The Trackers (1971)

          Apparently Sammy Davis Jr. spent some time looking for a project in which he could costar with John Wayne, leading to development of The Trackers. Somewhere along the way, the project lost Wayne, director Burt Kennedy, and the potential for a theatrical release, instead becoming an inexpensive telefilm directed by small-screen workhorse Earl Bellamy and costarring Ernest Borgnine. It’s probably for the best a glossier version of this project never materialized for two reasons: 1) Davis seems way out of his element playing a formidable lawman, and 2) the plot follows the familiar formula of Black and White characters who overcome racial animus when thrown together by circumstance. As a brisk TV movie with household-name actors, The Trackers makes for a pleasant 74 minutes of disposable entertainment—but stretching this content out to feature length would have brought its shortcomings into sharp focus.
          Sam Paxton (Borgnine) is an amiable rancher with a wife and two adult children until one day when raiders attack his property, kill his son, and kidnap his daughter. Initial efforts to find the evildoers prove fruitless, so Sam writes to a lawman friend who specializes in tracking. Unable to help because of an injury, the friend sends Ezekiel Smith (Davis), which aggravates Sam’s racism. (He fought for the South.) Nonetheless, once Ezekiel demonstrates his prowess, Sam agrees to ride with the Black lawman even as the trail leads closer and closer to the Mexican border. Since there have been roughly a zillion movies about men from different worlds forced to work together, you know how things go from there—Sam and Ezekiel vacillate between bonding and squabbling. In reflective moments, they share stories and find common cause. In combustible moments, they physically assault each other. A few beats are played for mild comic relief, but for the most part The Trackers aims for a serious tone.
          It’s tricky to buy Davis in his role, not just because he seems so modern but also because he’s so physically slight—in one particularly eye-rolling moment, Davis’s character holds his own in an extended brawl with Borgnine’s character even though Borgnine looks as if he could snap Davis’s spine like a twig. Related, Davis’s performance feels artificial and bland compared to the believable intensity Borgnine brings to nearly every scene. As always, Borgnine’s performance style is more about blunt force than nuance, but his animalistic approach suits the role and the storyline. He’s actually quite engaging here, so it’s moderately satisfying to watch his character describe an emotional arc, however predictable and trite.

The Trackers: FUNKY

Hardcase (1972)

          In the great 1966 Western The Professionals, mercenaries enter Mexico to rescue an American’s wife, who was supposedly kidnapped by a revolutionary, only to discover the wife has become romantically involved with the revolutionary. A twist on that premise drives the agreeable made-for-TV Western Hardcase, starring former Cheyenne star Clint Walker and Stefanie Powers. Ex-soldier Jack (Walker) returns from POW incarceration to discover that his wife, Roz (Powers), not only ran off with revolutionary Simon (Pedro Aremendáriz Jr.) but, thinking Jack dead, sold his ranch to buy supplies for Simon’s rebel band. Hardcase, titled for a nickname someone hangs on the stoic protagonist, dramatizes how Jack responds to this conundrum. This telefilm is so light on plot that it resembles an episode of some generic Western anthology; similarly, the piece has the over-lit aesthetic and unimaginative camerawork of vintage episodic television. Yet Hardcase boasts a reasonably intelligent script, by Hollywood veterans Harold Jack Bloom and Sam Rolfe, and the narrative successfully ensnares its protagonist in a fraught moral dilemma. As a result, the movie is simple without being wholly simplistic.
          Anyone who has encountered a Walker performance knows better than to expect nuance from his acting—his towering physicality and granite features lend so much visual impact that he if he aims in the general direction of a dramatic texture and doesn’t exert himself, he’s able to put across something adequate. Powers is similarly limited in her abilities. Perhaps that’s why they make a compatible duo in Hardcase—the boundaries of his skills suit a character who has difficulty expressing emotion, just as the boundaries of hers fit the character of a woman torn between conflicting loyalties. Meanwhile, Aremendáriz Jr. capably offers a frontier riff on the Paul Henreid role from Casablanca (1942) and former NFL player Alex Karras, in his first proper movie performance, lends a mix of amiability and grit. The dramatic beats these actors perform get plenty of screen time because the movie doesn’t have much action—or, for that matter, much tension. It’s tempting to guess that Hardcase is so gentle because it was the first live-action movie from kiddie-animation specialists Hanna-Barbera Productions. 

