Support Your Local Sheriff / Support Your Local Gunfighter Double Feature

Director Burt Kennedy made a name for himself with Westerns, but this pair of comedic genre entries might be his most oddball projects. "Support Your Local Sheriff" / "Support Your Local Gunfighter" both fit neatly onto one Blu-ray disc, and if you're a fan of Westerns, silly 1960s-70s comedies, or James Garner, you're likely to find this double feature is both worth your time and a bargain to boot.

The faintly burlesque, overtly produce charm of 1969's "Support Your Local Sheriff" start off with a funeral that sparks a gold rush, and then hurtle headlong through a string of set pieces that see a sleepy Colorado town explode into a frontier hotspot complete with wall-to-wall brawling, a bawdy house (called "Miss Orr's," which occasions some pungent punning), and general lawlessness so disruptive that the town's founding fathers are willing to pay a good salary to anyone who'll take on the job of restoring law and order.

Enter Jason McCullough (James Garner), a low-key, laid-back sort who's just passing though on his way to brighter prospects in Australia. (Exactly why this brings him though Colorado is beside the point.) McCullough is so fast and deadly accurate on the draw that the town's trigger-happy residents can't get the drop on him, so they fall into line; he's also so smart that he has no trouble keeping Joe Danby (Bruce Dern), younger and dumber son of the local family of thugs, locked up in a jail with no locks (nor even bars).

There's a bevy of supporting players, familiar faces all, headed up by Harry Morgan as mine owner and town mayor Olly Perkins, who takes McCullough in as a boarder as part of the new sheriff's compensation. Perkins had a daughter -- the stout-hearted but slightly befuddled Prudy (Joan Hackett) -- and it's not long before Prudy and McCullough are on their way to romance. But first, McCullough has to face off with Joe's ornery pa (Walter Brennan) and older brothers (Gene Evans and Dick Peabody). It's a tall order even for someone of McCullough's effortless �lan, but fortunately he has a newly-minted deputy, Jake (the gifted Jack Elam), at his side. It's "High Noon" mixed with high absurdity.

The 1971 follow-up "Support Your Local Gunfighter," takes some of the broader story elements, and much the same cast, and tosses it all into a new salad. The setting is another Colorado town gripped by a gold rush, but this time Garner plays Latigo (not the one from the old newspaper comic strips, though you have to wonder at the coincidence), a scam artist on the lam from his latest mark, a wealthy woman he's jilted. Seeking shelter in the town of Purgatory, Latigo finds himself mistaken for a notorious gunslinger; the mixup makes him a target for rifle-toting Patience (Suzanne Pleshett), a certifiable hot-head. This time around it's she -- not he -- who is bound for greater things: Patience belies her name in her haste to leave Colorado and relocated to New York, where she dreams of attending a fancy finishing school and then launching a brilliant career as a lady of refinement. (The joke, of course, is how impossible this ambition is to square with her fundamentally aggressive nature.)

Now the twist: Patience's father, a mine owner named Taylor (Harry Morgan), is embroiled in a feud with Col. Ames (John Dehner), a rival mine owner. Both are in hot pursuit of a "mother lode," and both are digging their way toward it as fast as they can in hopes of reaching the massive gold deposit before the other manages to get there. Ames has rigged the game by stationing a trio of gunmen at the entrance to Taylor's mine, and Taylor looks to Latigo for help.

Latigo, seeing his chance, passes off a fellow named Jug May (Elam) as the gunslinger Swifty Morgan; Jug is a broke acquaintance with nothing to lose, and he goes along with the scam for a fraction of the proceeds, but he gets the marathon he bargained for when the real Swifty Morgan (Chuck Connors) arrives in town, plenty steamed up about the impostor. As if this main storyline weren't explosive enough, there are a number of subplots about a Latigo's mysterious medical condition, Taylor's romancing of Ames' defiant sister, a plot involving a dynamite-laden donkey, and a boardinghouse proprietrix played by Kathleen Freeman, just because you've got to make room for Katherine Freeman when you've also shoehorned Henry Jones, Willis Bouchy, Joan Blondell, and Dub Taylor into the mix. (Freeman had a much smaller role in "Sheriff.")

The extravagance of subplots should tip you off that the main storyline isn't good enough. In fact, the whole film falls short of the inventiveness and underplayed mania from the first installment, and the result is a little too strained to be funny; in fact, "Gunfighter" slips into the insipid early on and never extricates itself. One might feel that the second film was only added into this package for the sake of completeness; though "Gunfighter" is its own movie, in most ways it feels like a collection of afterthoughts and discards from "Sheriff."

Both films benefit from hi-def 1080p transfers that make the colors look as rich as though the films had only been completed yesterday. (In some instances, that kind of works against their period settings.) The Twilight Time single-disc edition of the two films offers isolated score tracks (the music for "Sheriff" is by Jeff Alexander; for "Gunfighter" it's by Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson; neither score stays out particularly). There's also an audio commentary track for "Sheriff" by film historians Lee Pfiffer and Paul Scrabo, who keep up an unending torrent of anecdotes, facts, and analyses. The liner notes by Julie Kirgo are another bonus, praising Garner and finding nice things to say about "Gunfighter."

"Support Your Local Sheriff" / "Support Your Local Gunfighter"
Blu-ray
$29.95
http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm/ID/30904/SUPPORT-YOUR-LOCAL-SHERIFF-1969-SUPPORT-YOUR-LOCAL-GUNFIGHTER-1971