Don Knotts – The Magnificent 60s

The Shakiest Gun in the West (1968) ***

Don Knotts (The Incredible Mr Limpet, 1964) was an acquired taste, relying overmuch on permafrozen goggle eyes and physical comedy. Despite the best efforts of The Great Race (1965) and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) and the reissues of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy classics – perhaps because of this surfeit of slapstick – it would take a very special comedian to make as big an impression.

Bob Hope had gone down the cowardly cowboy route before in The Paleface (1948) and Son of Paleface (1952) and in fact this is pretty much a remake of The Paleface, substituting newcomer Barbara Rhoades (Don’t Just Stand There, 1968) in her sophomore outing as “Bad Penny” Penelope instead of Jane Russell as the more famous Calamity Jane. So it’s not a comparison a comedian would generally welcome – to be matched up against Bob Hope.

What distinguished Hope’s coward was that he always believed he was catnip to the ladies. Don Knotts was under no such illusions.

The story just reruns The Paleface – mild-mannered dentist Jesse Heywood (Don Knotts) is teamed up with sharpshooting criminal Penelope (Barbara Rhoades) to winkle out villains smuggling guns to Native Americans. The twist is that as part of the woman’s cover she’s been married off to the hapless dentist – for the simple reason that wagons trains won’t accept single women. Needless to say, their expectations of marriage differ.

While she manages to avoid intimacy, Jesse becomes acclaimed as a hero during a Native American attack, oblivious to the fact that it’s his wife who’s been doing all the shooting. That singles out Jesse as the undercover agent but he’s again saved by Penelope.

Eventually, he learns the truth but not in time to save Penelope who’s been kidnapped by the Rev Zachary Gant (Don “Red” Barry) and his sidekick Matthew Basch (Jackie Coogan) who have been smuggling weapons inside boxes of Bibles. When Jesse goes to the rescue it’s on the assumption Penelope’s marksmanship will save the day. However, she’s whisked out of the way and Jesse is forced to do his own gunfighting.

Even so, it’s not his skills with a gun that retrieve the situation, rather his dentistry, as he fixes the teeth of the Native American chief.

This relies far more on set pieces than the Bob Hope effort. Hope was able to draw the cinema audience towards him, a skill which Knotts lacks, so the humor results from the more obvious. However, there are a few scenes that don’t rely on Knotts. In one it’s the background character of a railway porter laden down with bags who snags the laffs.

Fear is a Knotts trope. During a stagecoach robbery he literally goes stiff with fear and has to be carried stiff as a piece of wood back into the stagecoach. Absent-minded, goofy, way out of his depth and not just with women, is the comedian’s schtick. Even when he develops a swagger following his deluded belief that he’s a six-gun ace, it’s the dumbest swagger ever.

Luckily, nobody’s trying to steal the scenes. The rest of the cast is drawn from more serious timber. You might be more pleased to see veteran Jackie Coogan (A Fine Madness, 1966), one-time child star, and B-western icon Don “Red” Barry (Alvarez Kelly, 1966) in more than their usual bit parts and to catch Pat Morita (The Karate Kid, 1984) in his sophomore venture.

Unfortunately, neither Knotts not Barbara Rhoades can come close to their predecessors.

Directed by Alan Rafkin – who had directed Knotts in The Ghost and Mr Chicken (1965) – from a screenplay by the team of Jim Fritzell and Everett Greenbaum (The Ghost and Mr Chicken) based on The Paleface written by Frank Tashlin (Caprice, 1967) and Edward Hartmann (The Sword of Ali Baba, 1965).

I’d been very much aware of Don Knotts as I moseyed around 1960s cinema but, fearing disappointment, had steered clear. This will suffice, I think.

Easy on the eye as long as you keep your comparisons to yourself.

Wake Me When It’s Over (1960) ***

You could scarcely find a better example of the pleasant undemanding fare that constituted Hollywood’s bread-and-butter than this mild comedy. It takes 20 minutes to even get to first base, setting our hero on his journey to a distant land, and another 20 minutes before the narrative sets out a purpose, from which various romantic and dramatic complications can arise. It doesn’t boast any stars.

If top-billed Ernie Kovacs (North to Alaska, 1960), in his third movie (and first as the headline act) had any marquee attraction it was to a television audience following his output in various comedy shows, but those would carry no weight abroad. The second-billed Dick Shawn (A Very Special Favor, 1965) carried even less appeal. He was best known as a guest star liable to pop up on television shows. Both comics were an acquired taste, belonging to the avant-garde, so their styles were not guaranteed to necessarily go down well. Not like, for example, more established comedians such as Bob Hope or Jerry Lewis.

The public was even less familiar with female lead Margo Moore (The George Raft Story, 1961). She only made three movies in total, this being the middle one.

