Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie

This isn't one of Johnny Mack Brown's better films. The script is threadbare, so this 61 minute film is packed with too much comedy relief featuring Fuzzy Knight and songs like "The Bears Give Me the Bird!" There's so much "comedy" in the film that one could honestly refer to the ridin', fightin', and shootin' scenes as "action relief."

The only thing that makes this sloppily-edited B western at all interesting is some incredibly bizarre moments: Fuzzy cuts off a bad-guy's hair and glues it to his face to make a beard; a daughter loses her dad in a shooting and expresses practically no remorse, since her acting range is so limited; and a jaw-dropping racist joke at the film's conclusion.

Nell O'Day (as Fuzzy's sister)steals the show here: she has as many action scenes as Brown himself and shows a hell of a lot more spunk.

Even undiscriminating B Western fans will likely have a tough time getting through this one.

There isn't a lot of plot in "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie" and so to make up for this, there is a lot of comedy...far more than you'd expect in a B-western. Whether you like it or not will undoubtedly depend on what you think of Fuzzy Knight's antics in this one. Fortunately, his antics do NOT include his stuttering shtick...something that wears thin very quickly.

When the story begin, three prospectors are upset that, yet again, they've found nothing. Well, when a nearby prospector strikes gold, they decide to jump his claim by killing him. It turns out the dead man is Joe Henderson's brother and Joe (Johnny Mack Brown) is going to get to the bottom of it. He's assisted by his sidekick, Lem (Fuzzy Knight). But when Lem strikes gold something very weird happens. The same three killers find him...but this is after Lem knocks himself out and loses his memory. Now he thinks he's a Civil War colonel and the trio can't get anything useful out of him! Can Joe find Lem and the gang before it's too late?

If you want to see Johnny Mack Brown do much, well keep looking! It's definitely a Fuzzy Knight film from start to finish. Strange, that's for sure...but I didn't mind the weird change of pace.