The Six Shooter
The Star Who Turned Down Chesterfield
James Stewart's only starring radio series came late in the medium's golden run, and it almost had a sponsor. Liggett & Myers, the tobacco company behind Chesterfield cigarettes, reportedly spent months trying to underwrite The Six Shooter. Stewart said no. As producer-director Jack Johnstone recalled, "Chesterfield begged and begged and begged for months trying to get sponsorship, but Jim didn't feel that, because of his screen image, it would be fair for him to be sponsored by a cigarette." Beyond Coleman Heaters covering the first few episodes, the show ran largely unsponsored — sustained by NBC — despite Stewart's standing as one of Hollywood's biggest names. By the early 1950s, radio economics had shifted sharply. Johnstone noted that major Hollywood stars could be hired for anthology appearances for as little as $1,000, down from $5,000 during the medium's boom years. Stewart was willing to commit to a full weekly series anyway, and the result was thirty-nine episodes of something genuinely unusual in the Western genre.
Stewart had spent years appearing on radio anthology programs — Lux Radio Theater, Screen Guild Theater, Theater Guild of the Air — but always in support of his films and always as a guest. The Six Shooter was his enthusiastic debut as a weekly radio series lead. His western film work of the early 1950s, including Winchester '73, Bend of the River, and The Naked Spur, all directed by Anthony Mann, had built the lean, morally deliberate western persona he brought directly to the radio role. The series broadcast on NBC from September 20, 1953 to June 24, 1954, thirty minutes per episode, and ran for exactly one season.
Britt Ponset and the Man Who Created Him
The show's epigraph introduced the character each week: Britt Ponset was "the Texas plainsman who wandered through the western territories, leaving behind a trail of still-remembered legends." He was angular and long-legged, with sun-dyed brown skin and a gun with a gray steel and rainbow mother-of-pearl handle. People called both the man and the gun "the Six Shooter." In practice, Ponset was slow-talking and easy-going but dangerous when pushed into a gunfight — which, across thirty-nine episodes, happened less often than listeners might have expected. Ponset killed just two men outright during the entire run, was indirectly responsible for a third death, and mentioned a fourth only in passing. It was a notably restrained tally for a Western hero, and it fit the character's essentially humane temperament.
Nearly everything about Ponset's voice and scripts came from a single writer. Frank Burt — born Augustus Berek, son of vaudeville performers, former half of the comic duo Burr and Rosedale, onetime refrigerator salesman, and Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University — wrote all but one of the thirty-nine series episodes. He had come back to entertainment as a radio writer in the late 1930s, with credits on The Whistler, Hallmark Hall of Fame, The Man Called X, and The Unexpected. For The Six Shooter, Burt functioned as both creator and nearly sole writer, giving the show a consistency of voice unusual for radio series of the period.
The Ponset character had a direct origin. A precursor episode titled "The Six Shooter," written by Burt and directed by Johnstone with Stewart in the lead, aired April 13, 1952, on the NBC anthology Hollywood Star Playhouse. A subsidiary of MCA-TV called Revue Productions saw potential in the concept and reunited the creative team. An unaired audition was recorded July 15, 1953, using a variation of the same "Ben Scofield" script; it included a personal message from Stewart mid-episode and at the close, aimed at prospective sponsors. That script later became the seventh regular episode of the series, broadcast November 1, 1953.
How It Sounded
Jack Johnstone — born Earl Ransom Johnstone in Vineland, New Jersey in 1906, a veteran of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Crime Doctor, Richard Diamond Private Detective, and The Adventures of Superman — directed the series in association with Revue Productions at NBC. The music was composed by Basil Adlam, who arranged and conducted an existing piece by British light-music composer Charles Williams (1893–1978) as the show's theme. That piece, "Highland Lament," had been recorded by the Queen's Hall Light Orchestra in 1945 and gave the series a haunting melody fit for a wandering plainsman — an unusual, slightly elegiac sound for a Western.
The show's most distinctive narrative technique was Stewart's use of first-person whispered narration during tense scenes. The whisper signaled to listeners that gunplay was coming, and episodes built their most dramatic moments around this device. An episode called "The Silver Buckle" used a whispered narration climax that stands as one of the season's gripping moments of truth. The effect worked because Stewart genuinely committed to it. His evident enjoyment of the Britt Ponset role is cited often as central to whatever lasting appeal the series carries — he later named Ponset one of his favorite roles.