This probably was greenlit thanks to director Mervyn Leroy who had helmed two very successful service comedies, Mister Roberts (1955), replacing John Ford, and No Time for Sergeants (1958), both based on hit Broadway plays.

Through a bureaucratic error, unassuming Gus Brubaker (Dick Shawn) is re-drafted into the U.S. military and dispatched to a remote island near Japan where, this being in the aftermath of the Korean War, there is nothing for the soldiers to do except laze around. Capt Stark (Ernie Kovacs), the unit commander, is as intent on doing nothing as anyone else.

Brubaker hits on the idea of utilizing the natural hot springs of the area to build a hotel using materials acquired very cheaply in order to capitalize on this wonder, offering hot spa treatments to visitors and recuperating soldiers.

The soldiers, including resident medic Capt Farrington (Jack Warden), sign on, seeing it as a business opportunity, involvement in which, somehow, does not run contrary to military regulations. Just when you’re waiting for the picture to develop some snap – it’s not going to be romance between Brubaker and Ume (Nobu McCarthy), daughter of the local mayor, because he’s already happily married to Marge (Noreen Nash) – up pops Lt Nora McKay (Margo Moore), bringing a female sensibility to the project and in charge of hiring the 40 local women to staff Hotel Shima.

With Brubaker off limits, it’s up to Stark and McKay to make romantic hay, though that ultimately encounters complication. Building the hotel would be the modern equivalent of a corporate team building operation because the solders soon revert to proper military ways and bond.

But word misleadingly gets out that far from being known for its healing properties, the hotel is actually a front for sexual encounters and Brubaker is court-martialed, leading to all sorts of shenanigans. After being found guilty, he is let off the hook due to the original bureaucratic error that led him to be re-drafted in the first place.

Once it gets going – and that’s quite a long time – it turns into harmless enjoyment and the two stars have ample opportunity to show they are not run-of-the-mill comedians. There are some good visual jokes, The cans of beer Brubaker has dropped in a pool to cool explode to demonstrate the water is actually a hot spring, the MacGuffin of the piece. On finding himself on the island, Brubaker plans to immediately submit a request to leave. The filing cabinet for a simple request is half-full, the one seeking a transfer full and the one demanding he be viewed as a special case overflowing.

Charming in its own way. Didn’t turn anyone into a star but proved that Hollywood could make this kind of small picture – what we’d call a “sleeper” – with enough going on to maintain interest.

Move Over, Darling (1963) ***

Doris Day never quite replaced Cary Grant or Rock Hudson in her romantic comedy ventures. This is her second outing with James Garner – The Thrill of It All had appeared earlier the same year. Ironically, it’s based on a Cary Grant film, My Favorite Wife (1940) with Irene Dunne. Having been lost at sea for the requisite five years, this version kicks off with Day being pronounced legally dead in court to pave the way for Garner to marry Polly Bergen (Cape Fear, 1962). Naturally, she turns up on the day of their wedding and the first part of the movie is Garner trying to keep the women apart. Cue comic pratfalls, double takes, diving in an out of bedrooms, but Day and Bergen seem to be trying to out-screech each other. The idea of bigamy, scandalous at the time, has lost its power to shock.

While Day spent much of the picture in hysterics, I didn’t, and wished they had moved quicker to the complication which was that she had shared her desert island with a hunk (Chuck Connors). The pace picks up a bit after that as Day has to pretend that it was nerd (Don Knotts) with whom she was stranded while Garner knows the truth. There is some good reversal, her kids, who naturally don’t recognize her, complaining about her singing. A number of set pieces save the day – two court scenes with an exasperated judge (Edgar Buchanan), Day disguised as a Swedish masseuse giving Bergen a savage work-over and Day trapped in car wash.

Michael Gordon had helmed Pillow Talk (1959) but missed the mark here. Don Knotts, prior to his incarnation as The Incredible Mr Limpet (1964) show his potential as the shoe salesman recruited by Day to impersonate Connors. Accomplished comedienne Thelma Ritter holds back on the comedy instead playing a straight role as the meddling mother-in-law. Fred Clark as the alternately bemused and suspicious hotel manager gets the best of the double takes. Garner, unfortunately, has little opportunity to exhibit his sly sense of humor or the laid-style that worked a treat in Support Your Local Sheriff (1969).

Hal Kanter, who worked on the George Gobel and Milton Berle television shows and scripted Blue Hawaii (1961) fashioned the screenplay along with the more versatile and sometime director Jack Sher (Paris Blues, 1961).

When it was known as Something’s Got to Give, George Cukor was set to direct a cast that included Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin, Cyd Charisse, Tom Tryon and Phil Silvers from a script by Nunnally Johnson and Walter Bernstein. Monroe had nixed working with Garner and Knotts. When Monroe was fired, Kim Novak and Shirley Maclaine refused offers to replace her. Dean Martin refused to continue without Monroe and although re-hired she died before production recommenced.