Lowbrow, maybe, but that suits me
Although many ‘comedy
Westerns’ were dire, some were splendid. The Sheepman was the best of
the 1950s, we had the magnificent Blazing Saddles in 1974 and in between we had these two most amusing oaters. Significantly,
Support Your Local Sheriff! was
written by William Bowers, who penned The
Sheepman and what they share, apart from wit, is a love of the genre. They
are affectionate parodies.
Burt Kennedy, who directed
both, wrote and/or directed a whole heap of excellent Westerns. One thinks of
the Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher series or the very good Clint Walker ones
like Fort Dobbs and Yellowstone Kelly. But he also did a
number of comedy Westerns (Dirty Dingus
Magee, Hannie Caulder and above all, one of my favorites, The Rounders). Kennedy understood and
loved the genre, and it shows.
Garner doing his Henry Fonda Clementine act. Well, he was Wyatt Earp. Twice.
The most successful element
of both Support movies was the
casting. James Garner had established a character and a style through years of Maverick
on TV and he brings the same self-effacing humor and grit to this movie. He is
just right as the sheriff “on his way to Australia”, as he endlessly reminds
us, who cleans up the town and in episode 1 gets the accident-prone tomboy
daughter of the mayor. Joan Hackett (from Will Penny) as the girl and Harry Morgan as the mayor are both absolutely excellent.
Harry Morgan was never successful in serious Westerns, for example as a heavy – you keep laughing - but was a comic genius. Then the choice of Walter Brennan to reprise and gently mock the ‘Old Man Clanton’ type role he had played so often was inspired. He plays it straight and is hilarious. Bruce Dern (my hero) is also outstanding as his dumb son.
Best of all was the talent that Jack Elam discovered for comedy. He
is great as the deputy.
Forget Dragnet. Harry Morgan was a comic genius.
Harry Morgan was never successful in serious Westerns, for example as a heavy – you keep laughing - but was a comic genius. Then the choice of Walter Brennan to reprise and gently mock the ‘Old Man Clanton’ type role he had played so often was inspired. He plays it straight and is hilarious. Bruce Dern (my hero) is also outstanding as his dumb son.
Garner plugs Brennan
They haven't quite got their bars in yet
Jack the Great
It’s all very silly, of
course, but it is huge fun. Some of the comedy is on the low side (Elam says
his former job was “to hold the horse at Madame Orr’s house”, with the
inevitable spooneristic mangling) but it’s perfectly harmless. There is no irritating
canned laughter, nor overly ‘comic’ music.
A sequel was inevitable, and
enjoyed. Support Your Local Gunfighter reassembled most of the same
cast. Sequels don’t always work and the joke can wear thin. This one, however,
has a lot of the same pzazz and sense of fun.
It’s not quite as good as the previous one, maybe
because Bowers didn’t write it: James Edward Grant, who did a lot of Wayne
Westerns, though who had also collaborated on The Sheepman, was at the typewriter. It was wise of them not to
make another, Support Your Local Outlaw or
something, but it’s definitely worth seeing. You’ll chuckle.
Good old Marie Windsor is
in it (as a saloon gal, natch) as well as John Dehner as a colonel. Chuck
Connors is the real Swifty Morgan.
Class actors at work
Gunfighter is corny and slapstick and there are many jokes
about people stealing burros and saying it’s your ass and so on (stolen from Young Billy Young, another Burt Kennedy
film) but who cares? In fact the ass
theme carries all through. The doc (Dub Taylor), who also acts as a veterinarian, says, “I doctor pack-mules, too. If you got a
pain in the ass, you come see Doc Schultz”. That was witty and rather daring in
1971.
Garner is great again, this
time in the old Along Came Jones plot of a man newly arrived in town
mistaken for a crack gunfighter. He does his Maverick ‘cowardice is the
better part of valor’ act. Jack Elam, comic star, is back as the scruffy
incompetent posing as Swifty Morgan, gunman. Harry Morgan once again has a
Calamity Jane style daughter (this time Suzanne Pleshette) and many of the other
characters return too.
That's just Dern mean
There’s nice Colorado
scenery with the Durango and Silverton Railroad (which I love).
You get the idea that the
whole cast enjoyed making the movie and their fun transmits itself to the
audience.
Once again Jack Elam has a
closing monologue in which he tells us what happened to all the characters. As
for himself, he tells us that he went on to become a big star in Italian
Westerns.
Two great comic actors
Some snooty critics, including
Roger Ebert, panned both movies. It is true that they aren’t played straight
like The Sheepman or The Rounders, which are funnier because
they border on the serious. But the Support
movies go for a different comedy, more obvious, less subtle but just as funny
in a more upfront way. And they are respectful, affectionate spoofs, not cynical, mocking ones.
Oddly, Support Your Local Sheriff! had an exclamation point in the title
(usually a sure sign of weakness in a movie) and its sequel didn’t. I might
have to revise my theory, the well-known and much-discussed Arnold Ludicrous Exclamation
Point Hypothesis (ALEPH).
Affectionate parodies. I love that description. That is what separates the good parodies from the bad ones. I would give Sheriff 4 pistols and Gunfighter 3.
ReplyDeleteAt least Sheriff didn't have the word true in its title.