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It is a performances centric movie

best movie i've ever seen.

Absolutely Fantastic

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

This is really just a live-action cartoon with the same ultra-minimal entertainment value as the thinnest material on Cartoon Network (in case you're in a part of the world where that's available). It may help you get through a night when you have to stay up and have absolutely no other way to pass the time.The gags are so witless and so wearily timed that when the payoff comes, you may literally think, "Is that it?" Dial your expectations 'way down -- and then double down, just to be on the safe side -- before trying to let this entertain you.Still, barren though it is, I didn't find SYLG downright annoying (not having paid to see it, but caught it on TV). Once I realized that I was not going to be laughing, I turned my attention to the cavalcade of familiar faces. The cast is full of actors great and small (well, medium-sized and small) riding into the sunset of active careers. Here's a partial list:Joan Blondell, whose Hollywood credits do make "medium-sized" seem slighting. The definitive wisecracking blonde of variable respectability but constantly good heart who, it seems, can never be rich or thin. Her best moment of a great many may be in Topper Returns (1941).Marie Windsor, the definitive tough dame of film noir. Catch her in Force of Evil (1948) and The Narrow Margin (1952).John Dehner, who played Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel on the radio and later turned up everywhere on television. His voice was so authoritative and his presence so strong that I always thought of him as a star making a cameo appearance.Ellen Corby, who worked a corner in mousy little women -- often blighted or crusty, occasionally endearing, sometimes incomparably sinister. She has her moment in films as different as It's a Wonderful Life (1946) and Vertigo (1958), and through nearly five decades of American television.Herb Vigran, the ultimate example of the ubiquitous bit player whose name you don't know. You'd recognize him, though, by the heavy eyebrows, the comfortable paunch, the non-threatening height and receding hairline, and above all the complacent nasal baritone of the guy next door (if your door be in the Midwestern US). Have a look at his credits on IMDb when you're in the mood for a LOT of scrolling.Kathleen Freeman, hearty and apple-cheeked, often cast as Swedes or other blonde ethnics but also in many general supporting parts where her character either requires respect or fails to give it. You may remember her as the elocution teacher in Singin' in the Rain ("I cahhhhn't stand him").Willis Bouchey, another actor with an authoritative voice who seems always to have been white-haired and recreating a real-life career as a judge, doctor, businessman, military officer, or politician. When he's not crooked, he's the soul of integrity.Dub Taylor, who began life in Virginia and, if anything, became more Southern after that. From his Hollywood debut as an amiable Alabaman in You Can't Take It with You (1938), he was the quintessential Southerner or other rustic who is never at a loss for words, always overflowing with the rural idiom though not always with the milk of human kindness. In the age of television, he blended so naturally into the world of The Andy Griffith Show that he could turn up as various characters.Several actors returning from the earlier Support Your Local Sheriff: Harry Morgan, Jack Elam, Henry Jones, and Walter Burke, as well as Freeman and Bouchey (above): a core of supporting players with centuries of constant work in film and television among them. Of course, there's also the star, James Garner.The fact that so many of the same actors appear in both a good comedy and a very poor attempt at comedy along the same lines serves to remind us that actors can't do much to strengthen a weak script. True, Walter Huston said, "Hell, I ain't paid to make good lines sound good. I'm paid to make bad lines sound good." But even stars can't make a whole movie sound or look much better than it is. Supporting players who specialize in types are limited to bringing those types to work and making us associate the inferior movie at hand with the better ones we've seen them in.That, for me, was the only pleasure to be had in watching Support Your Local Gunfighter: watching experienced actors do a job with their usual competence and apparent good cheer, all digging together toward the mother lode of paychecks for everyone.

