The Westerner

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.

There were so many westerns on TV in 1960 that you could almost smell the phony gunsmoke. Most were forgettably simple-minded tales of good vs.evil, with cardboard characters, predictable outcomes, and no hint of real world complexity. Then along came an anonymous entry on Friday night without the big name stars or glamour of a Wagon Train, Bonanza, or Big Valley and long before the movie-going public had heard of Sam Peckinpah. You had to stumble across the show to even know it was there-- (what little publicity it got dwelled on a gimmick, Keith's 'scoped rifle', which Peckinpah ditched as soon as possible.). Nonetheless, The Westerner, as other reviewers point out, was ground-breaking in its willingness to explore nuance, and bring some realism to that most heavily fictionalized of American genres-- The Cowboy Movie. Instead of the usual cowboy hero as an unbeatable force for good, Bryan Keith's Dave Blassingame is a recognizable human being. He's a cowpoke drifter-- dusty from the trail, who befriends dogs, hookers, and lowlifes, can't read or write, likes to drink and brawl win or lose, and is obviously going nowhere in life. But he has an innate sense of honor that occasionally lifts him above the ordinary. In short, he's one of those rare characters who stands for the rest of us, not as a god, but as a real recognizable human being. It would be a mistake to read too much into the show-- it only lasted 13 weeks. But Peckinpah's willingness to challenge conventions is clearly evident, while the episode titled The Line Camp is as good as any show from that era. In this post-Vietnam period, it may be harder to see what was so special about the series. Still, the episodes wear well and the best are dramas as good now as they were then. I never thought I'd have a chance to share a public salute to what Peckinpah was trying to do, and was never even sure anyone else was watching. The series was simply there one week and gone the next as though it had never existed-- and I never knew why. I think now that the plots and characters were simply too offbeat for the time, and the sponsors and network lost their nerve. But I've never forgotten Dave Blassingame and his big scruffy dog. Thank you, Sam Peckinpah for trying to do something special, and thanks to The Western Channel for reviving this obscure but outstanding series.

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. .

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.

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.