Sam Peckinpah’s Television Western

Television in the middle of the last century could be extraordinarily rich and varied. To be sure, there were not many channels and if you wanted to watch a specific program you needed to make arrangements to be at home at a particular time; and everything was in black-and-white. In Australia, commercial channels were doing their best to make as few local shows as possible. Channel Nine boss Ken G. Hall told me that Nine’s proprietor, Frank Packer, would “buy as much overseas material as cheaply as possible and bung it on”. This was, however, not an unmitigated disaster. America was making a lot of very good television, especially westerns. The absence of colour was not a problem. This was still the age of the “adult” western, and two of the best, High Noon and Winchester 73, had been shot in black-and-white. The gritty black-and-white photography had an authority absent from the sometimes too-pretty B westerns that were being shown theatrically. Above all, good writers and directors were free to be innovative with the new medium; perhaps never more so than when the young Sam Peckinpah created The Westerner, which after over fifty years has now been released in its entirety on DVD.

The series did not come to Australia, but for years it has been the Holy Grail of Peckinpah studies: a collection of half-hour episodes that lasted only one season in 1960, written and directed by some of the great film artists. It came from Four Star Films, one of the best production houses of the period. The four stars were Dick Powell, Charles Boyer, Ida Lupino and David Niven. Along with various series Four Stars made playlets, usually with one or more of the four stars in some role. These playlets would appear in anthology shows such as Four Star Playhouse, and then if the characters and situations worked they became a series; which as I recall made watching early television something of an adventure. I can’t resist mentioning that while Boyer, Powell and Niven never managed to appear in a Peckinpah western, Ida Lupino did; predictably she was very good.

The Westerner began its life as part of Zane Grey Theater, hosted by Powell, with an action-packed episode screened in 1959. It starred Brian Keith as the wandering cowboy Dave Blassingame, and had Neville Brand as a wonderfully evil villain with Michael Pate as his murderous henchman. This became the pilot for the series. The episode is included as an extra in the new release and makes a good start to your viewing; which I warn you can become addictive.

If you want to introduce young people to the best early television had to offer you can’t do much better than The Westerner. As with many series in the 1950s and 1960s, the narratives are self-contained and last only thirty minutes. The episodes are slower paced than contemporary television. Time is taken to introduce viewers to interesting characters and situations. Dialogue isn’t rushed, and there is space for complexity. Certainly there are shoot-outs, but we are still a long way from the routine exchanges of gunfire that so often spoiled early television westerns.

Although Peckinpah directed only five episodes himself, it is his vision that dominates the series. According to the surviving participants, Peckinpah was a splendid producer. He’d been given a free hand by Powell and responded by leaving his directors alone, including fine craftsmen such as Andre De Toth and Ted Post. Peckinpah controlled the material through the writing, even with scripts for which he was not credited. Then there was his meticulous work on post-production. It was not for nothing that Powell gave him a “created by” credit.

The Zane Grey Theater episode is in some ways a formula that never quite evolved. There is a special gun. Television westerns were full of trick guns, such as the Buntline Special for Wyatt Earp and the sawn-off rifle used by Steve McQueen’s bounty hunter in Wanted Dead or Alive. Peckinpah himself had created The Rifleman, which featured a spinning Winchester operated one-handed under the credits. Reportedly this alarmed some parents, but at the heart of the series was a gentle father-and-son relationship, and the conflicts were not always resolved by violence. In The Westerner the weapon was historically accurate, a Winchester with a telescopic sight first devised in 1895 for Teddy Roosevelt. The Zane Grey Theater episode explains how our protagonist acquired the special rifle, and the weapon is written into a few appropriate situations; but the gun does not dominate the action. The hero is also given Brown, a pleasantly unsentimental dog, as a companion.

