DVD Review The Virginian: The Complete Seventh Season DVD Review (1 Viewer)

[ponset]

Rest In Peace, Sarah Lane.

Sara Lane, Actress on ‘The Virginian,’ Dies at 73

After playing a prankster in the Joan Crawford-starring 'I Saw What You Did,' she spent four seasons as Elizabeth Grainger on the NBC series.

www.hollywoodreporter.com

 

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[benbess]

One of my top episodes from the first season is The Mountain of the Sun, featuring guest star Dolores Hart, which first aired on April 17th of 1963. Amazing to think that's sixty years ago. Jeanette Nolan is also in this episode.

CTVA - The Virginian 1.28 "The Mountain of the Sun" 17-Apr-1963 NBC

 

[Jeff Flugel]

One of my top episodes from the first season is The Mountain of the Sun, featuring guest star Dolores Hart, which first aired on April 17th of 1963. Amazing to think that's sixty years ago. Jeanette Nolan is also in this episode.

Great episode, Ben! It also happened to be the very first Virginian episode I ever watched in full. I reviewed it (briefly) almost three years ago in the "What Classic TV have you been watching?" thread (see those comments below):

The Virginian – 1.28 “The Mountain of the Sun”
My first time watching this series. Always knew of it, but as it didn’t air in syndication in my neck of the woods when I was growing up in the ‘70s (at least that I recall), I had never gotten into the show. Picked up the S1 DVD set a while back and finally cracked open the case. Tried watching the celebrated tragicomic episode “West,” but was put off by the goofy aging cowpoke guest characters, played by Steve Cochran, Claude Akins and James Brown (no, not that one), so switched over to this episode and enjoyed it quite a bit. The Virginian (James Drury) befriends three widows who are determined to venture into Yaqui territory as missionaries, despite their husbands having been killed doing the same thing months earlier. Of course, one of the women (Dolores Hart) being exceedingly pretty adds extra incentive for the Virginian to guide them deep into hostile terrain, against his better judgment. Lots of nice outdoor location filming here, and some good performances, including Jeannette Nolan, Joe De Santis and Rodolfo Acosta. This was the luminous Ms. Hart’s last acting role; appropriately enough, regarding this story about faith and commitment to a higher cause, she left Hollywood behind and became a nun.

Dolores Hart, then and now.

 

[benbess]

Dolores Hart, as we know, was also in the movie King Creole in 1958 with Elvis Presley.

Jeff: I'd be interested to read your other reviews of episodes of The Virginian, if by any chance it's easy for you to look up the dates, or maybe even copy and paste them here.

 

[Jeff Flugel]

Jeff: I'd be interested to read your other reviews of episodes of The Virginian, if by any chance it's easy for you to look up the dates, or maybe even copy and paste them here.

Thanks for your interest, Ben! I'll look back and see what other Virginian episode reviews I've posted. I know I've written about several others over the past few years. I don't watch the show too often, but I have grown to quite like it. I have the first three seasons on Timeless' nice-looking DVD sets...plus a handful of episodes from HD braodcasts, kindly sent to me by Neal a.k.a. The 1960's.

*Edited to add* OK, found one:

The Virginian – 3.30 “We’ve Lost a Train”
This, the final episode of the third season, is a backdoor pilot for the cheerfully rowdy two-season western Laredo, another one written by veteran screenwriter Borden Chase. Easygoing Trampas (Doug McClure) is sent down to Mexico to pick up a prize bull recently purchased by Judge Garth and transport it back to the Shiloh Ranch (a journey which takes arduous and frequently deadly months in Lonesome Dove but doesn't seem to bother ol' Trampas overmuch). A brief stopover in Laredo results in his unwittingly running afoul of three Texas Rangers - Reese (bullfrog-voiced Neville Brand), Chad (Peter Brown, formerly of Lawman) and Joe (the recently passed William Smith) - ala The Three Musketeers (and just like in the Dumas tale, the three Rangers come off as real pricks at first). Since he’s heading that way anyhow, Trampas ends up accompanying the constantly-bickering three amigos as they search for the bandits who murdered a bunch of people on a train and absconded with the gold shipment it was carrying. We then wander briefly into Three Godfathers territory, as the Rangers and Trampas rescue the only survivor of the attack, a baby, and end up taking the infant to stay with Mama Dolores (Ida Lupino) and her brood, who have designs on making Reese their new papacito. The four fend off an attack by marauding Yaqui Indians and tangle with suspicious Federale Captain Estrada (Fernando Lamas, looking “mah-vellous”).

