The Cockeyed Cowboys of Calico County

I found this movie to be uplifting, and heartwarming. Dan Blocker is funny in his innocent way. It promotes high morals and is the kind of movie that the whole family can watch. A funny, innocent love story that you'll want to add to your library.

This movie hounded me for YEARS. We saw this on a double-bill with PUFINSTUF, and all I could remember was it being a family-friendly western with a saloon gal as part of the plot. Thanks to the online Chicago Tribune archives I found the listing and solved the mystery. Someone had posted the movie to YouTube and this is definitely the movie I had remembered. Good performances by a veteran cast (the opening credits panning through a turn of the century catalog were pretty creative), this is an ideal movie you can enjoy with the family, hopefully Universal will finally make this available on DVD or BluRay.

When charley's mail order bride doesn't show up, he threatens to leave town. But he's the only blacksmith in calico! So the townsfolk band together to come up with a plan to make charley change his mind. But of course, this scheme will backfire somehow. (they all do!) some funny lines in here, for a simple western. And the hat budget must have been sky high... i've never seen so many top-hats and derbies on the menfolk. Familiar faces in the cast list... nanette fabray, jack cassidy, jim backus, wally cox. Sub plot with a nearly blind bounty hunter. It's good. Nothing too earthshaking or new. Directed by tony leader; written and co-directed by ranald macdougall. He was married to fabray, but died at age 58, a couple years after making this film. Blocker himself died at 43, just two years after this film. Was probably best known for his role on bonanza. Jack cassidy died at 49. Wally cox at 48.

I absolutely adore this movie, and am so sad that it isn't available on VHS, laserdisc, DVD or any premium channels to speak of, since I tend not to watch movies on channels with commercials. Packed with great laughs and touching performances, the movie teaches some of life's great lessons about beauty truly being in the eye of the beholder, love, stereotyping, and yes, even Christianity and forgiveness. My fondest wish is that someone from the Westerns channel would happen onto this gem and pick it up for broadcast during family viewing hours. Maybe even on DVD???? Pop the popcorn, light the fire, and settle in for a feel-good movie that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics, violence, sex or foul language to define "entertainment value."

I saw this movie maybe twice--once in the theater and once on TV--all over 30 years ago. Then I obtained a very good VHS copy and it is in my collection. It is very good and deserves a release in some form. I enjoyed some very comic moments: Jack Elam plays a half-crazed, legally blind bounty hunter with thick spectacles, teaching his finger how to read a wanted poster; Jack Cassidy ends up in jail and loses his temper because the one locking him up is too stupid to understand he's got the wrong man; Nannette Fabray gives the burly Dan Blocker a big roundhouse punch which seals their romance. The plot is a classic: a mail-order bride no-show motivates the town to fix their only blacksmith up with a saloon girl substitute, who just arrives in town. There a lot of subplots that are slapstick. The scenes between Fabray and her hostess where Fabray reveals that she's unexpectedly fallen in love with the gentle giant of a blacksmith; and the scenes between Fabray and Blocker are quite good and are what makes this film better even than what its writer or director probably intended. I would have directed Fabray to keep in mind that her character--while probably matching Fabray's intelligence and robustness but not her sophistication--is not accustomed to having such deep feelings. Perhaps a scene or two more to contrast her relationship to Panama Jack with her newly-discovered capacity to deeply love a man who is not a Western stereotype (but probably closer to the majority of men actually living in the post-Civil War West), the unarmed, simple rough-cut but still part of Victorian America--blacksmith named Charlie. This movie is a hidden gem because it's a product of an old-school cast that whose careers started in an era where actors cared deeply about their work. I cannot see today's TV or movie crowd making such a movie without treating the subject matter and their characters as beneath them--or adding unneeded sex scenes, more violence, profanity, politics and message--so that they could show their constituent audiences, or their equally cynical paymasters, that they're determined to be "realistic." Folks, get a copy of this if you can; it's worth it.