Sam Wanamaker's directing collaboration with Rick Dalton

Sam Wanamaker's directing collaboration with Rick Dalton on the Lancer pilot is both a practical working relationship and a sustained attempt to reshape what Dalton can signify on screen. Wanamaker chooses the veteran television star to play Caleb DeCoteau, then treats his presence, costume, and scenes with Jim Stacy as tools for making the series feel different from a conventional television Western. For Dalton, the collaboration begins amid career anxiety but opens a space in which another director’s confidence can become a new way of seeing himself.

Casting and First Impressions

Wanamaker makes his entrance into Dalton’s makeup trailer with theatrical force, introducing himself as if addressing the back row of the Old Vic. Dalton, seated with an ice-cold treatment on his face, returns the handshake with a wet hand and stumbles through his greeting. Wanamaker brushes off the awkwardness and quickly establishes the substance of their relationship: he tells Dalton that he personally cast him and is delighted he has taken the part. The reassurance matters in a moment when Dalton is struggling to regain his balance and his characteristic stammer is beginning to surface.

Wanamaker distinguishes Dalton’s selection from the network’s casting of the series leads. The network chose Jim Stacy and Wayne Maunder; Wanamaker says that he chose Dalton, anticipating a charged onscreen chemistry between Dalton and Stacy. He wants that tension to remain active beneath their dialogue, with Dalton helping him draw a strong performance from Stacy. The director does not ask his guest star merely to deliver Caleb’s lines. He gives him a playable task: goad Johnny, provoke him as though trying to make the network replace Stacy with Dalton as Johnny Lancer. Wanamaker presents the antagonism as a service to Stacy and to the show, not as a private feud.

A Western Built on Contrast

The casting draws its force from the difference between Dalton’s established public image and the series’ new lead. In Dalton’s assessment, Lancer has a darker, more cynical premise than familiar Westerns such as Bonanza and The High Chaparral. Its central family must defend a ranch from Caleb and his rustlers, and any reconciliation among the Lancers has to be earned amid the danger. More unusually, Johnny Lancer is written not as the sort of mysterious young outsider who appears for an episode, but as the series’ lead. Dalton sees the role as an unusually dubious, antiheroic figure for network television.

Wanamaker’s choice of Dalton makes that departure legible. He had considered Joe Don Baker, whom he liked and whose size appealed to him, but preferred the idea of placing a recognized television cowboy in the role of the heavy. The audience could watch Johnny defeat Caleb and, in doing so, see Stacy’s new hero overcome the image of Jake Cahill, the Western icon Dalton had played. Dalton recognizes the imaginative risk in the casting: when Johnny kills Caleb, the scene need not simply repeat the defeat of another disposable villain; it can put Dalton’s familiar screen identity itself into play.

Wanamaker’s larger stylistic aim is to give a Sunday-evening CBS series some of the atmosphere of newer, grittier Westerns, within the limits of broadcast television. He pursues that aim through the show’s costumes and through Stacy’s characterization of Johnny. Stacy wants a mustache to distinguish Johnny from the lighter-haired Scott and to set his character apart from the familiar television-Western mold. CBS rejects the idea for the hero and insists that a mustache belongs on the heavy instead. When Dalton asks Wanamaker about it, the director recounts the fights over Stacy’s request. The rejected facial hair becomes part of the visual contrast that places Dalton’s Caleb on the other side of the genre’s new, sharper edge.

Costume, Direction, and Dalton’s Changing Image

The transformation is immediate when Dalton steps from the makeup trailer in Caleb’s costume: shoulder-length brown hair, a large drooping mustache, and a fringed rawhide jacket. Wanamaker, Sonya, and Rebekkah are pleased with the result; Dalton initially is not. He privately thinks the disguise makes him look ridiculous, and worries that viewers will not recognize him. His willingness to conceal that reaction is also part of the working relationship: because Wanamaker believes so strongly in the design and in Dalton, the actor decides to behave as enthusiastically as the director hopes he feels.

The costume begins to work differently once Dalton sees it in the Western set’s window. The boots feel good, he likes the hat, and the jacket’s fringe gives his gestures a visual emphasis he can use. More important, the reflection does not look quite like Rick Dalton. The missing pompadour and shaggy hair make him seem less like an aging cowboy star and more like a contemporary actor; the figure in the window even suggests Michael Sarrazin to him. Wanamaker’s Caleb is therefore not only a villainous part but a practical alteration of Dalton’s familiar screen image. The role lets him test the possibility that looking unlike himself might be an advantage.

That shift intersects with the career diagnosis Dalton has recently heard from Marvin Schwarz: he belongs to an Eisenhower-era acting world while Hollywood is changing around him. Earlier, Marvin’s blunt account of how Italian filmmakers might want Dalton as a substitute for Steve McQueen had brought tears close to the actor’s eyes. On the Lancer set, the unfamiliar costume gives that difficult idea a visible form. Dalton begins to understand Wanamaker’s direction less defensively: the changed appearance may help him read as a different, more modern actor. He also sees a useful distinction between Caleb and Jake Cahill. If Johnny defeats Caleb, Dalton need not simply be playing his old Western persona losing a fight.

Rehearsing Character and Possibility

Wanamaker continues to direct through images and specific behavioral prompts. Sitting with Dalton on the Lancer set while the actor is dressed as Caleb, he proposes a rattlesnake as the character’s spirit animal. He describes Caleb’s men as taking over a town and frightening its inhabitants like a motorcycle gang. The comparison connects the Western gang to a contemporary source of menace, helping Dalton approach Caleb as more than a standard frontier heavy. Wanamaker’s direction repeatedly translates an abstract tonal goal into something the actor can play: menace, territorial pressure, and provocation.

The collaboration also reaches beyond the pilot’s immediate demands. Wanamaker recalls performing Lear with Laurence Olivier and asks whether Dalton has ever acted in Shakespeare. Dalton admits that he has barely read Shakespeare and is unsure whether he could perform it; Wanamaker offers to direct him in Lear and says he can work with him on the material. The exchange does not establish that such a production takes place. Its significance is the offer itself: Wanamaker imagines Dalton in a role far removed from the Western parts that formed his reputation, and treats his lack of experience as something a director can help him address rather than a reason to dismiss the possibility.

Significance of the Partnership

Wanamaker’s collaboration with Dalton rests on an unusual combination of confidence and challenge. He welcomes the actor, identifies a specific dramatic function for him, and trusts him to help create friction with the lead; at the same time, he asks him to surrender the look and assumptions that make him recognizable. Dalton’s evolving response—from discomfort with the disguise to interest in the figure he sees reflected in the set—shows how direction can alter an actor’s understanding of a role and of his own professional image.

The partnership also gives the Lancer pilot a way to stage a change in Western television. Dalton’s established cowboy persona supplies the audience with an older convention, while Wanamaker’s Caleb and Stacy’s Johnny embody a rougher, less predictable direction. Rather than discard Dalton’s history, the director uses it: the familiar star becomes the heavy whose defeat can announce a new kind of hero. For Dalton, the same choice makes Caleb a chance to perform outside the outline of Jake Cahill and to imagine that his career might still accommodate reinvention.