The Dick Powell Theatre: “The Losers” (Complete Video, Free, and Without Commercial Interruptions)

Re-posted by N.S.

The Westerner (1960): S01E03 “Brown,” (Free, Complete, and Without Commercial Interruption);

The Westerner (1960), S01E06 “The Courting of Libby,”;

The Westerner (1960), S01E13, “The Painting”.

In 1960, Sam Peckinpah, who had created the Western TV series The Rifleman (1958-1963), starring Chuck Connors, then still in its run, got a deal for a new Western series, called The Westerner, starring Brian Keith. In The Westerner, Keith played a resourceful but illiterate saddle tramp named Dave Blasingame, who travels from town to town, looking for work and for love.

Most of the 13 episodes were dramas, with a little humor thrown in, but three were strictly comedies. Those all had as guest star, Dave's frenemy--friendly nemesis, con artist Burgundy Smith (John Dehner).

John Dehner (1915-1992) was a legend of early TV. Although he'd trained as an artist, he got into acting, and did so everywhere--on the radio (e.g., as Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel), on TV, and in pictures. At imdb, I counted 596 credits, not counting radio, and Dehner did not pad his resume with talk and game show appearances. He was a working actor.

He often played flamboyant characters. In one episode of Combat!, he played an elderly resident in a French village under German occupation, who had been a general in WWI, and who saves the day by showing the Americans a secret passage into city hall. He had to be one of the busiest actors whose exploits are recorded at imdb.com.

The Westerner was produced by Dick Powell, who had been a song-and-dance man in early talkies, who then segued to playing hard-boiled private eyes, and then founded his own TV production company, Four Stars, which made high quality TV series (e.g., The Rogues) with excellent, older movie actors.

Powell had wanted to continue the saga of Dave Blasingame and Burgundy Smith, as a contemporary TV series, but apparently neither Keith nor Dehner was available, so Powell had to settle for Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn.

The problem with Four Star Productions was that Dick Powell dropped dead in 1963, of a massive coronary, at 58. He'd been a heavy smoker.

The problem with “The Losers” was the same as with the Burgundy Smith episodes on The Westerner: They were always entertaining, but only intermittently amusing. It had to be the scripts; it couldn't have been the acting.

Older intro, before the Kopyright Kops killed off the account of the guy who had earlier posted this: I’d heard about this one-shot episode from The Dick Powell Theatre for many years. I knew it had something to do with Sam Peckinpah, but I didn’t catch the tie-in to The Westerner (1960), until a couple of days ago, when I saw that someone had re-posted it here [at Youtube].

During the 1960s, Lee Marvin (1924-1987) was the hottest actor on TV and in movies. He gave one brilliant performance after another.

He should have won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for playing the thug Liberty Valance, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). The following year, he starred in a two-part TV movie in which he was so stunning as an alleged traitor, that the producer had it cut up into a theatrical feature, Sergeant Ryker. In 1965, he played a dual role in silly, modern Western whose nominal star Jane Fonda was, Cat Ballou, but Marvin stole the show doing a parody of Liberty Valance. In a split-vote, Marvin won the Oscar for Best Actor that year, Richard Burton’s Oscar.

Marvin starred in Richard Brooks’ The Professionals (1966), which Sam Peckinpah ripped off, and turned into his masterpiece, The Wild Bunch (1969). In 1967, Marvin and Angie Dickinson starred in John Boorman’s neo-Noir, Point Blank, about a man who gets ripped off, in more ways than one, by his crime partner, best friend, and the mob. He also starred that year in Robert Aldrich’s box office hit, The Dirty Dozen, one of the most ripped-off movies ever made, about a ragtag unit of death row inmates who go on a suicide mission, for the sake of their freedom.

Marvin was reportedly the first star to get a cool million per movie, but by the end of the 60s, his drinking was destroying him. However, he gave a brilliant performance starring as Hickey in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1973). He should have been up for Best Actor again, but the producer only released the picture for one weekend.

[Postscript, February 7, 2026: I got that line about Marvin's drinking destroying him from Richard Brooks. However, I now see that Brooks was full of crap, and was trying to harm Marvin. Why would Brooks do that? Perhaps Marvin had bedded a woman whom Brooks wanted.]

Keenan Wynn was a great character actor, who could do just about anything, and for many years, one of the hardest-working actors in the business.

Wynn’s herculean work ethic cost him his first wife, Evie, and his best friend, Van Johnson. As Scott Eyman recounts in his monumental biography of MGM chief and co-founder, Louis B. Mayer (1885-1957), Lion of Hollywood, by 1949, people were whispering about MGM’s biggest star, Van Johnson. He was never known to be involved with any woman. The only woman who made him light up was Evie Wynn, whom he frequently escorted, when Keenan was off on a shoot. Meanwhile, whenever Evie Wynn was seen being chaperoned by Johnson, she just lit up like a Christmas tree.

L.B. Mayer’s intelligence was impeccable. So, he brought in Evie for a talk. She negotiated for everyone involved. She loved her husband, and ensured that he would continue to get lots of work, but she was madly in love with Van. And so, Mayer and Evie arranged that Evie would divorce Keenan, and marry Van. She bore Van a daughter, Schuyler, and they stayed together until 1962, when he absconded with his tennis pro.

@mikedoran9851

“When this show first ran in ‘63, my father recognized the names of the characters, from a series called The Westerner from a few years before. That was a ‘traditional’ Western, with Brian Keith as ‘Blasingame’ (Lee Marvin’s part) and John Dehner as ‘Burgundy’ (Keenan Wynn’s part). Sam Peckinpah did that old series; [Dick Powell's] Four Star gave him a shot at an update. This was what came to be called a ‘backdoor pilot’; this time, the backdoor stayed shut. It happens ...”

The Dick Powell Theatre: “The Losers”