Film Stories From The Book:
Hollywood of the Rockies
By: Frederic B. Wildfang
Support Your Local Gunfighter
1971 — United Artists — produced by Burt Kennedy — written by James Edward Grant, directed by Burt Kennedy, photography by Harry Stradling, Jr., music by Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson — starring James Garner, Suzanne Pleshette, Harry Morgan, Jack Elam, Chuck Connors, Joan Blondell, Marie Windsor, Henry Jones, and John Dehner
This comedy-western is about a con man named Latigo Smith (played by James Garner), who jumps a train at a little mining town in the mountains and is mistaken for a notorious gunfighter named Swifty Morgan. Almost immediately, Latigo is accosted by a gal named Patience (Suzanne Pleshette), a sexy, wild-shooting tomboy, who —while trying to protect her father’s (Harry Morgan’s) interest in the town — falls in love with Latigo. Latigo tries to profit from the whole situation by passing off a neer-do-well local bumpkin (Jack Elam) as Swifty Morgan — banking on Swifty’s reputation to help him in the power struggle to gain control of the town and make him a little money at the same time. When the real Swifty Morgan (Chuck Conners) shows up, of course, all hell breaks loose.
Garner is perfect as Latigo Smith. As Esquire magazine once characterized him, Garner is “a master at playing dumb while maintaining a sense shrewdness and dignity”:
He is the macho stud who makes fun of himself; he is the scaredy-cat we know will not let us down in the end.
Nearly stealing the show, though, is that slack-eyed bad guy of over a hundred films, character actor Jack Elam. This is one of the movies in which Elam was able to change his image from villain to first-rate comic.
Support Your Local Gunfighter was the third Durango movie in which Elam appeared. As Elam recalls (in an article published in the Durango Herald in 1993):
‘I first came to Durango in 1949 to work on “Ticket to Tomahawk,” he said. ‘I didn’t have much of a part, Rory Calhoun was the star, and once or twice he said to me, “Go get the horses,” and I answered “OK boss....”’
‘After awhile my speaking roles increased so that I’d say, “OK boss, but we’d better hurry,”’ Elam said.... ‘Also, I’d go get the horses more times, so I was building a career.’
By the time he returned to Durango in 1955 to work on Night Passage with Jimmy Stewart, Elam had progressed to the point where he was recognized as a “legitimate heavy.”
Jack Elam’s all-time favorite director was the director of Support Your Local Gunfighter, Burt Kennedy. Elam has been in 14 movies with Kennedy and would do almost anything for him — even if it meant something a little dangerous. As Elam again recalls (in that same article):
‘In the final scene, we had this great shot of the train in the Animas Canyon [the same Durango-Silverton train that is featured throughout the movie]. I’m standing on the end of the train, and they’re shooting the scene from a helicopter overhead.’ Elam paused again. ‘Now you have to understand that I’m scared witless of heights. I’m practically unconscious before we start the scene, so they have me chained to the train. This didn’t help me much, until Kennedy had himself chained to me, but out of camera range.’ Kennedy assured Elam that if he fell, Kennedy would fall with him. ‘That helped,’ Elam admitted. In fact, they shot the perilous scene four times before the director was satisfied.
It is at the end of this scene that Elam delivers his now famous last line: “...and me, I go off to become a big star in Italian Westerns.”
Elam also appeared in the predecessor to Support Your Local Gunfighter — the slightly more successful Support Your Local Sheriff, released in 1969. Probably the most successful movie Elam ever made — or at least the most well-known — was Gunfight at the OK Corral, released in 1957.
In 1992, Elam returned to Durango one more time — to help make Tony Schweikle’s promotional video, “Travel The Movie Trail,” in which Elam appears as host. During this visit, Jack Elam was kind enough to grant the interviews from which these stories about his early career were gleaned.
