The Texan (TV series)
The Texan starring Rory Calhoun: No Tears for the Dead
Here is a season 1 episode of The Texan starring Rory Calhoun. The episode is entitled: No Tears for the Dead. This is complete and unedited as shown on 8th December 1958. Final commercial has Rory Calhoun pitching Viceroy Cigarettes.
Calhoun as Bill Longley, 1961
The Texan was a Western television series starring popular B movie actor Rory Calhoun, which aired on the CBS television network from 1958 to 1960.
Production Notes
In The Texan, Calhoun played Bill Longley, a Confederate captain from the American Civil War, who roams the American West to help people in need. Often the plot would center around Longley helping an old friend or a relative of an old friend. He was known by reputation as a fearsome gunfighter.
The fictitious Bill Longley of The Texan was in no way the real Bill Longley, an outlaw hanged in 1878 in Giddings in Lee County, Texas.
Calhoun formed Rorvic Productions with Victor Orsatti to co-produce The Texan in partnership with Desilu Productions, the production company founded by Lucille Ball and her first husband, Desi Arnaz, Sr.
The Texan ran for only two seasons. In the second half of the second season, it was preceded on the CBS schedule by Kate Smith‘s return to network television, her unsuccessful The Kate Smith Show. The first season, sponsored by Viceroy, was the better because in the second season, the network reused some of the material and footage from the first season. After the 79-episode run, Calhoun returned to starring and co-starring in “B” Westerns, and making occasional television appearances. Louis L’Amour wrote teleplays for several episodes.
In the 1960-1961 television season, rebroadcasts of The Texan ran on ABC daytime opposite CBS’s As the World Turns and NBC‘s Make Room for Daddy.
