The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw

A few minutes into The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, a Cinemascope Western released in 1958, a technician shows the hero a tiny Derringer pistol mounted on a bracket strapped to the man's forearm -- when the man extends his arm as if to shake hands, the little pistol glides into his grip.  The staid and very proper Englishman who is the film's protagonist (played by Kenneth More) comments that the pistol seems very small and harmless:  "Not at all, sir," the technician says.  "President Abraham Lincoln was killed with just such gun."  In 1915, the film's director, the formidable Raoul Walsh, played John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, and, it seems, that he is slyly signing this film through this tiny and inconspicuous allusion.  Walsh, apparently, had some affection for this leisurely comic Western -- although it's really not a very good film.  The movie's premise is that an English gentleman, the scion of a gun-manufacturing firm that dates to 1605, travels to the American West in the hope of retailing weapons there.  He stumbles into a range war, befriends the local Indian tribe, and, through a misunderstanding, become the titular Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, the remote settlement where the action takes place.  Along the way, the hero falls in love with a dance-hall girl, played with a grating Southern accent by Jayne Mansfield -- the film's happy ending is the hero's marriage to the saloon chanteuse, the voluptuous beauty "given away" by the protagonist's adopted father, the Indian Chief in full headdress and war regalia.  It's all good-natured, casually racist, and expensively produced -- the landscapes are an impressive mixture of deep canyons rimmed by pine trees and baked-looking hoodoo badlands; the Western village is an elaborate set located in the center of an empty plain shimmering with mirages; hundreds of men mounted on horseback participate in some of the climactic scenes -- big cavalry charges that are about avoiding carnage, not committing it.  (The film is pacifist for its time -- a couple of savages are shot off their horsebacks in an early scene and one bad hombre gets gunned-down in barroom duel; otherwise, the film is surprising non-violent -- after all, it was marketed as a big, expensive comedy and too many killings would have defeated the film's purpose and upset its blithe tone.)

The movie belongs squarely to the genre of the dude or greenhorn out of place in the rough and tumble American West -- examples of this kind of film are Laurel and Hardy's Way out West, the Bob Hope vehicle Paleface, Ruggles of Red Gap, Billy Crystal's comedy City Slickers and, on a darker note, films like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.  The sliding holster for the Derringer results in More's character being considered the "fastest gun" in the West -- the Derringer assembly is similar to a device that Travis Bickel builds for himself in Taxi Driver.  In fact, the Dude's derringer isn't loaded and the hero is persistently non-violent.  By the end of the film, he has mediated peace between the warring factions engaged in the range war and, curiously, established a neutral peace-keeping force by making his fortune peddling guns to the renegade Indians.  The heavily armed Indians are, then, recruited as  the Sheriff's deputies to keep the trigger-happy cowboys from killing one another -- a peculiar plot twist if ever there was one.  Because of the Victorian period in which this film is set, Jayne Mansfield is a little disabled -- she can't show the acres of cleavage that she flaunted in her two previous Hollywood films The Girl Can't Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?  Instead, this picture exploits Mansfield's hour-glass figure, particularly her freakishly tiny waist -- she's not really effective in the film,  too screechy with a grating moonbeams and magnolias accent.  She has three songs, all of them sweetly dubbed by Connie Francis -- Francis' vocals, with her pure, girl-next-door tones and the simplicity of her phrasing is one of the best things in the film:  the dubbing is not believable nor are several rear-projection process shots that are so poorly done that they seem almost dream-like, surrealist, more like shots in a film by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg than typical Hollywood images.  Walsh directs the film in fairly long takes, populating his scenes with lots of figures -- he seems to like his actors and indulges them.  The action sequences involve lots of extras but they are filmed in a cursory manner as if Walsh wasn't really interested in these sequences.  (A good example of Walsh's nonchalant direction occurs in the first part of the film:  More is seen tinkering with a steam-powered "horseless carriage" - the thing starts on fire and we are shown a close-up of the boiler pressure spinning crazily.  The car blows up and the blast is represented by a wooden door popping off the side of the barn where the car is located -- it's a distinctly underwhelming climax to a complicated and protracted sequence:  your reaction is:  Is that all?) The movie was made at Pinewood Studios near London and in Aragon, Spain -- this was the first widely released Western made in Spain.  Apparently, the picture was big at the box-office in the UK -- someone at the BBC watched the film and took heed:  a few years later, the unflappable Patrick McNee in business suit and bowler hat would be paired with the slinky Diana Rigg in her hyper-modern black vinyl cat-suits -- the odd couple of John Steed and Mrs. Peel in The Avengers seems to derive in some ways from the prototype of Jayne Mansfield and Kenneth More in this film.