Hardcase: FUNKY

The Sweet Creek County War (1979)

          While the threadbare premise of The Sweet Creek County War was never to be the foundation for singular entertainment, the script’s colorful dialogue and earnest characterizations could have become the building blocks for something highly watchable. Alas, J. Frank James elected to direct his own script instead of entrusting it to more capable hands, thus ensuring the end of a screen career that began just a few years earlier with the other low-budget Western that he wrote and directed, The Legend of Earl Durand (1974). James was not without skill as a screenwriter, but he was hopelessly inept as a director, so both of his films squandered their potential. Even the title of The Sweet Creek County War indicates how badly this piece suffers for anemic execution—although the title suggests a sweeping story about frontier conflict, the picture largely depicts varmints laying siege to a single cabin occupied by the three main characters. More like The Sweet Creek County Skirmish.
          As for those characters, they are retired lawman Judd (Richard Egan), aging outlaw George (Albert Salmi), and past-her-prime prostitute Firetop Alice (Nita Talbot). After Judd rescues George from a lynch mob, the men pool their resources to buy a ranch. Later, George drunkenly marries Firetop Alice and brings her back to the ranch, upsetting the dynamic of his friendship with Judd. Meanwhile, vicious developer Lucas (Robert J. Wilke), who wants the land on which the ranch is located, unleashes gunmen to intimidate  Judd and George. Also drifting through the story, somewhat inconsequentially, is a stuttering dope named “Jitters Pippen,” played by Slim Pickens. (Presumably Dub Taylor was unavailable and Strother Martin was too expensive.)
          The basic premise of The Sweet Creek County War appeared in countless previous Western movies and TV shows, so the picture’s only moderately individualistic elements are characterizations and the dialogue—and what these elements lack in originality, they offer in sincerity. James seems committed to exploring both an unusual friendship and the conflicted emotions of people who carry deep regrets. Accordingly, had James worked with a proper director, one imagines he could have minimized the script’s formulaic components and leaned into the poignant ones. In turn, improvements to the script and the participation of a competent filmmaker might have attracted relevant performers, no offence to the blandly competent Egan, Salmi, and Talbot. After all, acting isn’t the problem here. The most amateurish aspect of The Sweet Creek County War is unquestionably James’s artless shooting style.

The Sweet Creek County War: FUNKY

Cry for Me, Billy (1972)

          Many familiar ’70s-cinema textures converge in the bleak Western Cry for Me, Billy, which boasts a handful of riveting scenes but underwhelms overall. The film’s biggest problem is a predictable storyline, so director William A. Graham’s leisurely approach exacerbates inherent sluggishness. Additionally, leading man Cliff Potts, a workaday actor in films and television from the late ’60s to the late ’90s (notwithstanding minor recent appearances), wasn’t up to the task of carrying a movie. Oh, and it should also be noted that despite his prominent billing, the great Harry Dean Stanton only appears in about 10 minutes of the movie, mostly in the beginning and then again toward the end.

          Gun-toting drifter Billy (Potts) wanders into a tiny town, where he observes several Cavalry soldiers withholding water from a group of thirsty Indian prisoners. Incensed, Billy gives water to the prisoners, but later, when several prisoners escape, Billy watches helplessly while the soldiers kill the remaining Indians. Then Billy leaves town and encounters Little Sparrow (Maria Yolanda Aguayo), one of the escapees. She’s a beautiful young woman who for some reason is completely nude until Billy gives her a blanket. Despite a language barrier (the only word she ever speaks in the movie is Billy’s name), the two fall in love. Then, of course, the soldiers return to spoil their idyll, and bloodshed ensues.

          Given the trite narrative, Cry for Me, Billy should be interminable, but several elements redeem the movie. Markson’s dialogue is excellent, and he does a terrific job sketching the minor characters whom Billy and Little Sparrow encounter. Better still, the cinematography by Jorden Cronenweth is gorgeous; in scene after scene, Cronenweth finds clever ways to put the sun behind actors, creating beautiful pictorial depth. Also priaseworthy are brief but effective turns by Stanton, James Gammon, Don Wilbanks, and others. Alas, the main story, though presented with great care, underwhelms until the grim final act. FYI, Aguayo, who later married her costar Potts, was originally billed as “Xochitl,” an Aztec word for “flower,” hence some online sources giving that word as the name of her character. The alias represented a failed attempt to give her screen debut a bit of intrigue.

Cry for Me, Billy: FUNKY

Mackintosh and T.J. (1975)

          Roy Rogers ended a decades-long hiatus from leading big-screen roles with Mackintosh and T.J., a gentle character study about an aging ranch hand who befriends a directionless orphan. The movie isn’t as saccharine as it sounds, and Rogers’ unfussy acting serves the material well—beyond slipping into the skin of a specific character, Rogers incarnates the heartland values that defined his screen persona during the ’40s and ’50s. That he eschews certain things with which he’s closely associated—gunplay, singing, tricky horsemanship—keeps the focus squarely on character work. So even though the material is thin, the presence of an iconic actor in a suitable role lends Mackintosh and T.J. something like gravitas.

