SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Self-important, over-dramatic, uninspired.

A very feeble attempt at affirmatie action

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

An adult version of the types of comedies that were being made at Walt Disney, this is for adults who find the Three Stooges geniuses and find Mel Brooks and Blake Edwards too challenging, and Woody Allen films too intellectual. It's exactly as I describe above, the story of the dimwitted blacksmith Dan Blocker, stood up and conned out of his life savings by a "mail order bride". Not wanting to find a blacksmith in this dust bowl of a western town, the townsmen cajole saloon hostess Nanette Fabray to take on the part, resulting in a bunch of silly innuendo and ridiculous plot twists.A great supporting cast completes the ensemble of mostly famous TV faces at the time. Most of them, completely realizing that the material is beneath them, add extra oomph in their line delivery, making this a burlesque of the western genre, minus the usual plot lines that dominated them. This is at its best when the always delightful Nanette Fabray is on screen, especially when feigning "ladylike" behavior when around the prickly women of the town who stuck their nose up at her when they believed her to be a woman of ill repute but treat her different in her disguise. Among those in the cast are Jim Backus, Wally Cox, Mickey Rooney, Henry Jones, Marge Champion and Jack Elam. They all do their best with the material they are given, but what has been proved time and time again, comedy is a much harder genre than drama. Getting people to laugh is not as easy as stirring up people's emotions, and if I had a laugh from this for each emotion that exists, I'd be a statue.

The towns Black Smith and his anvil are headed back east after a bout of loneliness gets him down, his mail order bride did not wait for him? His friends might let him drift but there is not another one for 50 miles, or an anvil, and that is a bigger problem. Now his poker playing buddies need to step up and do for him what no self respecting buddy would do to a bachelor, find an unattached available, marriage minded female fast, but where? They slowly gather the whole town into their dastardly, good deed doer's plot, even the only dance hall girl in town. Without a doubt each new solution creates a new problem, when is Jack due back?

A 1970's screwball comedy-western with just the right amount of sentiment thrown in...and is NOT on video or DVD! Why?? You have a wonderful cast brought together here: Dan Blocker, Jim Backus, Nanette Fabray, Wally Cox, scene-stealer Mickey Rooney, Noah Berry Jr, Stubby Kaye, the uproarious Jack Elam, long-time stock player Henry Jones, Jack Cassidy, and more! You couldn't lose with a cast like this!The plot is simple and formula: Charlie, the only blacksmith in town (Blocker) is going to leave because his mail-order bride turned out to be a hoax. The nervous townsfolk convince Sadie the saloon girl (Fabray) to portray the bride just long enough to let him down easy, leave town, then resume her normal life as a bar singer. Since the blacksmith doesn't drink, he'd never enter the saloon, so it's a perfect plan, right? Jack Cassidy plays Sadie's nasty sometime-boyfriend Roger Hand who the gang try to pass off as wanted criminal Panama Jack. In a great 'showdown' scene, blind-as-a-bat bounty hunter Blaze Kittrick (Elam) draws down on innocent Indian Tom (Rooney) with hysterical results! Blocker and Fabray fall for each other in the end (naturally) , but the path to their eventual nuptials is a comedy gold-mine with a lot of laughs and heartfelt warm. A true gem of a minor "B" film that finally, after years of waiting, I have a DVD of the movie from an Australian source! Hopefully someday a big-wig at Universal will see the light of day and release it to the public. You want a copy? Ioffer.com has them for sale (me too!).

I saw this movie maybe twice--once in the theater and once on TV--all over 30 years ago. Then I obtained a very good VHS copy and it is in my collection. It is very good and deserves a release in some form. I enjoyed some very comic moments: Jack Elam plays a half-crazed, legally blind bounty hunter with thick spectacles, teaching his finger how to read a wanted poster; Jack Cassidy ends up in jail and loses his temper because the one locking him up is too stupid to understand he's got the wrong man; Nannette Fabray gives the burly Dan Blocker a big roundhouse punch which seals their romance. The plot is a classic: a mail-order bride no-show motivates the town to fix their only blacksmith up with a saloon girl substitute, who just arrives in town. There a lot of subplots that are slapstick. The scenes between Fabray and her hostess where Fabray reveals that she's unexpectedly fallen in love with the gentle giant of a blacksmith; and the scenes between Fabray and Blocker are quite good and are what makes this film better even than what its writer or director probably intended. I would have directed Fabray to keep in mind that her character--while probably matching Fabray's intelligence and robustness but not her sophistication--is not accustomed to having such deep feelings. Perhaps a scene or two more to contrast her relationship to Panama Jack with her newly-discovered capacity to deeply love a man who is not a Western stereotype (but probably closer to the majority of men actually living in the post-Civil War West), the unarmed, simple rough-cut but still part of Victorian America--blacksmith named Charlie. This movie is a hidden gem because it's a product of an old-school cast that whose careers started in an era where actors cared deeply about their work. I cannot see today's TV or movie crowd making such a movie without treating the subject matter and their characters as beneath them--or adding unneeded sex scenes, more violence, profanity, politics and message--so that they could show their constituent audiences, or their equally cynical paymasters, that they're determined to be "realistic." Folks, get a copy of this if you can; it's worth it.