Rhapsodies

As a way to clear my pallete of the dark nature of last week’s topic I chose a theme that I like to call “Sexy Western Comedy”. That is to say western comedies with a sex symbol as the lead. This way, I figured, I could get a good laugh and briefly ease my sad bachelor syndrome. Well, it sounded like a good idea at the time. . 

The first film on my list was Melven Frank’s The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, starring Goldie Hawn and George Segal. Segal plays the Dirtwater Fox an incompetent gambler who succeeds in robbing some gangsters, after helping them with a bank robbery. He hightails it to San Francisco where he meets up with a popular dance hall girl called the Duchess. While still trying to avoid the gangsters on their trail they try to go to Salt Lake City with a band of Mormons… Hilarity ensues. 

The best thing I can say about this film is, Meh. My opinions go down hill from there. In its defense there were a few adequate musical numbers, just as long as you remembered Goldies singing badly on purpose for comic effect. But other than that everyone’s so stupid it’s difficult to regard it even as parody.

The next film on my list, Elliot Silverstein’s Cat Ballou, as a pair of baladeers played by Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye tell us, is the story of Catherine “Cat’ Ballou. A young woman who has just returned from school to her home town of Wolf City, Wyoming, to become a school teacher. Once she returns she discovers a railway company is after her father’s land. She tries to get help but al she can get are a pair of incompetent cattle rustlers played by Michael Callan and Dwayne Hickman, and a washed out drunk gun fighter played by Lee Marvin. 

However when her father is killed all Cat has left is revenge. 

This film was… okay. It was amusing when it wasn’t being a heavy-handed sermon about the death of an era (that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the Shootist did it better.) For the most part, Lee Marvin stole the show doing a parody of himself. In my opinion, the best part of the film was George Orrison, Marvin’s stuntman who did an absolutely amazing display of drunken horse riding.