McClure’s Trampas is the perfect Virginian cast member to mix with the Laredo’s crew of ornery, rambunctious cowpokes, and overall, this is a lively, rambling tall tale with some moments of surprising violence (we get a brief closeup of one Yaqui warrior getting gorily shot in the neck in one scene) and plenty of roughhouse humor. It’s a treat to see the Laredo leads in such sharp, colorful detail here on this remastered Timeless Virginian print, compared to the rather faded transfers they received on on their own series' set. Brand looks lean and rattlesnake mean here, his character not nearly as dumbed down as it becomes in the resulting spinoff. There's an impressive guest cast here, too, headlined by redheaded stunner Rhonda Fleming - 41 at the time but still looking fabulous, with her looooong legs and milky complexion...unlike the miscast Lupino, once a real beauty herself, but here looking a good decade or two older than her 47 years. (Some people get all the genetic good luck.) Also with L.Q. Jones, Bing Russell, House Peters, Jr. and, somewhere among the Indian casualties, good old X. Brands, from Yancy Derringer.

 

[benbess]

Thanks, Jeff, for that great review of We've Lost a Train, which is one of several very good episodes in the third season.

I've been watching with Starz some more of The Virginian, and I'm reminded again of why it's my favorite Western. Picture quality has for a while been very impressive, and really beyond the DVD sets. In fact, ironically, pq is now much better for The Virginian than it is for one of my favorite sci fi shows of the 1990s, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which although filmed on 35mm was then edited on videotape, and is still in that resolution.

Anyway, what makes The Virginian one of my favorite shows is the ambition the people working on it had, in front of and behind the camera, to make every episode into a good little B-Western movie. It mostly works from my pov, giving viewers often dramatic and complex characters and stories. The productions values are also good, with sometimes a lot of outdoor locations, good cinematography and editing, original music scores, etc.

I'm currently watching the finale for the first season, which called The Final Hour. From these posters below, it looks like Universal maybe shipped this 75-minute episode off to England, and maybe some other places, as a B-Western movie that actually played in theaters? It is a good episode starring Doug McClure's Trampas, in a dramatic role. The Final Hour has many guest stars, including charismatic Swedish actress Ulla Jacobsson. Trampas falls in love, but as we know fate will not be on the side of this potential young couple.

My top 12 episodes for the first season are: Woman of White Wing, Throw a Long Rope, The Big Deal, The Brazen Bell, It Tolls for Thee, Fifty Days to Moose Jaw, If You Have Tears, The Golden Door, Strangers at Sundown, The Mountain of the Sun, and The Final Hour.

 

[benbess]

James Drury did some interviews just a few years before his passing, and he talked about the challenges of filming a B-Western movie as an episode every eight days or so....

"Really, it was like doing a movie every week....We were blessed to have a lot of really fine western writers working for us, and they were able to write big, important, juicy guest-star roles for men and women. Of course, then as now, actors were walking barefoot over broken glass to get to play a part that they wanted to play. As a result, we had the best actors and actresses in Hollywood come and work on our show. We had Bette Davis and Joan Crawford and George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst and Ralph Bellamy — and the list goes on and on. We had somebody great every week. It was a very unique situation. And it was a very wonderful place to be as an actor, because you were always working opposite someone who was extremely gifted and skilled, and you had to bring your game up to match theirs. It kept us on our toes and tested our mettle every single week.

"We had multiple units working quite often because we would run out of time. See, we had to provide one episode every week — but it took eight days to make one, so we had to make two or three at a time. You’d have a show where Doug McClure would have the largest role, and I’d come in for a small part. Then I’d go to another episode where I had the starring role, and I’d do several pages of script. And then I’d go someplace where Gary Clarke maybe had the starring role. It was fascinating how it all worked out, how it was all put together. On one famous occasion, I was in five episodes of The Virginian in the same day. You’d go from one soundstage, to the backlot, to another soundstage, and back to the backlot. It was an amazing day, but we got it all done. It's where you really have to concentrate and keep everything straight so you're not saying the lines from one episode in another episode. Make sure you know where you are — end of story. Of course, that's something I was very, very determined to make happen. And I did. We all did. We were able to pull it all off. I think people respond to it because they get involved in the story, and it takes them away from their own problems, which is the definition of entertainment. That's what we were able to do, so I was very pleased and honored to be part of it. I still am quite proud of the show."