          At the beginning of the picture, Mackintosh (Rogers) roams the West in his battered pickup truck, looking for a day’s work here and there as he moseys along. In one town, he watches a tough sheriff hassle T.J. (Clay O’Brien), a 13-year-old kid who’s given up on foster homes and orphanages, hence an arrest for vagrancy and orders from the sheriff to vamoose. Mackintosh frees the kid from trouble with the law, so they travel together for a spell, becoming friends. Once Mackintosh lands an open-ended job on a cattle ranch, he swings a gig for T.J. as well, and they begin to set down roots until intrigue reveals their situation is precarious.

          Because this movie’s plot is unhurried to a fault, many viewers will grow impatient waiting for complications to arise, but once things get going, Mackintosh and T.J. goes to darker places than one might expect. As directed by journeyman helmer Marvin J. Chomsky, the picture never quite achieves lyricism, though original songs by Waylon Jennings are used effectively to frame the overall narrative. And because the supporting cast is filled with competent players (Walter Barnes, Billy Green Bush, Joan Hackett, James Hampton, Andrew Robinson), the movie is never less than polished. Arguably the picture’s biggest flaw is the choice to withhold crucial backstory about Mackintosh until very late in the running time, but one imagines the notion was to let the character’s actions define him until it became absolutely necessary to reveal secrets.

          In any event, Rogers does something interesting by adding colors of age, loss, and regret into the portrait of the quintessential American man he’d sketched so many times previously in his younger years.

Mackintosh and T.J.: FUNKY

Guns of a Stranger (1973)

Beyond his success as a country singer, Marty Robbins occasionally acted, for instance starring in the short-lived Western series The Drifter (1965–1966). This movie, which contains Robbins’ last leading performance, is a quasi-continuation of that series, because Robbins stars as a former sheriff who goes by the nickname “Drifter.” Envision an anemic rehash of the plot from Shane (1953), and you know roughly what to expect here. Kind but tough Matthew (Robbins) leaves law enforcement for life on the roam, then happens upon a family in trouble. Elderly Tom Duncan (Chill Wills) isn’t up to the task of protecting his grandchildren, pretty twentysomething Virginia (Dovie Beams) and impressionable grade-schooler Danny (Steven Tackett), from generic frontier varmints. Seeing injustice sparks Matthew to action—sort of. Among the most casually paced Western movies ever made, Guns of a Stranger meanders from one inconsequential event to the next, so viewers never get a sense of impending danger. In fact, the movie frequently stops dead so Matthew can warble a tune or impart a life lesson to the worshipful Danny. Storytelling this vapid went out with Gene Autry, and matters are made worse by the excruciatingly bad supporting performances; although Robbins is competent, Wills is well past his prime and Beams is stunningly awful. Guns of a Stranger is so enervated that it verges on accidental comedy at times, as when Matthew participates in a lengthy but pointless bare-knuckle brawl or when he sings a lullaby to a group of cows.

Guns of a Stranger: LAME

Cain’s Cutthroats (1970)

          Revenge is the focus in this grubby, low-budget Western, but don’t get your hopes up for something metaphorically vital in the mode of, say, a good Clint Eastwood oater or even a pulpy Lee Van Cleef offering. This one’s strictly by-the-numbers, so were it not for the presence of R-rated sex and violence, Cain’s Cutthroats—also known as Cain’s Way—would seem like an episode of some generic TV series. The biggest name in the cast is John Carradine, who plays a supporting role, and in the movie’s only novelty factor involves seeing Carradine play a somewhat normal character. After all, he spent much of his late career playing underwritten crazies and drunks and ghouls. Despite his second billing, bland he-man Scott Brady is the film’s actual star. He portrays Justice Cain (yes, that’s really the character’s name), a former soldier who declares a vendetta against his onetime colleagues after they wrong him. Specifically, the men who previously served under Cain’s command form a criminal gang and seek his leadership. When he refuses, they retaliate by gang-raping and murdering his wife, then leaving him for dead. Predictably, he survives and sets out to balance the scales.

          The premise of Cain’s Cutthroats is okay, and more adept filmmakers could have taken the material in worthy directions, such as exploring the moral gray areas between killing for one’s country and killing for one’s personal enrichment. Instead of visiting that lofty terrain, the folks behind Cain’s Cutthroats wallow in the mud of human depravity. The criminals are portrayed as filthy idiots, spitting and swearing whenever they’re not squabbling with each other. The rape scene features sensationalistic nudie shots, as does a subplot featuring the curvy woman who travels with Cain for spell. As for how Carradine fits into the mix, he plays a preacher who is also a bounty hunter, so his character also travels with Cain. A number of far superior films tell similar stories, including Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), so while Cain’s Cutthroats is hardly the worst movie of its type, one is hard-pressed to put forth a compelling reason to watch the thing.

