The late B-movie legend Larry Cohen was primarily known for making outrageous horror flicks and actioners. “It’s Alive” tells the story of a newborn mutant baby that feasts on people, while “The Stuff” is about a yogurt-like substance that turns consumers into zombies. That said, Cohen’s work was always laden with poignant social commentary, some of which he had to disguise to get his point across. This brings us to “Branded,” a forgotten 1960s Western TV series that sneakily critiqued McCarthyism.
“Branded” tells the story of Jason McCord (Chuck Connors), a U.S. cavalryman who gets ousted after being deemed a coward. The soldier is forced to live in shame afterward, despite not doing anything wrong — much like the actors and filmmakers who were exiled from Hollywood for holding left-wing political views back then. Cohen might have found himself blacklisted for telling a story like this, but he was careful about disguising the allegorical elements of “Branded.” As he wrote in “Larry Cohen: The Stuff of Gods and Monsters:”
“It would have been unthinkable to have dealt with this subject literally in the 1960s, but by taking the blacklist and dramatising it in an acceptable manner — and in a popular form like the Western — it was possible. So, I thought I’d do a Western show about somebody whose reputation had been destroyed, and that taint and those accusations followed him around wherever he went.”
Unfortunately, Cohen’s time on the underrated Western series led to problems with its main star. Political differences reared their terrible head on the set, and “Branded” proved to be pretty short-lived.
Chuck Connors had Larry Cohen removed from Branded
Larry Cohen and Chuck Connors had a good working relationship — until the actor found out what the “Branded” was really about. After Cohen revealed that the Western series was an allegory for Hollywood blacklisting communists, Connors wanted nothing to do with him. Here’s how Cohen told the story in the aforementioned book:
“Chuck was a right-wing conservative guy, and when he heard my revelation about the show, he thought he’d fallen into the hands of a communist! After that, we didn’t have much to do with each other. […] Once I intimated that the show had something to do with the unfortunate blacklisting of people, which I’m sure Chuck was very much in favor of by the way, it marked the immediate termination of our friendship.”
What’s more, Cohen claimed that his confession got him removed from “Branded” at Connors’ behest. Given that Connors had starred in all-time great classic Western series like “The Rifleman,” his influence carried some weight. Be that as it may, Cohen was happy to be done with the project, as he was fed up with other writers coming in and ruining his scripts. Overall, it was a win-win situation for everyone — and Cohen went on to write and direct a bunch of classic films.
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