It'll make you chuckle here and there
There is a kind of plot. As
with most comedy Westerns, there is some attempt to string the
one-liners together. But exiguous is the word, I think. Exiguous. Rogue
Cuthbert J Twillie (WC Fields) meets saucy Flower Belle (Mae West) on a train.
La West must be married or run out of town by the respectable folk. She thinks
Cuthbert is loaded (with money, I mean) and so decides to marry him. A gambler,
an unusually racy Donald Meek, is mistaken for a preacher (an easy error to
make) and performs the ceremony. Twillie somehow becomes sheriff of Greasewood
as well as tending bar and gambling. The love affair becomes triangular when
Zorro holds up the stage and kidnaps Flower Belle, who falls for him. And so
on, you know how they do.
The not so happy couple...
Fuzzy Knight is usually in
such films for the comic relief. Here, they ought to have had someone serious
for the opposite. He is Cousin Zeb.
Actually, however, although
Mae West gives us her extraordinary walk (all hips) and suggestive
double-entendres and Fields gives us some famous lines (such as his last
request when about to be hanged), overall it isn’t all that funny. When put in
the league of great comedy Westerns such as Son of Paleface, the 1925
Go West or Blazing Saddles, it all falls rather flat.
The best thing about it is
Joseph Calleia, who plays Jeff Baxter, the saloon owner and town boss, who is
also – oh well, I might as well say (I don’t think it’s going to spoil your
enjoyment), the Zorroesque “Masked Bandit”. Calleia was a great character actor
in a number of Westerns from the 1930s to the 1960s, usually when a Mexican
American was required. Perhaps his best role was Monte Marquez (a saloon owner
again) in the absolutely excellent Joel McCrea picture Four Faces West. But
in My Little Chickadee he gives class to the support acting. The film
kind of needed boosting.
Calleia with his hand on Fields's shoulder
The New York Times
review of the day when describing West and Fields quoted Noel Coward’s line
about two empty paper bags belaboring each other and said that the film is at
low tide most of the time in the quality of its humor. That’s putting it too
strongly. There are some undoubtedly funny parts.
It is said that West and
Fields didn’t like each other. It’s possible. There isn’t much magic or spark
in the movie anyhow.
It’s worth a watch on a wet
afternoon and will make you chuckle here and there.
I'd like to see Paris
before I die... Philadelphia will do.
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