Support Your Local Sheriff is not going to blow your socks off, top your list of ‘must-see movies’ or have self-described ‘cineastes’ drooling over this, that and t’other aspect of it. Not by a long chalk. Yet in several ways it is a one-off that attempts something simple and carries off the attempt with aplomb.
On paper it does not sound promising: it’s a ‘spoof Western’ made almost 57 years ago, and I can already sense many of you thinking ‘time to move on, then’, but bear with me.
But in its own, very quiet, modest way it can be just as funny.
Nor is it one of those so-called ‘gross-out’ spoofs Tinseltown is convinced are ‘smart and sassy’ and will tickle our ribs (and which never tickle mine) with loads of all-too-obvious ‘jokes’ pitched at the six-year-old assumed to be lurking in the soul of all of us.
Support Your Local Sheriff has in common with Blazing Saddles that it runs through the range of standard Western tropes and sends them up.
Mel Brooks did that almost viciously, Support Your Local Sheriff does it far more unobtrusively and is all the more effective for it.
I might here give one of my favourites quotes which, in a sense, illuminates that point. It is a few lines from verse by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her Verses Addressed to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace responding to a vicious attack in verse by Alexander Pope and she skewers him rather neatly.
Pope was something of a misfit and possibly, being just 4ft 6in tall, might have had an inferiority complex (it happens, though my apologies to any and all short-arses reading this and is not necessarily the case).
He and Lady Mary had been friends when, the story goes, he tried it on with her and she gave him, metaphorically, two fingers (Canucks, Aussies and Kiwis will know what that means, for Americans etc, think ‘the finger’).
Sadly, Alex Pope did not have the backbone to walk tall and put that rebuttal down to fate (and sorry for the rather weak joke, but I could not resist it once it had occurred to me). So again and again he attacked her in his verse until the the good lady aristo had had more than enough and wrote her response.
The relevant lines I am referring to are
Satire shoud, like a polishd Razor keen,I’m certainly not suggesting Brooks has merely the ‘rage’ but not the ‘talent’, far from it; but he is hard-hitting. Support Your Local Sheriff is not, in any way. It is gentle and seems almost – but is not quite – fond of the Western tropes it is sending up.
Wound with a Touch, that’s scarcely felt or seen.
Thine is an Oyster-Knife, that hacks and hews;
The Rage, but not the Talent of Abuse;
And is in Hate, what Love is in the Stews.
What make that possible is that like a series of very funny classics starring Leslie Nielsen (Airplane and The Naked Gun films), Support Your Local Sheriff does it all with a completely straight face.
There is – thank the fucking Lord! – none of that insufferably knowingness which Americans, but like a virus it has spread, believe is ’irony’. It ain’t, buddies – the closest many Americans get to irony is electing as their president ill-educated utterly narcissistic fraud, sex pet and possible paedophile with abysmal taste in interior – sticking cheapo moulded plastic sprayed ‘gold’ on the walls of the Oval Office and thinking that gives it and him ‘class’. For fuck’s sake!
I am getting on a bit and quite possibly a lot older than many of you, so when I mention James Garner or The Rockford Files, you might not know who I mean.
But if you do, you will know that in both his dramatic and comedic roles, he had a certain something, a winning charm that meant you couldn’t but like him. Here he takes the central role in Support Your Local Sheriff as ‘drifter’ handy with his gun, ostensibly ‘one his way to Australia’ and takes the job as sheriff or a lawless town just for the money.
When push comes to shove and it is the sheriff, his deputy and the girl he loves up against the 13 baddies come to town to kill him while the est of the town he is protecting going into hiding – High Noon? – you can guess who comes out on top.
Yes, it’s that ‘original’, but that’ snot the point: Garner and the rest of them – Bruce Dern, Joan Hackett and Jack Elam as well as old troupers bring to what might have been a weak, throwaway film that same quiet Garner charm. Yes, it’s total hokum, but who cares? I didn’t and you won’t, either.
I shan’t bother outlining ‘the plot’ further because it is slight and not original, but that isn’t the point at all. A phrase I like and often quote is that ‘it’s not the joke but how you tell it’ and this film hits the spot every time. No, it’s not Oscar material and doesn’t in a million years think it might have been, but . . .
I first came across it years ago and always wanted to see it again. Well, the other day by chance I came across it on You Tube (I have premium membership to avoid all those blood awful intrusive ads).
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