Cain’s Cutthroats: FUNKY

Apache Blood (1975)

Nearly unwatchable because of narrative incoherence, this low-budget Western depicts the exploits of an Apache warrior seeking vengeance against deceitful and murderous U.S. soldiers. It also tracks the ordeal of a soldier left behind in the wilderness after a bear attack. If that second bit reminds you of Man in the Wilderness (1971) or The Revenant (2015), most likely that’s not a coincidence; the makers of Apache Blood probably encountered the same historical records that inspired the other films. Any tangential connection to real history, however, should not give the impression that Apache Blood—also known as Pursuit—is worth watching. While there may have been a passable action-adventure film somewhere in the raw footage, the assembled movie is a mess. Scenes start and stop abruptly, transitions don’t exist, and some of the production values, especially during the bear-attack scene, are laughable. Worse, the one thing that should give Apache Blood artistic merit, the choice to exclude dialogue from most scenes, helps render the picture incomprehensible. Who are the people onscreen? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? Don’t get your hopes up about answering any of those questions, because even detecting the broad outlines of the story is challenging. Every so often, a scene makes sense for a few moments, as when the protagonist, “Yellow Shirt” (Ray Danton), sneaks up on a military encampment because a guard has fallen asleep—but then the flick devolves into awkwardly filmed action and the viewer’s sense of narrative direction disappears. Oh, and just for good measure, the film is littered with clichés, as in the scene of a U.S. soldier buried up to his head in desert sand while Native Americans charge at him on horseback. Presuming the picture’s overall goal was to counter the demeaning image of Indians as savages, trite scenes like that aren’t helpful.

Apache Blood: LAME

Jessi’s Girls (1975)

          Discovering a watchable Al Adamson movie is a joyous moment for the ’70s-cinema explorer, so even though Jessi’s Girls is contrived and exploitive, it improves upon most of Adamson’s directorial adventures simply because the plot makes sense and the production values are relatively professional. For surprisingly long stretches of screen time, this low-budget Western is compelling thanks to a simple vengeance-mission narrative and the novelty, given the context, of a distaff protagonist. Redheaded beauty Sondra Currie stars as Jessica Hartwell, a Mormon woman traveling with her husband through the American frontier. A gang of thugs led by odious Frank Brock (Ben Frank) attacks the Hartwells, raping Jessica and killing her husband. Left for dead with a gunshot wound, Jessica finds her way to an isolated homestead, where grizzled loner Rufe (Rod Cameron) provides shelter and teaches Jessica how to use guns. Meanwhile, the film introduces several outlaw women, all of whom get captured by a marshal. In the story’s dopiest coincidence, Jessica stumbles upon the marshal’s wagon, kills him, and frees the outlaw women. That’s how they become participants in her vengeance mission.

          This movie’s obvious negatives are plentiful. Characterizations are trite, the plot shamelessly cops elements from the Raquel Welch movie Hannie Caulder (1971), and Adamson goes overboard with topless shots. This is hardly the sleaziest drive-in picture of the ’70s, but it was unquestionably designed to satisfy low appetites. Having said all that, the movie’s positives include qualities that are rare in the Adamson oeuvre. The story moves along at a good clip with virtually no glaring logic problems. The central character is interesting and sympathetic, with a fairly consistent behavior pattern. Supporting characters enter and exit the story when they should, so the picture isn’t bogged down with or derailed by pointless discursions. And the style is appropriate, from the dusty locations to the guitar-and-harmonica soundtrack. So even though Jessi’s Girls is ultimately nothing but a boobs-and-bullets cheapie, it’s palatable. For an Adamson movie, that’s saying a lot. You may now begin the Rick Springfield jokes you’ve been desperate to make since you first read the movie’s title.

Jessi’s Girls: FUNKY

Four Rode Out (1970)

          Distinguished only by its incessant cruelty, the American/European coproduction Four Rode Out is one of those bleak low-budget Westerns portraying the American frontier as a wasteland of morally bankrupt opportunists laying siege to innocents. Distinctly different from higher-minded projects with similar themes (e.g., Sam Peckinpah’s thematically complex Westerns), these cheap flicks embrace nihilism as a means of justifying lurid content. That said, there’s a crude sort of magnetism to films of this stripe, especially when actors lean in to the darkness infusing the storylines. Some of that happens in Four Rode Out, with grumpy Pernell Roberts and wicked Leslie Nielsen playing monstrous gunslingers while Sue Lyon, a world away from the sophisticated provocations of Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita (1962), gets caught in between. While it’s necessary to indicate that nothing unique happens in Four Rode Out, and that the visual style of the picture is quite bland—all interchangeable desert locations and rickety-looking frontier towns—it’s also true that the picture boasts a certain morbidly appealing ugliness. There’s even some beauty in the mix, because the great folksinger Janis Ian contributes a song score and appears onscreen to warble a tune near the beginning.

