Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) I don’t, as a rule, like westerns very much—the combination of overly familiar elements with an overall might-makes-right attitude has never sat very well with me, and you can make a fair argument that much of it boils down to basic differences between Americans and Canadians. It takes a lot to get me sympathetic to a Western, but Support Your Local Sheriff! manage to do so through a mildly comic treatment of the good old stranger-comes-to-town idea. Here, we have James Garner playing a confident gunsmith who takes up the sheriff’s job in a gold-rush town while he’s on his way to Australia—taming a rowdy town with little support from the town’s leaders. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Support Your Local Sheriff! is how it manages to be amusing without going to comedic extremes—this is tame material compared to Blazing Saddles, for instance, but the payoff is the ability to make compelling comic characters without turning them into absurdist caricatures. The film succeeds quickly at making us care for the characters, and once you have that, you can keep the same gently comic tone going until the end, as the film doesn’t necessarily rely on gags to keep going. Garner cuts quite a figure as the hero in a role tailored for him (he produced the film) — most modern comedies would have been tempted to make him incompetent, but here the laughs are better in following how he outsmarts the town. Meanwhile, Joan Hackett makes for a lovely romantic foil, with director Burt Kennedy being able to create a convincing small-town western atmosphere out of a meagre budget. I quite liked the result—it treats western with a lack of irreverence but not quite contempt, and it leaves viewers with smiles on their faces.