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Rating:  -
This is an excellent show, just finished watching all the episodes and wish there were more. Tate having a crippled arm wasn't really the gimmick Ironside being in a wheelchair and Longstreet being blind were. The shows for those characters revolved around their disablements, TATE didn't. Tate had a bad arm from a war wound and that was about it. The bad arm was sometimes mentioned but each story did not depend on him not being able to use that arm. Harry Julian Fink, the series creator, story consultant, and one of its writers, worked on HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL and that influence, not a bad thing, shows. Also, it's a thirty minute show, made back when TV knew how to make them and placed value on half hour dramas.
Rating: -
I didn't remember this TV western from 1960 when I was a boy, even though I watched lots of TV westerns then and loved them all. But this is one of the best. The quality of the DVDs is very good and shipment was prompt.
Highly recommended.
Roger L. Omanson
Rating: -
A one-armed gunfighter? You have to be kidding me. No, you are not. And I watched all 13 episodes on the same day. The guest stars are great and the stories are slightly above average. There were three or four westerns produced by the same producer who made 13 episodes -- "The Westerner" is one of them that come to mind. Not a bad series and the asking price is really good so it's worth the purchase price on Amazon. You will not be disappointed.
Rating: -
this was one of those good tv westerns like cheyenne-trackdown-lawman-the texan-yancey deringer- the restless gun,e.t.c.
Rating: -
"Tate" qualifies as one of the most off-beat western television dramas. This black & white oater with David McLean who gained fame as the Malboro man in cigarette commercials and also died from lung cancer. Think of the character that Sam Elliot played in "Thank You For Smoking," and you'll understand the comparison. "Tate" is a really neat show. The rugged, lonesome protagonist is a Civil War survivor, except his left arm hangs uselessly, blasted by an explosion in the war, and he wears his crippled limb in black leather sheathe with strap around his neck. David MacLean reminded me of Cliff Robertson. I don't know if Sergio Leone ever watched the show, probably didn't, but the hero dresses like a spaghetti western hero in a couple of episodes, sometimes even wearing a serape to conceal his lame limb. Naturally, he is super-fast on the draw.
Each episode opens with Tate displaying his celerity with his six-shooter. "Tate" belongs in the same league as "The Prisoner." Tate himself is a gunslinger and doesn't cry about his choice of profession or behave in a politically correct fashion. He has his own sense of uncompromising values, and he sticks with those values. He isn't an indiscriminate killer. You've got to be right and have some legal stance before he'll accept your money, but once he accepts the money, he doesn't back down. He has no sidekick and carried a sawed-off shotgun as back-up. He doesn't call his horse by a nickname. The shows are half-hour in length and there is nothing gratuitous in them. They are concise, tight, and they do some pretty alarming things. The one that I just took a break from opens with a jealous man killing a saloon girl with a double-barreled shotgun. There is ZERO humor in the show. It's all about business. There are no recurring characters, except Tate. Tate is grim, stoic, to the point, and doesn't solicit sympathy. One of the first shows in the series opens with an angry gunman going after Tate to kill him. Tate kills him before the second break in the narrative. The unknown actor who gets gunned down stone dead is none other than Robert Redford. Later, Redford shows up in another episode as an entirely different character who protects his ranch wife from Comanche Indians, principally the chief of the redskins, played by Leonard Nimoy of "Star Trek."
Harry Julian Fink who wrote and created "Dirty Harry," had a hand in the many rewrites of "Ice Station Zebra," penned John Wayne's "Big Jake" and "Cahill, U.S. Marshall," created the show and served as the script consultant. In one episode, James Coburn plays a prisoner destined to hang for killing an entire family after the daughter of the family refused to marry him. Robert Culp plays a be-spectacled bounty hunter in another scene. Tate doesn't get a lot of sympathy. Warren Oates makes the mistake of talking when he should be shooting and Tate takes him out. Other than his limp arm, Tate shares no secrets, but he does point out that he has a mailing address, general delivery, Kansas City. There is a strain of Biblical quoting running through the show like a thread and usually the biggest Bible quoters are the biggest dastards. Meantime, Martin Landau plays a sheep herder in one episode and he gives a brilliant performance as a reformed Civil War raider that Tate is taking in for his war crimes. Some of the dialogue crackles. Once, when Culp's bounty killers gets the drop on Tate, he warns Tate that he can take him either as "pig or pork." For the record, Tate only gets kissed once in the entire 13 episodes by Julia Adams in the episode "The Mary Hardin Story." Indeed, there is a lot of violence, too. The visual quality is 9 out of 10, with only some audio hum on "The Mary Hardin Story" episode. "Tate" emerges as a memorable, but short-lived western. Watch it!
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