Support Your Local Sheriff!

A gold rush town is out of control; every sheriff gets killed and nobody wants the job. Jason McCullough, passing through, says he needs money to get to Australia and takes it. The jail has no bars yet, so McCullough finds other ways to keep his prisoner inside. Burt Kennedy directs. James Garner plays McCullough, with Joan Hackett, Walter Brennan, Jack Elam and Harry Morgan. It is a parody and it is not sneering. It knows the western's rules, knows you know them, and builds every scene on that shared knowledge; the hero does not fight, he talks and thinks his way through. Walter Brennan is playing his own past here. He imitates, almost exactly, the villainous patriarch he played in My Darling Clementine, which is among the film's most deliberate jokes. Jack Elam's character turns to camera at the end and explains what happened to everyone afterwards, an unusual closing device for the period. Support Your Local Gunfighter, made by the same team in 1971, is a comparable film but not a sequel; Garner plays a different character. Who it is for: viewers who like classic western parody and James Garner. Who it is not for: there is no tension and no sense of danger, and the film never wants to be taken seriously.