The Rifleman, Dano plays a creepy parody of Abraham Lincoln.
Every time Dano showed up in a TV Western, it was usually in some kind of role that called for a two-dimensional character. Dano never delivered a thoughtful or meaningful performance as a 1870s Western cowboy. He always played the broadest and most degrading stereotype of a rough mountain man, dim-witted hillbilly, gullible country folk, drunken miner, etc.
Here Dano plays some demented half-wit who thinks he is Abraham Lincoln. Fake Lincoln is married to an understanding woman who caters to him as if he were President Lincoln. Living on a tiny dirt farm, you have to wonder how the fake Mr. Lincoln reconciled his poverty?
The people in town despised him, and constantly baited his ridiculous persona and physically attacked him. In the real world of the 1870s, how long could that last before fake Lincoln was killed? This could have been a ground-breaking episode about mental health treatment. Instead it was about labeling a crazy person as eccentric. Luke taught his son Mark that dealing with the mentally disturbed was just about playing along with whatever a crazy person believes is true.
Every time I see this episode, and watch Royal Dano shuffling around, making faces like he was Abraham Lincoln, I feel sorry for Honest Abe. I bet the real President Lincoln turned in his grave, back in 1961, when this episode first aired.