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Wonderful character development!

As Good As It Gets

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

PRAIRIE BADMEN is another serviceable programmer starring the western team-up of actors Buster Crabbe and Fuzzy St. John. They get involved in a plot involving the location of some stolen gold and the bad guys desperate to get their hands on it and willing to commit murder to do so. Crabbe gets to punch his way through the cast while Fuzzy provides the laughs. It's all very brief, fast-paced and action-packed, cheap and cheerful throughout.

Every once in a while I'll run into an old time Western like this with no reviews posted yet, kind of surprising with the reach IMDb seems to have. Here you have another Buster Crabbe/Fuzzy St. John team-up that opens with Fuzzy in the employ of a traveling medicine show hawking Kickapoo Elixir, self described as a 'Blessing to Mankind'.It turns out that Doc Lattimer (Ed Cassidy) was once a legitimate doctor who tended to a dying man who robbed four bars of gold bullion. Told in a five year old flashback, the man gave Lattimer a map showing where he buried the gold bars, and Doc initially considered taking advantage of the situation, but thought better of it and took to the road with his son and daughter in tow. When a trio of outlaws learn about the buried gold, they intend to take advantage of young Don Lattimer (John L. Buster) who's had enough of being poor, and intends to find the gold himself. Grabbing the map from his father's wagon, Don sets out with the hoods following close behind.The picture is rather formulaic for it's time and there's the usual back and forth between the good guys and bad guys trading fisticuffs and menacing threats. However it seemed a little out of character for Fuzzy to be thinking of settling down in this one. He 'sort of' asked Linda Lattimer (Patricia Knox) to marry him, but fortunately she was out of range before Fuzzy turned around to see she was gone. Fuzzy actually got jealous when he saw his pal Billy (Crabbe) talking to Linda later on; could you just see the two of them in a romantic rivalry? You know, the boys seemed to go to a lot of trouble to thwart the bad guys in this story. It seemed to me they could have taken the gold map to the authorities and let them deal with it since so much time had passed and there didn't seem to be any danger of Doc Lattimer being held accountable for his early indiscretion. Who would have known any better after five years? Well things get straightened out as one would expect, as Don Lattimer sees the error of his ways and the good guys prevail to thump the baddies, perennial Western heavies portrayed by Charles King, Kermit Maynard and John Cason. Usually these oaters, as formulaic as they were, managed to insert something out of the ordinary every now and then and this one was no exception. I would never have thought so, but Fuzzy St. John at one point showed that from a standing position, he had the physical dexterity to raise his leg in the air and kiss his own foot. Maybe it was the Kickapoo.