Directed by Don Taylor & Written by Richard Alan Shapiro
With: Lee Marvin as Sam Longwood, Former Army Scout and Indian Fighter, now a conman.Oliver Reed as Joe Knox, a Harvard educated conman with an Indian mother and, “… father was a sergeant, two corporals, a bugler and a company cook.”
Robert Culp as Jack Colby, a crook with the attitude of a tech billionaire.Kay Lenz as A Daughter of Joy, Thursday.Elizabeth Ashley as Nancy Sue, a harpy, Sam’s former lover and now Jack’s wife.
Sylvia Miles as Madam ‘Mike’, a madam with unnatural desires (1976 morality) Strother Martin as Billy, a horn-dog complainer in the morality of any year.
Funny western comedies include 1965’s :
Cat Ballou with Jane Fonda (hubba-hubba). Lee Marvin won the Oscar for his dual performances (and I know how all you revere the Oscar). It featured a Greek chorus of Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye on banjos and guitars .
Then there are 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, based on the Jack Finny novel, and John Sturges’ The Hallelujah Trail, a decidedly non-PC tale that could not be made today, post deification of our Indian friends (let them rot in poverty and despair on reservations, but for pity’s sake don’t make light of them.) Along Came Jones (Gary Cooper), Destry Rides Again (Jimmy Stewart), Max Evens’ The Rounders (Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda.), Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap (Charles Laughton and ZaSu Pitts), Bob Hope in The Paleface, Support Your Local Sheriff! With my buddy Jack Elam, Way Out West, Laurel and Hardy, which brings us to The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday.
When we first see a drunken Oliver Reed (as Joe Knox), he is rescuing a paddy-wagon full of cat house whores, seven of them, from Keystone type cops. His motives are less than heroic however, he plans to employ them in a scheme to rid Indian land of the white-man, a noble ambition I am sure you’ll agree. Knox is infected with the clap, and rogering the girls, infecting them to go forth into the civilization of the whites, including the soon-to-be president William Howard Taft, will return the buffalo and rid the land of Gilded Age greed heads is the plan. Then president Theodore Roosevelt being far too virtuous for the society of fallen women, or victims of an oppressive patriarchal society if you are a feminist (it is my assumption that feminist readers of Ruthless Reviews are scare as hen’s teeth).
His plan goes awry when Sam Longwood and fellow grifter Billy (Strother Martin perfected this kind of whinny character. Billy foreshadows the inept villain Bowen in Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue) announce the presence of the arch villain, Jack Colby, railroad millionaire candidate for governor of the Centennial State on the Republican ticket, is in town.
Hisses . . .
BACKSTORY:
Many years before, Colby, Knox and Longwood operated a small gold mine on the north rim of the Grand Canyon. After a night of drunken carousing, Knox and Longwood awoke with hangovers to discover Colby had absconded with the 100K in gold they had accumulated, taking the sweet-tempered Nancy Sue, Longwood’s intended, along with him.
This revelation engenders a chaos allowing the soiled doves to take wing, leaving only the adorable young whore Thursday to the tender mercies of the trio of old men, or chronically challenged seniors in 2025 terms.
Knox and Longwood corner Colby and demand their money under the threat of a Bowie knife.
“ You’d better cut him once, Joe Knox, just to show ’em we ain’t dirt farmin.” Longwood says.
Jack Colby: I would ‘a got your damn money to ya, if I could ‘a found ya. I tried, years ago.
Sam Longwood: You’re lying.
Jack Colby: How do you know?
Joe Knox: Your lips are moving.
Like all rich men, Colby manages to weasel out of payment. What follows is a prize fight, a chase through town, the kidnapping of the foul-mouthed Nancy Sue (which turns of to be a case like The Ransom of Red Chief), the attempted prostitution of Thursday, a love story, another chase, a fistfight and a happy ending (depending on your point of view).
It’s an excuse for witty & spirited banter between Oliver Reed and Lee Marvin punctuated by sight gags and stunts borrowed from the Silents.
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