For many aficionados the episode “Jeff”, which was intended to open The Westerner’s 1960 season, is one of the best of the series. For all the well-staged fights, it is really a melancholy portrait of a tortured relationship overshadowed by guilt and despair. Scripted and directed by Peckinpah with cinematography by Lucien Ballard, “Jeff” is one the director’s least typical works. It opens as straight formula. A wandering cowboy comes to rescue a childhood girlfriend who is in the power of a brutal pimp. As The Westerner was being broadcast in 1960 she had to be “a singer”, even though their real relationship was obvious to all but the youngest viewers. It was also extraordinarily well played. There are layers in Brian Keith’s and Diana Millay’s performances that together with Peckinpah’s dialogue deftly establish their backgrounds. Nearly as impressive is Geoffrey Toone’s portrayal of the pimp, who is strangely vulnerable beneath the brutality. It is at him during their inevitable brawl that Blassingame shouts, “This is not a game!”

For anyone who has studied Peckinpah all this is fascinating. “Jeff” prefigures the much more genial film The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), the witty tragi-comedy Peckinpah made after completing The Wild Bunch. This time there is no doubt Stella Stevens’s delightful Hildy is a whore; and there is nothing perverse about her affair with Jason Robards Jnr’s grizzled prospector. We had always known about the gentleness in Peckinpah. It is there in Ride the High Country (released in Australia as Guns in the Afternoon) the tale of two ageing lawmen (Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott) on their last mission that first made his name.

The Westerner allows us to appreciate Peckinpah’s gift for broad comedy. Three episodes featuring John Dehner, as Burgundy Smith, an extravagant cardsharp, combine enjoyably preposterous situations with outright slapstick. Keith and Dehner make the most of the very funny dialogue Peckinpah and his co-writers provided them and seem to have added some improvisations of their own. In the episode “Brown” they are rivals for the affection of Blassingame’s dog. In a running gag that continues in their other episodes together, Brown likes both of them. So does the beautiful Libby (Joan O’Brien), courted absurdly by both men although she and they know anything more is impossible. Even more fun is the final episode of the series, when Dave is hired to recover a nude painting of a contessa; and guess who painted the portrait? This time the stylish aristocrat (Madlyn Rhue) prefers Dave.

As a whole The Westerner anticipates the bleakness and realism of Peckinpah’s great mature works, The Wild Bunch (1969), Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Cross of Iron (1977). Blassingame is a saddle tramp, a working cowboy, illiterate and not especially bright, but with a sense of honour; and in Brian Keith’s hands sensitive and likeable. He is not always the main protagonist. In “Mrs Kennedy” Dave blunders into a family tragedy of greed and frustration. “The Old Man” begins conventionally with Dave hunting down the men who have stolen his horse and his rifle, but segues into a story about a patriarch who wants to leave his ranch to the loyal grandson who will make a go of it. The formal ritual of the climactic shoot-out staged by Andre De Toth anticipates Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch. Arguably the blackest episode, “Hand on the Gun”, interweaves a portrayal of racial bigotry with a chilling depiction of a gun-obsessed fast-draw artist “with the smell of death on him”.

The wandering cowboy is as old as the western itself, but Peckinpah and his collaborators exploit a variety of different forms for the individual episodes, including the short story, Greek tragedy and the feature film. Indeed one episode became a feature. This was “Line Camp”, written and directed by Tom Gries. It begins with Dave taking the place of a dead cowpuncher at a cattle line camp. The tensions between the newcomer and the other cowhands are explored in concisely written sequences culminating in a senseless gunfight between Dave and a former friend.

Peckinpah thought so highly of “Line Camp” that he persuaded Gries to develop his script into a feature. This version found its way to Charlton Heston. As Heston told it, his first reaction was, “Great script, who will we get to direct?” “Gries won’t let us have the script unless he directs it himself.” “Of course Gries must direct.” And he did, with Lucien Ballard as his cinematographer.

From memory, Will Penny (1967) is inspired by “Line Camp” rather than an expansion of the original. Will is an older version of Blassingame and has a touching romance with Joan Hackett’s abandoned widow and for a while becomes a father to her son. There is a scarifying villain played by Donald Pleasance (who else?) and the melancholy conclusion reflects the realism defined so well in The Westerner.

Reportedly there is a rich legacy of Sam Peckinpah’s television work becoming available. On the evidence of The Westerner this will further enrich our understanding of one of the great directors.