Urggggh I guess I've got to watch this one now haven't I?... I've gotten to that part on my quest where I have to check this one off and it's been a while since we last covered a retro black & white film on the blog, the last being Maniac in January which was awful... but it's one of the last old ones on my list and after this we move on to the 50's... you should know that going into this I was really not looking forward to having to watch this movie...
Bat Haines (Little Billy Rhodes) is hustling cattle from 2 different parties; Tex Preston (Billy Pratt) and Pop Lawson (John T. Bambury) and is content for both parties to think and blame it on the other one without getting found out. Meanwhile Buck Lawson (Billy Curtis) is asked by his dad, Pop, to find out what's going on and put a stop to it, interrupting Bat's gang from rustling more cattle and later from holding up a stagecoach. Buck manages to talk Tex round into meeting his dad and working together to track down the cattle hustlers, but Bat overhears the conversation and shoots Tex dead, then immediately rides to the Preston ranch and lies about seeing Buck shoot Tex. They pursue Tex and try to shoot him dead but he manages to hide and rides back to the Preston Ranch. Buck learns from Tex's niece that Bat Haines witnessed the murder and deducing that it must have been Bat who shot Tex he rides back to town but is arrested for the murder as he confronts Bat. Worried that he might get found out, Bat convinces everyone in the saloon to help him storm the Sheriff office and take care of Buck themselves and are almost on the cusp of hanging him when he is rescued by Preston's men. Buck chases Bat to his ranch and the 2 fight with Buck only narrowly escaping an explosion from dynamite planted by a scorned lover blowing Bat and his shack to pieces.
"What the hell am I watching," was a question I asked myself quite a lot as this film played out. I have no idea what they were even going for. Do I take this film seriously as a Western? Is it a Comedy because; 'Look they are little people! Look at them struggling to reach things! Look at them pretending to be Cowboys!'? is it a Musical because 3 quarters of it is bloody awful musical numbers...? Is it some horrifying, deformed smorgasbord of all 3 that begs you to put it out of misery and turn it off before you get to the end? Because I sure felt guilty enough after watching it.
Let's discount the fact that this is an all dwarf cast for a moment (we'll come on to that shortly) and focus on the production in general. Taking into account that this is a 1938 production, the cinematography is, for the most part, dreadful. No centre shots of any of the characters, lines of dialogue exchanged between characters always seem to be directed almost away from the camera's gaze and almost always to the far left or far right of the shot. No central framing pretty much at all throughout this. There were some almost impressive scenes shot of the characters riding... erm... Shetland Ponies... but they were incredibly short and always incredibly shaky. This movie also had it's fair share of choppy editing and choppy scene changes with one part obviously completely chopped out but not before the musical score had started to kick in before it was abruptly cut off.
The acting was atrocious, across the board, and yeah I feel a bit bad for picking on a ensemble cast of people obviously afflicted with Dwarfism, but it's quite obvious these people are not dyed-in-the-wool actors and it just reeks of exploitation all the way through. The dialogue was almost straight script reads in places, with no effort to deliver convincingly and half the time I hadn't got a clue what was going on. I got totally lost twice and had to rewind to try and figure out what was happening. The storyline is very much an average Western affair about cattle smuggling and 2 gunslingers having a showdown, but it's clear very little investment was put into it and instead put into as many scenes as possible where it can showcase little people trying to do big people things like: fetch something from the high part of a cupboard, walk through saloon doors, step up onto some decking. What a wretched, horrible excuse for a movie this really was.
Nothing about this film makes a convincing effort to produce a good Western movie and instead puts it focus purely on it's Dwarf cast and exploiting their condition for the curiosity or amusement of it's audience. It's an ambitious experiment, granted, but with all the wrong moral backbone and after it's all said and done, it's not even a good film either. It's not even an average film for that matter. It's just bad. Bad all the way through. I got nothing from this. Zero stars.
