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Author
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Topic: The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday (1976)
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Mike Blakesley
Film God
Posts: 12767
From: Forsyth, Montana
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 05-12-2012 12:09 PM
This was one of my favorite "guilty pleasures" movies from the 1970s. I know it's a silly flick but it's just great fun to watch. There aren't a lot of good western comedies but if you like that kind of thing, this movie is a fun way to spend a couple of hours.
It has Lee Marvin playing a down-on-his-luck retired Cavalry scout named Sam Longwood, Strother Martin as Longwood's partner-in-crime, Billy, and Oliver Reed playing a drunken half-breed Indian named Joe Knox who happens to have the "clap" (just imagine anybody trying to get away with that in 2012).
The story begins with Billy and Sam finding out that an old friend of theirs, a man named Jack Colby who stole all the money from a gold claim they once had and is now a millionaire, is in town to raise money for a political campaign by promoting a prize fight. They immediately decide to confront Colby to demand their share of the money.
At this point the story takes a definite turn off the tracks of your typical Western, as we're introduced to Joe Knox, who kidnaps a police-wagon full of recently arrested prostitutes. He shows up at the seedy rooming house where Sam and Billy live, and announces his plan to "take back" the American frontier by becoming a one-man epidemic, spreading his "Cupid's itch" from here to the White House. He introduces all seven prostitutes by naming each one for a day of the week -- except the last one, which he calls "Holidays!"
Once Joe finds out about Jack Colby being in town, he abandons that plan and sets the prostitutes free, but one -- "Thursday" -- stays behind, unbeknownst to any of the men, and later convinces them to help her escape the clutches of her "madam," a domineering woman named "Mike" played by Sylvia Miles.
The men confront Colby and demand their money, but he refuses to give it up on the grounds that they would just squander it. So Sam, Joe and Billy plan to kidnap Jack Colby's wife, Nancy Sue, played by Elizabeth Ashley -- a woman who was once Sam's true love -- and hold her for ransom. They succeed in this but it turns out that Nancy Sue isn't the sweet, lovable woman Sam remembers -- in fact, she's an outright raging bitch -- and Colby doesn't want her back, in fact he's glad to be rid of her.
This sets in motion an outlandish plan to steal their money from Colby by swiping the receipts of the prize fight he's promoting -- all the while avoiding "Mike," who is in hot pursuit of "Thursday" (we never do find out her real name) with the aid of a couple of bumbling henchmen. And all the while, Sam is developing feelings for "Thursday," who eventually wins him over by admiring his former exploits as a scout in the various skirmishes with the Indians.
There is added fun from the fact that the story is set in the very earliest days of the automobile, so we get to see a lot of car mishaps. But it's Oliver Reed who steals the show, with his constant smashing of all the Western-movie Indian stereotypes, virtually none of which would ever have a prayer of reaching a movie screen today.
This movie had never been released on DVD before to my knowledge, but it became available recently from Amazon as an "instant video," or you can also buy it as a DVD-R manufactured on demand, which is what I did. The disk is bare-bones, no extras, not even a fancy menu -- but the movie itself looks pretty good despite a disclaimer at the beginning saying it was made from the "best source material available." The color could have been a little more saturated but otherwise it looks about how you would expect for a budget reissue.
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