Radio actors from the Hollywood stable filled the supporting cast, including Virginia Gregg, Howard McNear, Parley Baer, Lou Merrill, Sam Edwards, and Shep Menken, with Elvia Allman, Harry Bartell, B. J. Thompson, Jess Kirkpatrick, Frank Gerstle, and Bert Holland also turning up across the run. William Conrad, who was simultaneously playing Marshal Matt Dillon on CBS's Gunsmoke, appeared in multiple episodes of The Six Shooter but was credited under the pseudonym "Julius Krelboyne" to avoid conflict with a competing network. Other notable guest players included Jeanette Nolan, Dan O'Herlihy, Alan Reed, and Marvin Miller. Hal Gibney served as announcer and was later replaced by John Wald.
The Range of Episodes
The show leaned more heavily toward comedy than most contemporaneous radio Westerns, and the range of material was wide enough to be surprising. Ponset once played Hamlet with a road company. In another episode, he ran for mayor and sheriff of the same town simultaneously. "When the Shoe Doesn't Fit" retold the Cinderella legend with a mean stepmother, ugly sisters, and a shoe that didn't fit. At Christmas, "Britt Ponset's Christmas Carol" had Ponset telling a young runaway the story of A Christmas Carol with Dickens characters replaced by western heavies.
Not everything was whimsical. The premiere, "Jenny," centered on a woman mocked her entire life for being unattractive and clumsy, which is why she lives alone in a remote cabin. "The Coward" examined Will Fetter, branded a coward by the citizens of Temple City for refusing to carry a gun or join posses — and then complicated that judgment. "Rink Larkin" featured an eleven-year-old boy who refuses to believe his father was a bank robber and is determined to kill the sheriff he holds responsible, leaving Ponset to stop him from shooting an innocent man. The series ran straight action episodes alongside fully comedic ones, sometimes within the same week, and Ponset's character held the tonal range together.
The final episode, "Myra Barker," broadcast June 24, 1954, ended the series on a characteristic note: Ponset, who had fallen in love with Myra Barker across the season, rode away from her on his horse, Scar. The wandering plainsman stayed a wandering plainsman.
After the Series Ended
The creative partnership between Stewart and Burt extended directly into film. Burt co-wrote the screenplay for The Man from Laramie (1955), directed by Anthony Mann and starring Stewart — another lean western in the same vein as the radio series. Stewart also purchased three of Burt's Six Shooter scripts and produced them for television. The remaining scripts were adapted as The Restless Gun, which ran on NBC from 1957 to 1959 with John Payne playing the renamed protagonist Vint Bonner. Burt served as consultant on the television adaptation but went uncredited on the pilot, which was adapted by Les Crutchfield from the radio episode "Red Lawson's Revenge." The principal producer of The Restless Gun was David Dortort, who went on to produce Bonanza for NBC beginning in 1959. Ponset's horse Scar kept the same name in both the radio series and the television adaptation.
Stewart also made several attempts to bring Britt Ponset directly to television himself. He filmed a pilot titled "The Windmill," with Barbara Hale, John McIntire, and Edgar Buchanan as potential cast members — it failed to sell. He did revive Ponset twice on General Electric Theater: "The Town with a Past" on February 10, 1957, based on the radio episode "Silver Annie," and "The Trail to Christmas" on December 15, 1957, based on "Britt Ponset's Christmas Carol," though in that version the character was renamed Bart. A December 1959 episode of Startime, "Cindy's Fella," drew from "When the Shoe Doesn't Fit," though Stewart played a peddler named Azel Dorsey and George Gobel took the drifter role. Frank Burt, who went on to write multiple episodes of Jack Webb's Dragnet — Webb considered him a favorite writer — had put a lot of usable material into that single season.
The Six Shooter came well past radio's best years, and it didn't have the fine edge of the medium's two strongest Westerns, Gunsmoke and Frontier Gentleman. Some scripts drifted into folksy platitude that Stewart's performance carried more than transcended. But it was an unusual Western for its moment — more varied in tone, more restrained in violence, and more dependent on a single performer's natural authority than most of what surrounded it.