James Drury - Cowboys and Indians Magazine

James Drury, star of classic television western "The Virginian," talks about the challenges of making a 90-minute show every week.

www.cowboysindians.com

In another interview, James Drury talked about the changing leadership of the Shiloh Ranch....

“Lee J. Cobb was the first, and left during the fourth season. I enjoyed working with him — he brought all those years as a Hollywood star to the role, but he hated the show. He was making a ton of money from the series, then just quit...."

“We had John Dehner for a short time, then Charles Bickford came along and he did just a wonderful job,” recalled Drury. “He loved the show and told me he wished he had been on from the beginning. But he died unexpectedly (during season 6). We finished the show on a Friday night about midnight, and it was a bitterly cold evening. He wasn’t well and everybody wanted him to go home, but he insisted on finishing his part and staying around. It turned into pneumonia and he died Sunday morning.”

“After Charles passed on, we got John McIntire and Jeanette Nolan to run the ranch, who were actually husband and wife and often worked together. They did very well, and John was perfect in every scene I ever saw him do.”

The only person with him through the whole show was Doug McClure:

“Off-screen Doug was quite like his character, and you couldn’t help but smile when he walked into a room because he was full of good humor and good spirits all the time. He could cheer anybody up. He became my best friend, and I still miss him terribly. You couldn't ask for a better co-star.”

James Drury remembers ‘The Virginian’ co-stars

Originally airing on NBC from 1962 to 1971, and currently rerunning on several cable networks, the enduring popularity of the “The Virginian” ...

www.mansfieldnewsjournal.com

 

[benbess]

The two episodes I watched yesterdays and today were "The Fatal Journey" (2.11) and "A Time Remember" (2.12). These episodes first aired in 1963, on the 4th of December and the 11th of December.

The Fatal Journey clears up some unfinished business from the first half of the first season, when the newspaper was run by Molly Wood, played by Pippa Scott. Unfortunately, she was written out the series so that the Virginian would have more romantic possibilities, although really I think they should have just kept her on as a reporter and friend. In this episode, without showing her, it's seen that she's campaigning through the Medicine Bow Banner for a crackdown on a lawless gang. That gang does her in, and so the fatal journey that the Virginian is on is to bring this gang to justice. The leader of this gang is played by Robert Lansing, an actor who was in more than 200 episodes of dozens of different TV shows from the 1950s through the 1980s, including a starring role in the World War II drama from ABC called Twelve O'Clock High—which so far I haven't seen. Anyway, Lansing brings genuine menace and a bit of believable crazy and cruelty to the episode. My rating: B+

A Time to Remember has a great guest star—Canadian-American Yvonne de Carlo. Somehow I'd never seen this episode before. I grew up watching Yvonne de Carlo, as I'm sure most of you did, as Lily Munster. But before that she was in several other movies in the 1940s and 1950s, including as Sephora in DeMille's The Ten Commandments. In A Time to Remember she has something like four different glamorous dresses she wears, which I've noticed they sometimes do in this show for beautiful guest actresses. Their costume designers must have been kept busy. The plot of the movie is somewhat far-fetched, but Yvonne de Carlo brings charisma and acting talent to it. The wonderful guest star can't quite fix the flaws in the episode from my pov, but overall I'd still rate it a B.

 

[The 1960's]

Another screen capping monster being born right before our eyes!

 

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[benbess]

I don't know if a moderator would be willing to do this, but after the first few posts this review thread for the season 7 DVD set turned into an all-purpose thread on The Virginian. Maybe a new thread title could be created to reflect that, maybe something like "All Seasons of TV's The Virginian," and then most of these posts could be moved over to that new thread? But I realize that might not be in the cards, which is fine.

Anyway, my episode of The Virginian today was titled "Man of Violence," and was first broadcast in December of 1963. The remarkable thing about this show is that two of the guest stars are none-other than Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley, who of course were to gain lasting fame from Star Trek starting in 1966. Nimoy is only on screen in this episode relatively briefly, but Kelley's character is a more multi-dimensional one who surprisingly ends up being rather heroic by the end. Another guest star is Peggy McCay, who was on all sorts of TV shows from the 1950s until the early 21st century. This episode has good location photography, but from my pov a somewhat tangled plot. But Doug McClure, Kelley, and McCay all put in impressive performances, giving this one emotional impact in places. I found online a very good photo collage that a fan of The Virginian has made for this episode.