          The plot begins with gruesome events. Mexican crook Fernando (Julián Mateos) slips into the bedroom of his gringo girlfriend, Myra (Lyon), and makes out with her until her father bursts into the room. Disgusted by their interracial and out-of-wedlock coupling, he commits suicide in Myra’s presence. Fernando flees. Soon U.S. Marshall Ross (Roberts) shows up to track Fernando down, as does an acerbic Pinkerton known only as Mr. Brown (Nielsen). By way of several overly convenient plot twists, Brown and Ross end up not only working together but also traveling with Myra, who hopes to cajole Fernando into surrendering without violence. Close proximity leads to crises including a rape, so by the time the pursuers find their quarry, emotions have reached a state of feverish intensity. In stronger hands, this basic material might have been more interesting, but director John Peyser fails to impose a distinctive point of view. Furthermore, the script often devolves into rambling nothingness, and the acting is inconsistent, with Lyon’s serviceable turn blocking the audience’s emotional pathway into the narrative. However, if frontier nastiness is enough to hold your interest, Four Rode Out has plenty.

Four Rode Out: FUNKY

Pony Express Rider (1976)

          Some genres have such satisfying textures that even mediocre examples of those genres can make for pleasant viewing. So it is with Westerns produced on respectable budgets. Like consuming a disposable episode of a cowboy-themed TV show, watching Pony Express Rider is an agreeably pointless exercise. Many of the familiar themes are here, such as honor and vengeance. The costumes, locations, and sets evoke the comfort-food milieu one associates with Hollywood oaters. And some the usual suspects populate the supporting cast: Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Dub Taylor. So even though the story is trite and unfocused, it’s possible to mindlessly groove on the polished look and somber mood of the piece. However, it should be said that the title is something of a misnomer, as the protagonist doesn’t actually join the Pony Express until halfway through the picture, and afterwards his involvement with the famous courier service is relatively inconsequential to the plot. If there’s a great story to be told about the bold men who carried mail through the dangerous frontiers of America’s Wild West, this is not that story. Instead, Pony Express Rider is a standard-issue revenge saga.

          At the beginning of the picture, Johnnie (Stewart Petersen) flirts with his best gal, Rose (Maureen McCormick), until her animalistic brother, Bovey (Buck Taylor), intervenes. He beats Johnnie, deeming him an unworthy suitor for his kin. Tensions rise further when Bovey’s father, Trevor (Henry Wilcoxon), accepts a post as governor of the Nevada Territory, leaving Bovey in charge of the family spread. Power-mad Bovey clashes with Johnnie’s father, Jed (Ken Curtis), leading to Jed’s death. Murkiness ensues. Jonnie sets out to avenge his dad by killing Bovey, though it’s never clear why that involves anything more than marching to Bovey’s house with a gun. Plus, once Johnnie hits the road for nebulous reasons, Bovey commences stalking Johnnie. Huh? At some point, Johnnie stumbles across a dead Pony Express Rider and takes responsibility for that man’s route, since he’s going in the same direction anyway. Again, huh? If you’re able to overlook the nonsensical plotting, it’s possible to enjoy the sleek camerawork, dusty riding scenes, and rote citations of Western-movie signifiers. Expecting anything more will lead to frustration.

Pony Express Rider: FUNKY

Molly and Lawless John (1972)

          A decade before he became a moustachioed fixture in small-screen westerns, a clean-shaven Sam Elliott starred in this quiet but respectable oater, a frontier love story exploring the complicated relationship between an outlaw and a sheriff’s wife. Featuring long stretches of silence and very little music, Molly and Lawless John is all about the energy that transfers between people thrown into close proximity at vulnerable moments. While Ellott’s performance is a bit obvious, blustery one moment and weepy the next, costar Vera Miles works a more nuanced groove, sketching various shadings of loneliness and naïveté before her character grows armor thanks to challenging circumstances. The tension between their different performance styles helps compensate for the generic quality of the film’s direction and writing. In many important ways, Molly and Lawless John fails to show viewers anything new, because the same sensitive-gunslinger dynamics permeate countless previous movies and TV shows. Yet the picture realizes its humble goals adequately, and the intimate narrative—most scenes feature just the title characters—helps conjure a degree of depth and warmth. Moreover, the storyline provides just enough complications to keep things interesting all the way to the grim but satisfying ending.

          Captured following his participation in a violent bank robbery, Johnny Lawler (Elliott) gets thrown in jail by foul-tempered Sheriff Marvin Parker (John Anderson). Parker’s put-upon wife, Molly (Miles), is tasked with providing the inmate’s meals while Parker is away on business, and she finds herself fascinated by the handsome prisoner. Sharing his fears about being executed, he touches her heart, so she reveals painful truths about her loveless marriage. Convinced they’ve bonded, she helps John escape, and their next adventure begins. Revealing more would diminish what little surprise the film offers. Suffice to say that life on the run isn’t what either of them expected, especially when they happen upon a stranger in trouble and become unlikely caretakers for an innocent. Despite being a fairly gentle movie, Molly and Lawless John plays rough on occasion, as when John appraises Molly’s looks: “You ain’t much, but you’re a hell of a lot better than nothin’.” Moments like that one get to the core of what makes the picture (mildly) rewarding—Molly and Lawless John explores the limited choices available to both criminals and women in the Wild West, thereby telling a story with aspects of class and gender, rather than the typical Western themes of male identity and personal honor.

