I love The Dick Powell Show but it has rarely been shown in the United Kingdom. Some episodes were shown late night on Channel 4 in the late 1980s and there were some reruns on the now defunct Performance channel in the mid-noughties. This episode, The Losers, was not among the epsiodes rerun on either channel.
I have just seen it now (I had downloaded on to my laptop hard drive after it turned up on You Tube a few years ago). Having seen about three quarters of the 60 episodes of The Dick Powell Show I think that (together with A Swiss Affair and Run Till It's Dark) The Losers is one of the poorest episodes in the show's entire run.
It stars Lee Marvin and Keenan Wynn - who are always both worth watching - and it starts off well enough but then becomes rather slow-moving and doesn't really engage the viewer.
The Losers was written by Sam Peckinpah and I suspect it is a remake of an episode of his earlier series The Westerner (1960) or is an unused script from that show.
The Westerner starred Brian Keith as "Dave Blassingame" who travelled the Old West accompanied by his dog "Brown." In The Losers Lee Marvin's character is called....... Dave Blassingame and he is accompanied by his dog called "Brown"! The Losers' story plays like a western set in the 1880s and now transplanted to the 1960s.
At this stage in his career Lee Marvin was making guest appearances in episodic television as well as supporting roles in films. A guest appearance in a show like Bonanza, in the mid-1960s paid about $5,000 - not bad for 7-10 days' work. So it's safe to assume Lee Marvin was paid somewhere in this region for his role - but considering the weakness of this story perhaps he should have passed on this particular episode.
Fans of Lee Marvin should look out for him in a much better episode in this series entitled Epilogue which is actually one of the best episodes of The Dick Powell Show.
I may be being over-generous but I have given The Losers a 3 out of 10 rating - one star each for Marvin and Wynn and one star for a rare acting role from Rosemary Clooney.
Every television series has clinker (good) episodes and clunker (bad) episodes and unfortunately The Losers is a clunker.