I saw "Support Your Local Sheriff" and enjoyed it so much that I immediately rented "Support Your Local Gunfighter" which I knew was similar. In terms of style, actors used, humor, character types and genre, the two are almost identical. The director Burt Kennedy is also the same. Also, both spoof earlier famous westerns (the first "Rio Bravo" and the like, the second "Yojimbo."). I enjoyed SYLS more than SYLG, though. I would rate the first movie a 9 out of 10—a real gem; the second I'd rate 3 out of 10—disappointing but not a complete waste.The main difference had to do with the likability of Garner's character. In SYLS, although smooth and suave, the Garner character is never deceptive. In fact, part of the humor is his flat honesty (as when he tells Prudy that he can't be in a committed relationship even before she even shows much interest in one). He also has real, not fake, talent, since his shooting ability is practically supernatural.In SYLG, the Garner character is nothing but a smooth fraud. From the very first scene, we watch him sneak away from his betrothed with fistloads of cash he's swindled from her. The first thing he does when getting into town is con a rich older lady into a relationship. Really? At least Robert Preston chose the prettiest and smartest woman in town to woo in "Music Man." This is just slimy, going after rich older women. The Garner character hires on as a gunfighter, but, in this account, he's not even an average shooter. That didn't impress me. I found the subplot where the Garner character keeps betting $4600 on 23 black (and losing) annoying also.SYLS was a real oddity: a film with conservative values made during the liberal era of "Hair," "The Graduate," and "Bonnie and Clyde." The subtext of this earlier film supports ideas like "An orderly town is superior to one full of violence and bullying," "When you take a job, you have certain responsibilities," and "Authority should come from real, not fake, talent." At its core, it was a tongue-in-cheek wish-fulfillment fantasy for those of us that believe a permissive, disorderly society hasn't been such a great improvement, but that with the right leader in charge, this problem could be solved. SYLG had no such appealing subtext. A rather shifty, fast-talking opportunist winds up getting the gal and a whole lot of money mostly by luck—a movie to be enjoyed more as droll character study and parody with a couple of mildly cute scenes than as something special that can be savored.

Support Your Local Gunfighter is not a sequel to Support Your Local Sheriff. Nor is it a film taking a look at how the other half lives in the wild west of Hollywood. But what it is is a rollicking good comedy with a cast of some of the best players around.Burt Kennedy brought over a whole flock of people from the other 'Support' film starting with James Garner and Jack Elam. Garner had patented playing cynical con men starting with Maverick on television. He's certainly showed he's got the acting chops to play serious parts. But he keeps getting cast as these conman comics because he's so darn good at it.As for Jack Elam, he became an almost permanent fixture in Burt Kennedy projects as a result of Support Your Local Sheriff. Talk about making lemonade out of a lemon. Elam first used his blind eye to great effect playing psychotic killers when he first broke into acting. But in the sixties he began using that same look for comedy and never really played serious after becoming a Burt Kennedy regular.Garner and Elam are a pair of amiable drifters who wind up in a mining town called Purgatory. There's a pair of rival mine owners, Harry Morgan and John Dehner who are tunneling under the town to reach the mother lode vein of gold that will make one of them fabulously wealthy. Dehner's purportedly sent for a notorious gunman and Morgan and his partners think it could be Garner. It isn't, but Garner and Elam play it for all it's worth.Suzanne Pleshette steps into the Calamity Jane wannabe part that Joan Hackett did in Support Your Local Sheriff and Pleshette does it most effectively. Joan Blondell and Marie Windsor are a pair of bordello madams each courted by Garner at one time. Hell hath no fury like a jilted madam. You've got to see Garner with that line about a spur and a dying cowhand's last wish.Even Chuck Connors as the real gunfighter playing it absolutely straight comes in for some good laughs. But I do like Harry Morgan courting Dehner's old maid sister Ellen Corby, love isn't just for the young, the two show love isn't just for the young.The ending; to bizarre for words, worthy of Mel Brooks. You have to see Support Your Local Gunfighter to believe it.

"Support Your Local Sheriff" was a very funny movie, so essentially the same cast and director to make another movie in the same style. "Support Your Local Gunfighter" is funnier without reference at all to "Sheriff", and if "Sheriff" hadn't been so good the flaws in "Gunfighter" wouldn't be so noticeable.Except for some mild language and extensive (and very funny violence), it's unobjectionable. Like "Sheriff", "Gunfighter" has James Garner as a western hero playing against the grain. In "Sheriff" he was a capable man "Just passing through on his way to Australia", and who, accepting the position of sheriff to clean up a town, seemed not to comprehend the western conventions the other characters were foisting onto him.In "Gunfighter", Garner is a west-hating coward who makes a living off women by his good looks. Fleeing the latest of his conquests, who thinks they're about to be married, he stops off in the town of Purgatory just to see a doctor then head on his way. Unfortunately the mayor (Harry Morgan) and his wackaloon daughter (Suzanne Pleshette) think he's "Swifty" Morgan, a gunfighter sent for by a business rival (John Dehner). Garner persuades them the gunfighter really is his newfound sidekick (Jack Elam), takes the money, and prepares to blow town.Chuck Connors, arriving at the end as the real "Swifty", proves, a decade before airplane, that having serious actors play deadpan in well-written comedies can be very funny indeed.Don't watch it on the same week-end as "Sheriff". There are no points of continuity between them, and, funny as this movie is, some of "Gunfighter"'s shine will be lost by the unavoidable comparisons with its superior predecessor.