Molly and Lawless John: FUNKY

Mule Feathers (1977)

A ghastly attempt at post-Blazing Saddles frontier hilarity, Mule Feathers compounds incoherence with insanity. The incoherence stems from the main storyline, which concerns a Wild West con man (Rory Calhoun) drifting into a gold-crazed town while dressed as a preacher. One suspects the picture was filmed hastily and slapped together carelessly, because the narrative is virtually incomprehensible, the protagonist disappears for long stretches of screen time, transitions are almost nonexistent, and the weak visuals are juiced with stupid audio flourishes (cartoony FX, overwrought music, sloppy dubbing, etc.). The filmmakers can’t decide whether they’re making a squeaky-clean family farce or a raunchy oater for the Mel Brooks crowd (note the jokes about a whore who “can’t even give it away”). Either way, everything looks cheap, from the drab sets to the terrible fake beards to the ugly cinematography. And now we reach the insane aspect of Mule Feathers. The picture opens with an animated vignette of a jackass, voiced by Don Knotts, roaming through the desert. Afterward, the film segues to a live-action scene in which Knotts’ voice emanates from the protagonist’s donkey companion. The animal’s lips don’t move, and nobody else can hear the creature talk, so is Calhoun’s character deranged? Even more disturbing questions are raised when Knotts says things like, “Oh, the tenderness that a man and his mule can feel for each other.” And when Calhoun’s character meets a woman, the donkey whines, “She can never be what I’ve been to you!” Yikes. Fair warning to curious Knotts fans: He never appears on camera, and his voice is featured in perhaps 20 of the movie’s 79 atrocious minutes.

Mule Feathers: SQUARE

Mr. Horn (1979)

          A year before Steve McQueen’s biographical Western movie Tom Horn was released to theaters, an even more detailed recounting of the same historical figure’s life story premiered on television. Sprawling over three very long hours, Mr. Horn has a colorful backstory. Oscar-winning screenwriter William Goldman penned a script with an eye toward casting frequent collaborator Robert Redford in the leading role of a cowboy who captured Geronimo and enjoyed a celebrated career as a Pinkerton, only to be framed for murder by ranchers who hired him as a bounty hunter. Together with the right director, Goldman and Redford could easily have transformed this material into something complicated and mythic. Alas, Redford left the project, as did proposed director Sydney Pollack, so Goldman’s script became an orphan even as McQueen’s competing project gained steam. Hence the downgrade to the small screen, with David Carradine assuming the title role.

          Seeing as how the broadcast version of Mr. Horn is essentially two movies—a 90-minute saga depicting the hunt for Geronimo and a 90-minute saga depicting the intrigue with the ranchers—it’s hard to imagine how the project would have worked as a feature. Yet the episodic storytelling is far from the only problem here. Put bluntly, Goldman never gets a bead on the main character, who is depicted through interesting events rather than properly revelatory scenes. Nearly every major supporting character is defined more clearly than Tom Horn. And while it’s easy to imagine Redford imbuing the character’s ambiguities with more nuance than Carradine can muster, the protagonist is very close to being a cipher. That’s a monumental problem for a three-hour character study.
          It doesn’t help that Jack Starrett’s direction is routine at best, or that the supporting cast comprises second-rate players. Richard Widmark contributes the movie’s best work as Horn’s crusty/funny mentor, though one can only dream of what, say, Jimmy Stewart could have done with the role. As for leading lady Karen Black, saying she’s forgettable requires acknowledging that her role is hopelessly muddled—the picture’s love story simply doesn’t work. However, none of these remarks should create the impression that Mr. Horn is an abject failure. More accurately, it’s like the rough draft of something better. The bones of a classic yarn are visible, but the Geronimo portion feels aimless, and the rancher portion, which has more clarity but suffers from bad jumps in continuity and logic, feels like a completely separate movie. Nonetheless, patient viewers will discover small rewards in Mr. Horn, such as the protagonist’s remark about why bogus aspects of his reputation are useful: “The more they think I’ve done,” he says, “the less I have to do.”

