Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...This is the first of a two-part series about the making of Tim Hunter's new film...
...BESET by a crop of western about extremely competent people. In Sam Whiskey, a dreary little film which proceeds shakily on the mistaken assumption that the audience is interested in what's going on, the title character engineers and executes a gold heist--crushing his adversaries and winding up in a clinch with Angie Dickinson. Along the way, he meets with no serious obstacles. In Support Your Local Sheriff, a food picture by Burt Kennedy, James Garner cleans up the town and wins the girl with computer-like dispatch, supremely faster, smarter, and better looking then anyone--and well aware...
...should be noted that Kennedy's film purports to be a comedy and consequently makes much of its hero's uncanny superiority. On the other hand, Sam Whiskey simply lies, since its hero, played by someone named Burt Reynolds, is plainly incapable of doing anything competently and is indeed fortunate to have a director and a writer (their names elude me) who want to pretend that he can. Mr. Reynolds, who was probably in a TV show once, plays as if he were trying to become a child star, and Sam Whiskey is distinguished only by the quiet talents...
...Your Local Sheriff earns most of its laughs by subverting western clichés; a mayor referring to his daughter says to Garner, "She takes after her dear departed mother." "Mother died?" Garner says with appropriate sobriety. "No, she just departed," says the mayor dryly, exiting screen left. The film abounds with set-up/tag-line jokes which work well, carrying it through a story line which parodies both Hawk's Rio Bravo and Ford's My Darling Clementine (Sheriff holds murderer despite efforts of murderer's family). One takes Burt Kennedy seriously; he wrote a series of Budd Boetticher-Randolph...
Like Bandelero!, a similar film, the mortality rate is very high so you should be careful who you take to it. I remember in the middle of the twenty minute slaughter that ends Bandelero!, the beautiful girl I had dragged along said to me, quite seriously, "I hate you for this!" I took my mother to 100 Rifles, which was also a mistake. You can't be too careful about these things if you want to enjoy long happy chunks of cinematic annihilation...