The Westerner

This show was nothing less than brilliant. I saw it when it was first out, when I was in my last year of high school. I knew it was too good to be true then, and, sure enough, I was right.

It is to westerns on television what Fawlty Towers was to comedy. Yes, it was that good...

This well done episode of the Westerner with Brian Keith as a laid back cowboy wandering into a Land dispute between a dying old man and his grandson (old man played by that great character actor Sam Jaffe...before Ben Casey fame) against the no good baddies led by that great "heavy" of them all Robert Wilke. It was well acted by all...the old man wouldn't give up his property...Mr. Wilke telling him to give up or die! Brian Keith is as cool as anyone stepping up to help the old man and his grandson...incidentally originally the baddies stole his horse and "Blassingame" was trying to get even! Very well-acted episode of this rarely seen series from 1960-61. I'm glad the western channel has resurrected this old gem of a series from Sam Peckinpah.

This series reminds me another one called THE LONER. Same period, same scenery and atmosphere with a kind of anti hero travelling from a place to another and who meets all kinds of people. As it was in the LONER, you deal here with pretty good characters study all over the show, far from those predictable garbage stuff which you find elsewhere in western series.

I became a Peckinpah fan through The Wild Bunch, first saw it probably 1980. I never knew he had his own TV show back in 1960. I found out about The Westerner through a guest star overlap with Have Gun Will Travel. (That's a great show too.)

I found a homemade set of The Westerner DVDs on eBay and decided to take a chance. I'm two episodes into the 13 total episodes. In a word, "Wow!"

The director packs so much into the 25-minute run time. Brian Keith is outstanding as the lead, and the supporting characters have depth. Even the dog Brown has depth, and this has been established in only a few quick scenes over the two episodes. There's violence, but it fits the plot lines and isn't sensationalized or made to look operatic as in later Peckinpah works.

Recommended for western fans who value the steak over the sizzle.

Probably too downbeat and "adult" for its times, the series soon vanished from network screens. At the age of eleven, having been beguiled by advance advertising of the series, I was bewildered when it disappeared before I could locate it on the schedule. In retrospect it seems like the ideal vehicle to make Brian Keith a top star-something that never quite happened.

It seems a brilliant touch of writing to make Dave Blassengame (what a name for a hero) an illiterate, itinerant cowpoke with the soul of a knight errant. He is Palidan without the cultural overlay. Guest appearances by distinguished journeyman actors like Slim Pickens, Michael Ansara, Robert Culp and others too numerous to include in this space make "the Westerner" a treat for me-especially when I had to wait forty-five years for it to appear on cable T.V. .