Mr. Horn: FUNKY

Get Mean (1975)

          “Oh, dear God,” the gunfighter exclaims. “They got everything in this country!” The country in question is Spain, or at least this film’s funhouse-mirror version of Spain, and the reason for the gunfighter’s exasperation is that even though he’s an American from the Wild West, he’s encountered ghosts, gypsies, a Shakespeare-spouting hunchback, marauding Moors, a bitchy princess, and barbarian savages who may or may not be Vikings. Although it’s technically the final entry in a four-film spaghetti-Western series starring Tony Anthony as “The Stranger,” a knockoff of Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” character, Get Mean—also known as Beat a Dead Horse, The Stranger Gets Mean, and Vengeance of the Barbarians—is a deeply weird phantasmagoria disguised as an action/adventure film.

          Many have noted similarities between Get Mean and Army of Darkness (1992), the final theatrical entry in Sam Raimi’s gonzo Evil Dead series, since both pictures involve sarcastic Americans facing monsters in otherworldly realms. Yet while Get Mean nearly matches Army of Darkness for imaginative strangeness, it lacks the playful wit of Raimi’s movies, so the movie is dull and flat when it should be exciting and whimsical. Anthony’s bland performance is one weak area, but it’s not the only one. Jokes thud, villains seem petty instead of nefarious, and scenes drag on way past the point when they cease being interesting.

          Thing get off to a lively start, because the Stranger gets dragged by a horse through a desert—past some sort of metallic orb thngy—into a ghost town, at which point the horse drops dead. Then the Stranger enters a saloon, which suddenly has people, and encounters folks dressed in costumes from various different historical periods. After a pointless bar brawl, Princess Elizabeth (Diana Loris) hires the Stranger to escort her to Spain. Cut to a map, revealing that the original location is in the Great Lakes (!), and a line tracks the Stranger’s trip to Spain by horse, train, and steamship. Upon reaching Europe, the Stranger gets roped into a war between the barbarians and the Moors, accepting the challenge to perform a labors-of-Hercules mission. At one point during his odyssey, the Stranger discovers his skin has turned black, just before he fights an angry bull. Other episodes during the movie include an implied lesbian orgy, a torture dungeon, and a shootout pitting the Stranger’s monstrous, multi-barreled hand cannon against the hunchback’s rotating gun turret, which is equipped with full-sized cannons.

          All of this sounds a lot more interesting than it is to watch, though Get Mean is somewhat lavishly produced. Director Ferdinando Baldi’s work is as unimpressive as Anthony’s, because in addition to awkwardly shifting between comic and serious tonalities, the filmmaker never quite maximizes the incredible visual potential of the material. Weird counts for something, but in the end, boring is boring. FYI, the preceding films in the series are A Stranger in Town (1967), The Stranger Returns (also 1967), and The Silent Stranger (1968).

Get Mean: FUNKY

The Deserter (1971)

          Part spaghetti Western and part Dirty Dozen ripoff, this Italy/US/Yugoslavia coproduction has a serviceable premise, then loses its way thanks to a forgettable leading performance and an overly mechanical plot. Along the way, several colorful actors are subsumed by the overall mediocrity of the piece, delivering half-hearted interpretations of underdeveloped roles. Even the action highlights are ho-hum. Those who want nothing more from adventure pictures than a steady flow of death-defying bravery and tight-lipped macho posturing will be able to consume the picture like a serving of empty calories, but those who expect anything more will get bored fairly quickly. In the Wild West, U.S. Cavalry soldier Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) completes a fortnight-long patrol and discovers that while he was away, Apaches raided the outpost where he lives and killed his wife. Kaleb blames the death on his superior officer, Colonel Brown (Richard Crenna), so Kaleb tries to quit the service and devote his life to killing Apaches. When Brown refuses Kaleb’s resignation, Kaleb shoots the colonel and becomes a fugitive from military justice. Two years later, blustery General Miles (John Huston) arrives on the scene, demanding that Brown illegally cross the Mexican border to slaughter a band of Apache raiders. What’s more, Miles demands that Brown’s men bring Kaleb in from the wilderness, because during the intervening period, Kaleb has made good on his vengeance pledge by slaughtering Apaches heedlessly, thereby becoming the ideal man to lead the mission into Mexico.

          Once all the narrative pieces are in place, Kaleb finds himself supervising a band of soldiers, including Kaleb, who would just as soon kill the notorious deserter as kill Apaches. Among those playing soldiers are Ian Bannen, Chuck Connors, Ricardo Montalban, Slim Pickens, and Woody Strode. (Naturally, Crenna’s character is along for the ride, too.) With this much talent at their disposal, producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Burt Kennedy should have been able to come up with something much more interesting than The Deserter, which is sometimes known as The Devil’s Backbone. Alas, the script is unrelentingly clichéd, predictable, and superficial, and the filmmakers miscalculated, badly, by casting Yugoslavian stud Fehmiu in the leading role. Just one year previous, Paramount tried to make Fehmiu into an international star by toplining him in the epic melodrama The Adventurers (1970), so this picture presumably represented the completion of a two-picture deal. A European equivalent to, say, James Franciscus, Fehmiu is suitably brooding and athletic, but he’s got the depth and range of a statue. With his performance creating a vacuum at the center of The Deserter, the movie is doomed to disappoint from its very first frames.

