Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) (Burt Kennedy, director; starring James Garner, Joan Hackett, Bruce Dern, Walter Brennan and a cast sent from God.)
I mean, except for a nice Christmas and all, it’s been a dreary, slogging couple of weeks. So, with depression hovering, I did what I oft-times do and fired up a couple of westerns.
First up, was The Tin Star, Anthony Mann’s superbly balanced town-tamer from 1957, with Henry Fonda’s old school flint sparking Anthony Perkins’ whet-stone Methodology. This was my umpteenth visit and it never gets old.
Then, just by coincidence, my eyes roamed the shelves and alighted on this:
Now, if anything, I’ve seen this even more often than The Tin Star…but I don’t think it ever made me laugh until I stopped breathing before (believe me, I’d remember, because not much ever does).
It may have just been the burden of the times being lifted for a few moments, but I suspect another element was the proximity (in my personal viewing lexicon) to this.
I mean, Support Your Local Sheriff is a specific kind of spoof–not only of westerns but of the “town-tamer” tropes in particular (there are plenty of direct references to Rio Bravo, My Darling Clementine and High Noon, among many others).
But, take all the elements…a reluctant sheriff:
a wide open town…
with muddy streets and, er, “construction issues”
touchy moral dilemmas…
shady back room deals…
a winsome, “complicated” heroine…
a bemused sidekick…
villains who embody consummate evil…
spine-tingling showdowns…
further moral dilemmas…
and a sort of happy ending…
..and what have you got, but Deadwood with all the “realistic” dreariness supplanted by gut-busting laughter and touching human drama!
Not to mention a tight script, a dream cast (every one of whom would have served the “seriousness” of the later project better than their modern stand-ins) and a fine sense of the absurd.
A spot-on parody of the past is one thing.
But parodying the future forty years before it gets around to “revising” that same past?
That’s genius.
Love James Garner…….Couldn’t believe Walter Brennan was here…..(my favorite idea of a sidekick & a Grandpa to go fishing with!) Now, I gotta’ find the movie again! TYVM!
Brennan was one of those remarkable old character actors who could play the meanest cuss or the most lovable (or anything in between…or a parody of himself) and make it all look effortless…Hope you enjoy!