"Support Your Local Sheriff" (1969)

I remember the first time my family rented Support Your Local Sheriff (1969).  It would have been sometime in 1993, I'm pretty sure.  When we moved to North Carolina in 1992, we discovered that a local video store had an amazing selection of old movies, including a huge number of westerns.  Every weekend, we would rent an old movie to watch together as a family -- and I was in charge of picking which one to watch each week.  We started by working our way through their westerns; Dad would say, "Get a western we haven't seen yet!" when Mom took us to town, and Mom didn't like westerns much, so when we got to the video store, she would tell me to pick a movie.  (Don't feel too badly for her -- we watched things she liked other times during the week, just not on the one night when Dad took a break to watch something with us.)  When I ran out of John Wayne movies, I continued on through James Stewart westerns, then Glenn Ford, then random ones starring people I didn't know yet.  (Eventually, we progressed to dramas, war movies, comedies, and so on.  But it took a long time to exhaust their selection of westerns.)

I always passed over Support Your Local Sheriff.  The cover's tagline said that it was all about "Bad men... Bad ladies... Bad horses..." and I thought it looked much too racy for our family!  So, week after week, I avoided getting it.  But then, one week, I didn't go along to the video store -- I can't actually remember why.  I probably had a cold.  My mom came back with this movie because it was the only western there she knew for sure we hadn't gotten yet.

Oh, my trepidation was extreme when we sat down to watch this movie!  It was going to be a dud, I just knew it.  It was going to be too skanky, and my dad was going to turn it off right about the time I actually found a character to like, and I was going to be disappointed, and everyone was going to be crabby and pretend not to be, and our weekly movie night was going to be ruined!

Except, it wasn't.  I was completely and entirely wrong.  (Well, there IS a little innuendo about some "working girls," but it is very mild.)  We laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed over this movie.  It immediately became a dear family favorite, and we all quote it to each other routinely still, thirty years later.

Support Your Local Sheriff opens with a funeral just outside a gold rush camp.  A handful of folks, including Olly Perkins (Harry Morgan) and his daughter Prudy (Joan Hackett), gather to consign the mortal remains of a fellow gold seeker to the earth.  

Halfway through the burial, Prudy finds gold.  In the grave.  And thereby becomes the richest little gal in the territory.  And thereby also lets the audience know exactly what sort of a movie this will be: a mildly irreverent, yet loving spoof of the western genre.

Cue a flood of goldseekers, including a handsome man named Jason McCullough, who never makes any secret of the fact that, basically, he's on his way to Australia.  He just stopped by to dig up some gold to finance his trip.  Trouble is, he arrives in the middle of a big gold strike, with prices skyrocketing left and right.  (When the price of a meal at one beanery goes from $3 to $8 before his eyes, a man elbows Jason and says, "That's what they call inflation.  Sometimes it catches you between mouthfuls."  I've been saying that a lot lately.)

Jason decides to find himself an actual job, just so he can afford to eat and sleep while he does some prospecting on the side.  It so happens that the town is in desperate need of a sheriff.  Not only do they have lawless, drunken miners shooting up the town day and night, but there's a mean, lowdown, ornery family by the name of Danby that forces everyone to pay a steep toll just to use the only road in and out of the town.  The town councilmen, headed up by Olly Perkins, give Jason the job after he astonishes them with his sharpshooting and quick-draw skills.

Jason sets about cleaning up the boom town.  First, he puts Joe Danby (Bruce Dern) in jail... a jail that doesn't actually have any bars in the windows or doors yet, but that's okay, Jason convinces Joe to stay there anyway.  Second, Jason hires the town drunk, Jake (Jack Elam), as his deputy.  

And then, Jason proceeds to clean up that town in the most unconventional and funny, yet believably effective, ways you can imagine.  He lies to people about whether or not their guns are loaded.  He throws rocks at hired gunfighters instead of getting suckered into gunfights.  He sympathizes with Pa Danby (Walter Brennan) for being so lonely.  He falls in love with Prudy, even though she tends to get into ridiculous scrapes like setting her dress on fire or getting into the most enormous mud fight with total strangers.

Through it all, Jason continues to insist he's going to leave for Australia any minute.  But the audience can tell he has found his perfect niche and won't be quitting his job as sheriff any time soon.

Spoofs can be so tricky to pull off.  I think they really only work when the people making it actually love the genre they are spoofing -- they have to see the value in the tropes that they upend or poke fun at.  I've seen western spoofs that are just making fun of westerns, like Blazing Saddles, that end up being too snide to be funny.  It's hard to poke fun at something without mocking it.  Support Your Local Sheriff manages it handily, and I do believe it's because writer William Bowers, director Burt Kennedy, and stars James Garner, Jack Elam, Harry Morgan, and Walter Brennan had all made lots and lots of westerns before they made this.  They clearly enjoyed making westerns, and that love for the genre shines through, making this a loving laugh-fest, not a disparaging one.  Also, the only spoofs that ever work for me personally are ones that have a good story and compelling characters, and that would work perfectly well as a serious story too, rather than relying on pratfalls and sarcasm to carry them through.  Which this one does, handily.

I can't close this without mentioning that this movie has two connections to my favorite TV show, Combat! (1962-67).  Director Burt Kennedy wrote and directed some of my favorite episodes of that show, and actor Dick Peabody, who plays one of the Danbys in this (above), played Littlejohn on Combat!.  That endears this movie to me just a little bit extra.

Is this movie family friendly?  Basically, yes.  There's some shooting and killing, though no gore.  There are a few cuss words.  The only thing that makes it not totally family friendly is a little bit of innuendo regarding an establishment called Madam Orr's which clearly is a whorehouse, and there's one scene where a bunch of men in long underwear come running out of it, along with a bunch of girls in bloomers and chemises, so the subtext of what's been going on there is clear to adults, but not to kids.  There's a little bit of dialog about Madam Orr's girls, too, but it's very veiled and, again, would go over a kid's head.  My kids have watched this movie.

This has been my first contribution to the On the Job Blogathon hosted by myself and Quiggy right here and at The Midnite Drive-in.  Join us all weekend long for more posts about movies involving people's jobs and workplaces!