The Deserter: FUNKY

The Great American Cowboy (1973)

          Watching The Great American Cowboy today, it’s difficult to imagine why the picture won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. A cynical person might assume it’s because the movie is unthreatening and wholesome, celebrating familiar themes of rugged individualism without delving too deeply into much of anything. A less cynical person might assume that director Keith Merrill and his collaborators were given the Academy’s top nonfiction prize simply because The Great American Cowboy is as slick as a Hollywood fiction feature. Devices including slow-motion photography and split-screen editing are used to juice already-exciting images of rodeo stars riding broncos and bulls. Furthermore, an over-the-top musical score composed by Harold Farberman and performed by a full orchestra, heavy on the brass, gives The Great American Cowboy operatic scope. Chances are the truth lies somewhere between these possible explanations. For instance, aging Academy members might have enjoyed revisiting images and values from simpler times, even as with-it Academy members dug the film’s impressive technical polish. In any event, The Great American Cowboy does not reward fresh viewing as well as some other ’70s winners of the documentary Oscar. To these modern eyes, the movie is hopelessly repetitive and superficial. Worse, the frontier poetry of the narration track, as spoken by veteran Western-movie star Joel McCrea, is elegant but trite.

          The picture tracks a competition between aging rider Larry Mahan and a younger rider, Phil Lyne, both of whom vie for the nation’s top rodeo prize. The backstory is that Mahan won the prize for several years before Lyne took it away from him in an upset, so this movie dramatizes their rematch. Unfortunately, Merrill spends so little quality time with the riders away from rodeo grounds that it’s virtually impossible to care who wins. Both men come across as ciphers. Moreover, the way Merrill treats rodeo as a religion—parsing cryptic remarks from a 101-year-old veteran of the circuit and studying the adventures of preteen competitors at “Little Britches” events—has the effect of making the prize an abstraction. We don’t get a real sense of what winning means to either man. Instead, scene after scene conveys homilies about the dignity a dude finds by pushing himself past his own limits, and so on. Plus, after about a dozen different slow-mo shots of riders getting bucked off animals, the imagery loses its novelty. To be fair, The Great American Cowboy was probably the best documentary ever made about rodeos at the time of its release, and fans of the sport probably still find the picture compelling. Alas, if you’re not into rodeo, The Great American Cowboy is unlikely to make you a believer.

The Great American Cowboy: FUNKY

True Grit: A Further Adventure (1978)

          Hollywood didn’t get the unique tone of Charles Portis’ wonderful Western novel True Grit (1968) right until the 2010 adaptation by the Coen Brothers, but misunderstanding the material didn’t stop filmmakers from putting Portis’ memorable supporting character Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn onscreen three times previous, to varying degrees of success. John Wayne won an Oscar for True Grit (1969), which sanded the book’s rough edges to offer bland entertainment, and he reprised the role in Rooster Cogburn (1975), featuring Katherine Hepburn as a woman who tests crusty marshal Cogburn’s romantic mettle. Paramount, which made the 1969 movie but not the sequel, dredged out Cogburn once more for the mediocre telefilm True Grit: A Further Adventure, this time with character actor Warren Oates playing the role. Presumably owing to copyright issues, True Grit: A Further Adventure ignores the existence of Rooster Cogburn by picking up immediately after the action of the 1969 film, continuing Cogburn’s odyssey as the hired protector of spirited teenager Mattie Ross. (Kim Darby played the role in True Grit, and Lisa Pelikan does the honors here.)
          When Cogburn delivers the body of a fallen friend to the man’s homestead, Cogburn and Mattie discover that the dead guy’s widow, Annie Sumner (Lee Meriwether), has fallen on hard times, forcing her three sons to seek work in a rough frontier town where the main business is a mine. Moreover, because Cogburn lost his traveling money in a card game, he, too, needs work. That’s how Mattie ends up trapped in the frontier town with him. Cogburn discovers corruption while teaching life lessons to the Sumner boys, and eldest son Christopher Sumner (Jeff Osterhage) develops a thing for the willful Mattie, who uses her fierce personality and quick wit to help Cogburn secure a lucrative job as a bounty hunter. The story then ventures into beats echoing the plot of both Portis’ original novel and the 1969 movie, with Cogburn and Mattie chasing varmints to a remote hideout. Although the script for True Grit: A Further Adventure is adequate on a moment-to-moment basis, the episodic storyline never adds up to much, and the pacing is sluggish. Although most of the supporting performances are drab, Pelikan gets points for making her version of Mattie thornier than Darby’s interpretation. As for Oates, he’s as wonderful as always, grubby and rural and salty, but the film’s antiseptic style keeps him on too tight a leash.

True Grit: A Further Adventure: FUNKY