The series of tense confrontations with the Nez Perce through which he and Paladin then navigate are not standard cowboys-versus-Indians stuff. But you? They’d stake you out between two poles and flay you alive.īut Anderson takes the job because he needs drinking money. PALADIN: Would a couple of men have any chance at all?ĪNDERSON: Men? A couple of Oglala Sioux, maybe. The first sparse exchange between them lays out the impossibility of the mission and establishes BJ’s quiet self-contempt: As a guide, Paladin recruits a white man who used to live as a Sioux, but who is now a destitute alcoholic. The girl is blonde, but we’ll learn that hers is not the head of hair to which the title refers. Scripted by the unsung master Harry Julian Fink, “A Head of Hair” sends Paladin deep into Indian country to find a long-ago kidnapped white woman, who may or may not have been spotted from a distance by a cavalry officer (George Kennedy). John Ford directed a handful of television shows, but the most Fordian television episode I’ve ever seen is “A Head of Hair,” a Have Gun Will Travel from 1960. “To make sense while conversing with a flower pot that doesn’t answer,” Lipton told reporter Lawrence Laurent, “takes a lot of acting.” Lipton hung around long enough to play one more really good guest role, as a dandyish writer who confounds Steve McQueen’s Josh Randall in Wanted Dead or Alive, and then moved back to New York. Child labor laws required Lipton, cast as a teacher, to play many of his scenes opposite Nolan without the boy present he would ask the director for guidance, and be told to play the scene off a nearby flower pot. In 1959 he accepted a male lead in Buckskin, a western whose real focus was on a fatherless child (Tommy Nolan). Lipton’s first brush with Los Angeles, a feint at becoming, perhaps, a television star, had not gone well. His few films are all noteworthy – Leo Penn’s A Man Called Adam Hercules in New York, the infamous “two Arnolds” (Stang and Schwarzenegger) indie Network (as one of the executives) and Windows, the only feature directed by famed cinematographer Gordon Willis – and all made in or around New York City. But I remember Michael as being very open, talented, and versatile to work with before the camera.”Īctually shot in Phoenix, “Sibyl” was one of Lipton’s last forays to the Coast. “The Bronson shoot was not a happy shoot. He played Harold, the role Leonard Frey had played in the production and in the movie, and Michael was brilliant,” Senensky wrote via e-mail last month. It was in the 1969 Los Angeles production of The Boys in the Band that Ralph Senensky spotted Lipton and decided to cast him as a warlock in a Then Came Bronson episode (“Sibyl,” pictured at the top) he was about to direct. But the bulk of his theater work was done Off-Broadway and on the road, in stock and in touring companies of shows like The Moon Is Blue (1954) and Neil Simon’s The Gingerbread Lady (1973). Lipton made his Broadway debut in 1949 as, essentially, a spear carrier in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and went on to larger roles in Inquest (1970) and Loose Ends (1979-1980). Lipton went on to star in Somerset for its entire run (1970-1976), and did a stint on One Life to Live in the eighties. Lipton’s most substantial television work came in soap operas, where he had a long run playing Neil Wade on As the World Turns according to this blog, from which I have shamelessly cadged the photo below, Lipton (right, with Peter Brandon and Deborah Steinberg Solomon) was on the show from 1962 to 1967. Adler’s late wife Elaine was Lipton’s sister. I learned of Lipton’s passing only by chance, while researching the obituary I wrote for the writer Edward Adler last month. Although his death was reported locally, it seems to have been overlooked by the film and soap opera communities. Michael Lipton, a prominent Broadway and daytime television actor who dabbled in film and prime-time over the course of a five-decade career, died on February 10 at the Actors’ Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey.
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