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The best comedy westernsApr 21 '11 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line the heyday of the comedy western was clearly mid-1960 to mid-70s The TCM-sponsored interview of Shirley Jones by Ben Mankiewicz last night at the Castro Theater reminded me that I wanted to do a list of my favorite comedy westerns. The event preceded a screening of "Elmer Gantry" for which Jones won an Oscar half a century ago, playing Lulu Baines, the prostitute who brings down preacher Elmer Gantry played by Burt Lancaster. The conversation did not touch on the later movie, directed by Gene Kelly, in which Jones had ascended to being a madame of a house of prostitution, euphemized as “the Cheyenne Social Club," let alone Lancaster’s comic westerns, but I thought of them while they were talking about “Elmer Gantry.” Probably the first movie that comes to most minds (soaked in old celluloid) at the mention of “comedy westerns” is Mel Brooks’s (1974) “Blazing Saddles.” Both at the time of its initial release and seeing it more recently, I thought most of the attempted humor lame (including the performances of Gene Wilder and Madeleine Kahn, both of whose work in Brooks’s “The Young Frankenstein” I found hilarious). What I love about the movie is the African American sheriff as played by Cleavon Little. I outright abhor most of the musical comedy westerns, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954) and "Paint Your Wagon" (1969). I find both very insipid, though the former has one of the great dance sequences in the history of MGM musicals, and the latter has the odd spectacles of Clint Eastwood and Lee Marvin singing and fine cinematography. Alas, it ran on way too long and had Jean Seberg as the leading lady. A few years later Lee Marvin became a belated star and won a best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a ruthless killer and a drunk whom "Cat Ballou" (Jane Fonda) hires what turns out to be the broken-down drunk Kid Shelleen to avenge the killing of her father by the silver-nosed killer also played by Marvin, Tim Strawn. The movie also has a minstrel chorus parodying many a western ballad, Nat “King” Cole and Stubby Kaye. Playing an over-the-hill drunkard of a gunman hired by a young woman to avenge her father’s death also won John Wayne an Oscar in “True Grit” in 1969. So far as I remember, crooner Glenn Campbell does not sing in the movie. (I have not seen the Coen brothers’ remake yet.) In “Along Came Jones” (1945), adapted by Nunnally Johnson (who frequently worked with John Ford), and costarring Loretta Young, Gary Cooper played a look-alike of a brutal killer. The amiable good guy and the bad guy not only look alike, but have the same initials (MJ)… Reaching further back, there’s James Stewart with Marlene Dietrich in “Destry Rides Again” (1939). Both are quite funny in my memory. It has a female-female fight scene that revived Dietrich’s career. That of course brings to mind “Johnny Guitar” (1954) , the camp female-conflict western directed by Nicholas Ray, which pits Joan Crawford against Mercedes McCambridge, competing for Sterling Hayden among other things. Something can only be “camp,” if not intended as comedy (cf. “Lust in the Dust”), and “Johnny Guitar” is the easy winner as campiest western. Earlier still, Charles Laughton was quite funny as a very proper English butler acquired by crude nouveau riche Americans Egbert and Effie Floud (Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland) in a poker game in “Ruggles of Red Gap.” Mistaken identity is central in Leo McCarey’s 1935 movie. Perhaps “My Name is Nobody” (1973) is a structural reversal, in that Terrence Hill lacks visibility, bearing the name “Nobody,” which eventually proves useful to the old gunfighter Jack Beauregard (Henry Fonda) who wants to retire, not be dogged by admirers (such as Nobody) or by those wanting to make a reputation by gunning him down (the fate of Gregory Peck’s “Gunfighter”). The humor fits with that in Sergio Leone movies (characters played by Clint Eastwood and Charles Bronson) and Leone was credited with the original idea, though along with many others I suspect Leone was more involved (not least in recruiting Fonda who had played radically against type in Leone’s great “Once Upon a Time in the West”). The directing credit went to Antonio Valerii, whose other spaghetti westerns I have not seen. (Hill, né Mario Girotti, btw, had been quite funny with Bud Spencer in “My Name Is Trinity” (1970) and its sequel “Trinity Is Still My Name” (1971), both directed by Enzo Barboni, though those movies are more slapstick, less driven by wit than “My Name is Nobody.”) Henry Fonda appeared in many westerns, and in a big share of what I consider the best comedy westerns, including the 1970 “The Cheyenne Social Club” that is the root of this list. The character played by James Stewart has inherited a successful business. Only after a long ride in which the laconic Stewart character’s patience is finally worn out by Fonda’s character’s garrulity. I find that funnier than Stewart’s discomfiture about finding that he owns a who_re-house, though Jones has fund making Stewart splutter once the cowboys arrive at their destination. I remember Fonda and Glenn Ford being funny in the 1965 “The Rounders,” a movie about modern-day, not-very-bright cowboys directed by Burt Kennedy that I have not seen since I was a child. (Nor have I seen the more recent version.) They work for Chill Wills, who provided comic relief in many a western, (If I saw Glenn Ford in the 1964 “Advance to the Rear,” I don’t remember anything about it.) Fonda played a crooked warden of a western penitentiary in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s foray into the western, “There Was a Crooked Man...” (1970) in which Kirk Douglas is incarcerated (a very Burt Lancaster role IMO). The movie is too long and not very lighthearted (more black comedy). Quoting myself, “There are some funny bits in "There Was a Crooked Man," and the shots at racism hit their mark, but the movie is ultimately too mean-spirited to be entertaining, or its nastiness is not stylized enough... or something.” A few years earlier (in 1966) Fonda was part of a stellar cast in “A Big Hand for the Little Lady,” with Joanne Woodward great as “the little lady” playing out a poker hand after becoming a widow, and Paul Ford playing a local banker. It’s funny, trust me! (It does seem that women have much more agency in western comedies than western dramas… I don’t consider Mexico part of “the West,” but for a wild frontier movie centered on independent women see Louis Malle’s 1965 “Viva Maria!” with Jeanne Moreau and Brigitte Moreau both playing Marias.) James Garner’s screen persona has mixed amiability with amorality, or at least playing fast and loose with the rules. The late-1950s tv series “Maverick” made him a star (though he was noticeable in the 1957 “Sayonara,” too). The 1966 “Duel at Diablo” in which Sidney Poitier played off Garner is not classifiable as a comedy, though it has some priceless ironic exchanges. Garner’s amiability carried “Support Your Local Sheriff!” in 1969 and “Support Your Local Gunfighter” two years later. Though the latter is not a sequel, it was certainly inspired by the success of the former (with Suzanne Pleshette instead of Joan Hackett… and Jack Elam instead of Walter Brennan). Burt Lancaster carried a pair of western comedies a few years earlier, the 1865 “Hallelujiah Trail” and the 1968 “The Scalphunters” (Lancaster then made some very gritty western dramas: Lawman, Valdez Is Coming, Ulzana’s Raid.) Though there is a wagon train at the center of “Hallelujiah Trail” it does not seem all that much a western, but the romantic comedy of a temperance crusader (Lee Remick) and the scalawag is like a 19th-century “Guys and Dolls.” There are Indians to deal with in both movies, and slavery in The Scalphunters” with a great performance as a slave by Ossie Davis (and Telly Savalas playing a character about as charming as the one he played in “The Dirty Dozen”). Though slow in places, Lancaster and Davis as unwilling buddies makes for a very good movie that successfully mixes action heroics, ironic wit, and outright farce. Howard Hawks’s classic “Rio Bravo” (a showing of which Ben Mankewicz also paved the TCM “Road to Hollywood” with an onstage interview of Angie Dickinson) is not generally considered a comedy, but with Dean Martin and Walter Brennan, and John Wayne at its wryest, there is certainly a lot of comedy within it. (Wayne’s wry comic timing was on display in most of his westerns after the driven Ethan Edwards in John Ford classic “The Searchers” in 1956, though it was in evidence as early as 1948 in Ford’s “Three Godfathers”). George Roy Hill’s much-loved buddy picture, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969), also has a lot of wry comedy, though more a western than a comedy (IMO). Arthur Penn’s 1970 adaptation of Little Big Man has farcical aspects (especially Faye Dunaway trying to bathe/seduce Dustin Hoffman and Hoffman’s old-age makeup) but is pervaded by sorrow and by Chief Dan George (who was pretty funny in “The Outlaw Josey Wales” in tandem with Clint Eastwood). Richard Brooks (The Professionals) directed Candice Bergen, Gene Hackman, James Coburn, Ben Johnson, and Dabney Coleman in a fairly entertaining cross-country racing movie set in the early 20th century, “Bite the Bullet” that seems little known. I enjoyed “Shanghai Noon” (2000) with Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson, though less than many of Chan's Hong Kong movies (some of which I think were influenced by American westerns). I might include the modern-day “City Slickers” and “Bagdad Café” both starring Jack Palance the archetypal vicious gunfighter from George Stevens’s “Shane,” but I won’t. Almost all the memorable comedy westerns date from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. In addition to “Along Came Jones,” I’d add three earlier north to Alaska movies, the 1960 one with that title, starring John Wayne and Ernie Kovacks, and the Anthony Mann dramadey “North Country” (with a charmingly corrupt John McIntire and one of those trademarked Walter Brennan stubborn codger performances) and Charlie Chaplin's 1925 "The Gold Rush." (I don't regard Buster Keaton's 1925 "Go West" as approaching being as good as his Southern movies, btw. It has an exciting cattle stampede though!) And maybe Leone’s “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966)? At least the bad and the ugly! Plus John Huston’s (1948)” The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” ends in laughter. Although Fred C. Dobbs’s psychopath is not really played for laughs by Humphrey Bogart, I suspect that Huston saw him as a black comedy figure. I’ve saved what I think is the best (of western comedies) for last. I think that Sam Peckinpah’s 1969 “The Wild Bunch” is a serious candidate for “Greatest American Movie” (and his adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine” with Jason Robards and Olivia de Haviland a serious candidate for best tv movie). I find the rapscallion Jason Robard played in Peckinpah’s 1970 “The Ballad of Cable Hogue” very funny. I also love Stella Stevens in it (plus it has Slim Pickens and Strother Martin). It centers on water, a very scarce commodity in much of the west (and Cable Hogue definitely commodifies it!). Do I have to rank-order ‘em? Sticking to those that I think had primarily a comic intent (boldfaced above) here's my top-ten list: (1) The Ballad of Cable Hogue (2) The Scalphunters (3) Destry Rides Again (4) My Name Is Nobody (5) True Grit (6) The Cheyenne Social Club (7) A Big Hand for the Little Lady (8) The Rounders (9) Cat Ballou (10) Support Your Local Sheriff!  |
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by jeff_wilder78
