1994’s Wagons East! is a great title for a western comedy. Unfortunately, it is far from being a great western comedy. Even more unfortunate, is it was the last movie on which John Candy worked before his death, which happened during the production.
He plays a disgraced wagon master who is going to escort a convoy of residents back to St. Louis from a frontier town ironically named Prosperity. Not unlike the guy in The Velvet Underground’s “Train Round the Bend”, these are all inherently city people, and country life did not agree with them.
There’s Richard Lewis, in the Richard Lewis role. We first him trying to talk his way out of a gunfight with the man who stole his cattle, outwitting the man by sneaking away as the cattle rustler counts to ten, except he forgets what comes after four. Lewis helpfully provides: “four and a half!” Ellen Greene, best known as Audrey in the 80’s Little Shop of Horrors, is a madam who has had enough of the business and the men of the town who give her the business. John C. McGinley is a flamingly gay bookseller who is frustrated that the only customers he gets for his wares want the pages from them for toilet paper. Robert Picardo is a teller at the bank, and he throws in the towel when the same group of robbers hit three times so far that month. His advises them is to space out the robberies so as let the take build up a bit, but his recommendation falls on deaf ears.
There are a great deal more characters on the margins of what at times feels like an ensemble comedy. There’s William Sanderson, who remembers he knows Candy from somewhere, but takes the first two acts to remember where that was. Robin McKee is a mail order bride purchased by the many hideous men of the Ferguson clan, who all chipped in for the acquisition. There’s Don Lake, whom I mostly know from Christopher Guest’s comedies, as a Calvary lieutenant. There’s Charles Rocket as his insane boss. There’s Gailard Sartain and Ethan Phillips as a railroad magnate and his second, respectively. Frankly, there’s too many people, period.
The railroad subplot concerns $100 million of subsidies, which will only be available to Sartain if the population of pioneers in the west continues to grow. So, the idea of people giving up and going back east is alarming. Candy is just confused by the direction they’re heading, as he has never gone east before. He tells them this when they are actually in progress the morning after he’s hired, and I found it odd this wasn’t established the night before. Also, didn’t he go east before each time he took more people west?
But the wagon trail will grow as it goes along, taking on more settlers who realize manifest destiny is bullshit. They don’t pick up anybody at one town where they successfully ford a river while some locals look on in what could be awe, bemusement or confusion. From the first second we see our heroes united and happy to be accomplishing this, I knew they had to be oblivious to an easier crossing nearby. Not only is that the obvious joke, but there will prove to be a bridge right there within eyesight, making this not stupidly funny, but just stupid.
Which, alas is true of most of the humor here. It is astonishing how many jokes fail to land. There are the usual gags where kids endlessly repeat “are we there yet?” and have to make multiple bathroom stops. There is the group therapy Lewis tries to organize one night while the wagons are in a circle round the campfire. For that matter, there is a strange decision near the end to square (as supposedly to circling) the wagons in order to confuse the soldiers sent to stop their progress. But there is a moment which got a solid laugh from me, and that is when Sioux chief Russell Means not only proves to speak English, but Picardo’s hand gestures communicate nothing: “You want to shave a buffalo butt and dance naked with the beavers?”
Most of the alleged humor compounds its failure by being surprisingly morbid. One running gag has McKee finding herself brought closer to young Gary Busey lookalike Locklyn Munro, as the Ferguson claim keep accidentally reducing their numbers. None of the means through which they meet their fate are especially natural, especially the guy who gets drawn and quartered. Even then, the world of the film is inconsistent, as hired gun Ed Lautner survives the failures of his complicated attempts to eliminate the settlers, as if he is channeling Wiley E. Coyote. But he will eventually meet his match in the only truly unexpected development in the film, and is it rather bloody.
The most unusual aspect of this movie is, given how little Candy appears, and how poorly he is used when he is on the screen, I would have thought he died early in the production. Instead, he supposedly passed on the last day he was to be on set. That scans as unlikely, given how much of the runtime feels like additional footage shot to cover his absence. If true, then this must have started life as a bigger shambles than I thought possible.
It is unfortunate Wagons East was the last picture on which Candy worked. The significantly better Canadian Bacon would be released a year later despite having been finished before this film started shooting. He deserved better than to have his legacy end here. A cast with a great many talented actors deserve better than this film. Not least, the audience deserves better than this subpar entertainment.
Dir: Peter Markle
Starring John Candy, Richard Lewis
Watched on Kanopy