Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre
VCI Entertainment, complete first season on four disks, 870 minutes, B&W, $39.99.
This Western anthology series ran on CBS for five seasons (1956–61) at a time when Westerns were top gun on the small screen and kids craved Zane Grey’s action-packed books. Some of the 29 first-season episodes were adapted from Grey stories, but his name was incorporated into the show’s title primarily to say, “This is a program about exciting Wild West tales.” Dick Powell’s name, which received top billing at first, certainly called to mind other roles —his 1930s musicals, his tough-guy leads in the 1940s and his early 1950s TV show Four Star Playhouse. Powell introduced the full run of 149 Old West episodes and appeared as various characters in 15 of them. He provided tidbits of real West information in his introductions and didn’t embarrass himself as a screen cowboy, though he was no Gary Cooper or even James Arness. Understandably, the DVD jacket plays up the name “Zane Grey” over that of “Dick Powell.”
When the Western Writers of America recently voted on the top 50 TV Westerns of all time, Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre didn’t even make the cut. But most of the episodes provide solid drama and fine acting. In the first episode, for instance, reliable Robert Ryan is believable as a rancher nearly hanged by viglantes. In episode five, Jack Palance plays a frolicking cowboy who can make a lariat sing (and kill, too) in a performance nearly as memorable as his classic bad-guy role in the movie Shane. Episode 27, “Badge of Honor,” starring Robert Culp, inspired the 1957–59 Western series Trackdown (No. 36 on the WWA list), which in turn led to Wanted Dead or Alive (1958–61, No. 15 on the list), starring Steve McQueen as a bounty hunter.
Countless now-familiar faces show up in season one, including Lee J. Cobb, Walter Brennan, Robert Vaughn, Jack Lemmon, Jack Elam, Sterling Hayden, David Niven, Ernest Borgnine, John Derek, Eddie Albert and James Garner. More of the same is promised as VCI releases subsequent seasons. A season-two episode, “The Sharpshooter,” with Chuck Connors, spun off into The Rifleman (1958–63, No. 6). Writer/director Sam Peckinpah was behind that show as well as The Westerner (1960, No. 12), which spun off from “Trouble at Tres Cruces,” an episode from season three.
Originally published in the December 2009 issue of Wild West. To subscribe, click here.
