O Xerife do Queixo Quebrado

I just happened to be at my father`s house and he had the western channel on.Which my father is a diehard western fan.This movie came on and I couldn`t believe Jayne Mansfield was in a western.I decided to watch some of the movie and got interested in it.It was not one of the best movies I had ever seen but I did enjoy it.I thought Kenneth Moore was very good as the sheriff.I didn`t really care for the singing in this movie but I did enjoy seeing Jayne Mansfield.

Kenneth More, the British Comedian stars in his first Hollywood movie with Jayne Maynesfield, the blonde bombshell in this spoof of westerns where a man who would rather drink tea than pick a gun tames the west. The film is well-directed by the veteran Michael Curtiz, is mildly amusing to extremely funny in parts. Jayne sings some songs, especially a catchy one with echoes. What else to say, good fluff.

Jayne Mansfield plays Kate, boarding house owner, and into town comes Kenneth Moore, a gun salesman from England. Not only are the songs by Jayne dubbed, it sounds like some of the lines are too. Starts out slow, gets better as it goes along. The mayor and the Indian chief steal the movie. There are a few gags and laughs, sort of an early version of Mel Brooks "Blazing Saddles". Nothing real good in "Special Features" on the DVD, but I guess that's due to the fact it was filmed in 1958. No real surprises here... your run of the mill spaghetti western with some laughs thrown in. According to the DVD liner notes included, this was filmed in England and in Spain (?) Too bad they didn't do more with Robert Morley; could have spiced things up more.

In the first place, the cliché of the "fish out of water" might be over-used now, but it was hardly over-used in 1958. There are echoes of Bob Hope's Paleface and Son of Paleface, but those were ten years earlier.

Secondly, just because a movie might have had some scenes filmed in Spain does not make it a Spaghetti Western. Spaghetti Westerns are westerns produced by Italians and directed by Italians. That's where the name "spaghetti" comes from, see?

The Western is not my favorite genre, but I enjoy Kenneth Moore. Jayne Mansfield does an adequate job. My favorite is of course poor William Campbell as Keno.

Good family film - something particularly wholesome about Kenneth More - and I don't want to 'rain on the parade' (More is one of my favourite actors and 1958 one of my favourite years - see also: A Night to Remember', More et al 1958). But there does seem to be a lack of chemistry between More (Jonathan Tibbs) and Jayne Mansfield (Kate) - notwithstanding that this is primarily a spoof-western comedy rather than a RomCom. Did they actually get on? Some of the scenes with just the two of them are painfully laboured. But, yes, the film (due in no small part to the laconic ease of More) is entirely watchable, and the production values - even for this lightweight film - are as high as you would expect from any mainstream Hollywood film of the day.