Chiefs – Nostalgia Central

1 9 8 3 (USA)
3 x 120 minute episodes

Charlton Heston returned to television after 25 years to head the considerable cast in this CBS miniseries as Hugh Holmes, the banker of the small Southern town of Delano.

The story opens just after World War I, and it is Holmes who shepherds the town out of the 19th Century and into the 20th.

Paul Sorvino plays the county sheriff, Skeeter Willis, and Keith Carradine is the serial murderer who picks up runaway teenage boys along Highway 41, takes them to his home, dons a police uniform, tortures his victims to death and buries them in his yard.

Carradine plays Foxy Funderburke, a World War I veteran who applies for the job of Delano’s first police chief in 1924 but is never seriously considered because everybody knows he’s kind of funny in the head.

Instead, the town chooses Will Henry Lee (Wayne Rogers), a nice-guy farmer who just can’t meet his payments, so he’s forced to move to town.

Many, including Foxy and Sheriff Willis, wonder whether Will Henry is tough enough for the job, particularly given his well-known friendship with a black family.

Will questions it, too, in some good scenes with his wife, Carrie, played by Tess Harper. But he performs more than adequately, fending off Skeeter and intelligently following a set of clues that lead to Foxy as the culprit in a mysterious, sexually oriented murder of a young man.

A sudden ending sees Foxy walk free.

In the second episode, Delano is welcoming its troops back from World War II, including Will Henry’s son, Billy Lee (Stephen Collins), an officer home from the war with an English bride, played by Victoria Tennant.

Holmes has taken the boy under his wing and is grooming him for a political career.

Delano’s most-decorated soldier is Sonny Butts (Brad Davis), a rather demented sort who is nonetheless a popular choice for the new police chief. Sonny is a vicious, sadistic, Ku Klux Klan racist who has been given a badge and gun and told not to let anyone push him around.

Naturally, he and Skeeter hit it off well, but eventually his actions catch up with him as Billy Lee finally convinces Holmes that Butts has to go.

Butts sees a chance to save his job when he stumbles onto some old evidence and some contemporary corroborating proof that points to Foxy as the culprit in that 20-year-old murder, evidence that indicates that he had continued to kill young men who came through Delano heading for Florida on Highway 41.

Another sudden ending keeps Foxy free and the murders unsolved.

The final episode takes place in 1963. Delano has clearly avoided the strife of the civil rights struggle, obviously in part due to the enlightened, if paternalistic, minds of people like Hugh Holmes and Billy Lee, now the state’s lieutenant governor.

It is with such a mindset that they convince the Delano City Council to hire a black man as police chief.

Billy Dee Williams plays Tyler Watts, the over-qualified military police major who carries a secret with him when he takes over. Skeeter is still around and doesn’t think much of a man of Watts’ complexion having such a position. It is a feeling shared by many.

It is finally Watts’ organised investigation of the string of murders – despite the parochial opposition of various officials – that solves the crime, his secret providing a personal denouement.

Filmed entirely on location in South Carolina, mainly in the small town of Chester, Chiefs rings true in its depiction of the 20th-century South.

There are many Delanos, there are many Hugh Holmeses, there are many Billy-Lees; indeed, there are many of almost every character in Chiefs.

It is not the one-dimensional South so often seen on television.

There are plenty of good people, trying to do good things, even if they are occasionally blinded by their heritage. But they carry with them the tragedy of this region, a land of tremendous physical beauty, rich and fertile, with a culture that overflows with poetry and prose and music and taste, and a tradition that defines refinement and gentility and hospitality.

Yet on the underside of that land is an equally strong strain of institutional racism and brutal violence that seems locked into the very foundation of the South.

Hugh Holmes
Charlton Heston
Foxy Funderburke
Keith Carradine
Billy Lee
Stephen Collins
Sonny Butts
Brad Davis
Carrie Lee
Tess Harper
Will Henry Lee
Wayne Rogers
Sheriff Skeeter Willis
Paul Sorvino
Trish Lee
Victoria Tennant
Tyler Watts/Joshua Cole
Billy Dee Williams
Hoss Spence
Lane Smith
Mrs Butts
Kaiulani Lee
Emmett Spence
Leo Burmester
Nellie Cole
Novella Nelson
Dr Tom Manton
Kenneth Campbell
Pieback Johnson
James Brown Henderson
Tommy Allen
Leon Rippy