If Rick Dalton ever turned a family identify, it was in the course of the run of the NBC Western TV sequence “Bounty Law,” through which he performed bounty hunter Jake Cahill from 1959 to 1963. A rival program to CBS’ “Wanted Dead or Alive” (starring future film icon Steve McQueen), “Bounty Law” noticed Dalton not solely show his appreciable chops however share the display screen with a lot of notable visitor stars starting from Charles Bronson to Darren McGavin.
Dalton tried to spin the present’s success right into a characteristic movie profession, however the lack of a task in John Sturges’ “The Great Escape” (a task that, in a bitterly ironic flip of occasions, went to McQueen) impacted the actor each personally and professionally. He nonetheless managed to do good work in supporting roles in such movies as 1965’s “Tanner” (a Western epic), 1967’s “Jigsaw Jane” (a proto-giallo that includes Dalton because the killer), and most famously the gritty WWII journey, 1966’s “The 14 Fists of McClusky.”
Dalton stored the lights on in the course of the late ’60s by touring to Italy and making a sequence of extremely pleasurable European style photos like “Nebraska Jim” and “Operazione Dyn-O-Mite!” (each 1970). As Tarantino mentions on the most recent episode of his podcast, Dalton had a wild real-life altercation again in Hollywood round this time:
“He also had a thing that happened with him in the late ’60s where three hippies were bursting into his house, and they were tripping, and they had a gun with them, and his stunt double basically beat the brains in of two of them, and Rick set the other one on fire with the flamethrower from ‘The 14 Fists of McClusky’.”
This incident, although finally minor, remains to be fondly remembered trivia for true crime aficionados and L.A. historians to today.