"Dirty Dingus Magee" is a pretty dopey movie and it did nothing to help the acting career of Frank Sinatra. Not surprisingly, following this film, he stayed out of films for nearly a decade!
Sinatra plays the title role. Dingus is a very small-time crook who looks like a bum and isn't especially bright. His nemesis in the film is Hoke Birdsill (George Kennedy), a man Dingus robs at the beginning of the movie. Birdsill wants revenge and gets the local madam and part-time mayor to appoint him sheriff...so he can kill Dingus legally. However, it turns out Hoke is perhaps even stupider than Dingus and they spend most of the film trying to one-up the other.
The film tries very hard to be a comedy and isn't exactly subtle. The problem is that it just isn't very funny and it manages to take a great actor, Sinatra, and make him look like a second-rate one. I think pretty much anyone could have played this role and his talents are really wasted. This leads you to wonder WHY he took the role in the first place. My assumption is that with the success of "Cat Ballou", another anti-western western comedy, he thought he might win an Oscar....just like Lee Marvin won for playing Ballou. Regardless of why, it certainly isn't a very good film. A time passer, at best.
