While watching 1968’s The Shakiest Gun in the West, I couldn’t stop thinking about The Avalanches’s song “Frontier Psychiatrist”. It is a track made of all kinds of crazy samples, including one I’ve always wondered the source of, where a guy is saying, “and he made false teeth”. Don Knotts may not be a psychiatrist in this film, but he is a frontier dentist with a ridiculously oversized set of demonstration teeth which factor into a good gag here.
We first see him struggling with a patient while he is in training at a dental college in Philadelphia. His patient refuses to open her mouth, which seems odd, as she had come there for an extraction. I hope she wasn’t intending to get it extracted from outside her closed mouth. He eventually finishes the job only after a long scene where the two actually engage in a fist fight and wrestling. Well, really, she engages in a great deal of physical action with a stunt double that looks nothing like our star.
Knotts graduates as class valedictorian, which I suspect has never been part of any trade college graduation ceremony. It seems to me that would be like graduating summa cum laude from plumbing school.
With a surplus of dentists in his hometown, he goes west, where there is likely a far greater need. This traumatizes his mother, prompting her to bring up everything that could go wrong, including his allergies. After all, she claims that’s supposedly what killed his father, but Knotts isn’t buying that: “He got hit by a beer wagon.” “Yes, but he had stopped to blow his nose.”
This is a man on a mission: “I’m going to spread dental health through the west like a plague.” But first, he and others on a stagecoach are robbed by a duo of bandits whose leader is revealed to be Barbara Rhoades. She’s soon apprehended by the authorities, and gets an offer of a commuted sentence if she’ll work as an undercover agent. The feds have been trying to determine who is providing guns to Native Americans. All they know is it is somebody who is part of a wagon train that is about to depart, so she needs a man to pose as her husband. No points for guessing who she ropes into the scheme.
The humor is at the same level as the two previous features Knotts starred in. Most gags didn’t click for me, though I still chuckled a fair amount. There weren’t many moments when I laughed, but the biggest of those for me was when two guys try to jump on a horse from opposite sides, knocking each other out when they collide. There was also a moment that was just flat-out weird for the time, and that was the old man who was Rhoades’s literal partner-in-crime, who decides to go legit so he can fulfill his life-long ambition: “Go to Boston and open a dress shop.” That is a bit worthy of Cabin Boy.
The action scenes aren’t bad, either, even if they aren’t the main attraction in a film such as this. There an interesting scene that starts with Native Americans in literal hot pursuit of a covered wagon, as they have landed some blazing arrows in its wheels. There’s a pretty good gag coming up where our hero believes he is a great shot, when it is really Rhoades doing all the work. Part of the setup is he has to keep moving to stay behind a barrel that rolls a couple of feet each time a bullet hits it. I feel like there’s a basis for an early 80’s arcade game there, probably one from Nintendo.
Although this is, like the previous Knotts films, a largely set-bound affair, there is considerably more outdoor footage. The cinematographer takes advantage of this opportunity, though none of the shots are what anybody would describe as beautiful.
Less pleasant are the portrayals of non-Caucasians, which isn’t too surprising, given when this was made. I expected Native Americans to be not be shown in a positive light, but I was more taken aback by one performance of a Chinese man. I guess, at least, the actor was actually Asian.
The Shakiest Gun in the West is the kind of film that, if you think you’ll enjoy it, then you will. Everything about it will be established in a very funny title song. It may not be “Frontier Psychiatrist”, but has such great lines as “He’s an underfoot tenderfoot” and “He’s got a hair in his eye and a gleam on his chest.”
Dir: Don Knotts, Barbara Rhoades
Watched on Shout Factory blu-ray