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Gone With The West
(1972
or 1973)
Little
Moon and Jud McGraw
(1978 or
1979)
by Johnny Web (Uncle
Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)
If you believe IMDb, Gone With the West and
Little Moon and Jud Mcgraw are the same 1975 movie, with
the latter being simply a re-naming for the foreign and
video releases. Amazon agrees, except they claim the
date should be 1976.
Those facts are not exactly right.
First of all, there are two good reasons why the 1975 or
1976 date cannot be accurate:
The characters in another movie,
Messiah of Evil, attended a movie theater. As they
watched the previews of coming attractions, they saw the
trailer for Gone With The West. Since Messiah of Evil
was released in 1973, Gone With The West had to have
been filmed before that.
The characters in the beginning and
end of Little Moon are seen driving a 1978 Oldsmobile
Cutlass. I'm pretty sure that the budget did not include
enough petty cash to develop a working time machine, so
those scenes had to be filmed in 1978 or 1979 (or
later).
Now I will see if you were paying attention. Did you
realize that I may have contradicted myself? On the one
hand, this film was seen in another film which was
released in 1973. On the other hand, some of the scenes
included a 1978 automobile. How can both of those facts
be accurate? Only one way.
Gone With The West and Little Moon and Jud McGraw are
actually two different films.
Well, kinda.
Gone With The West was shot in 1972 or 1973, which
explains how its trailer could be seen in another 1973
film. Little Moon was made in 1979 using some of the
footage from Gone With The West plus some additional
wrap-around scenes shot in 1978 or 1979, thus explaining
the 1978 Cutlass.
Here's what happened. Gone With The West was created in
1972, and it turned out to be utterly unwatchable. It's
an Old West yarn which is very sparse in the dialogue
department and is edited in such a way as to make it
difficult, almost impossible, to follow. Some of the
scenes were rushed through without sufficient
explanation, while some fight scenes and the burning of
a town just went on and on for no reason. The burning
scene alone lingers for 14 minutes of running time,
almost all of it without dialogue. (The creative team
built a small Western town and burned every bit of it on
camera, so I guess they wanted their money's worth on
celluloid.)
It seems that Gone With The West was trying to be a
genre spoof, but none of the jokes really work, so it's
not even obvious that it is a spoof, except during the
final scene, which consists of classically awful 1970s
cheese. Stephanie Powers, who had been in character the
entire movie as a Spanish-speaking Native American who
knew only a few words of heavily-accented English,
breaks out of character and says to James Caan, speaking
as Stephanie Powers rather than as Little Moon, "You've
killed everyone else except the cameraman." Caan then
draws his gun and shoots the cameraman, who falls to the
ground with the hand-held camera still running, thus
rotating the image we see by about 90 degrees clockwise.
Caan and Powers then walk off into the sunset. Sideways.
It wasn't just the jokes that failed. Nothing that they
tried in this film really worked, and it turned out to
be an unreleasable mess. It's now in the public domain,
so you
can watch it online or legally
download it for free if you care to. (The
Stephanie Powers nude scene occurs around 15:40.)
The film itself was just as bad in 1979 as it had been
in 1972, but a lot of things happened during those
intervening years to make the jumbled footage valuable
enough to try a re-edit. Th star, James Caan, went from
being a virtual nobody to being Sonny Corleone. His
sidekick, Stephanie Powers, got through a rough patch in
her career and became a star again in the TV series
"Hart to Hart." Given those circumstances, some
marketing geniuses undoubtedly figured, "Why not
re-release the film in 1979 by fixing up the two main
problems - short scenes which aren't clear, and long
scenes which drag on." And so they shot a framing story
about a modern reporter sent out into the desert by his
editor to produce a story on ghost towns of the Ol'
West. The reporter encounters a crusty old stock Western
character who ramps up her authentic frontier gibberish
to the Gabby Hayes level as she relates a story about
the old days. The story told by the ornery old
sidewinder is the same story from Gone With The West,
with 16 minutes of fat trimmed from the overlong scenes.
Because the colorful old woman was telling the story to
the city slicker, the editor was able to use her
voice-over to explain the incomprehensible goings-on in
some of the too-short scenes. Voila! They created a new
movie, Little Moon and Judd McGraw, starring three
pretty big stars: Caan, Powers, and Sammy Davis, Jr. The
original version of the film ran 92 minutes. The
re-release uses 76 minutes of that footage and adds
another 6-7 minutes in the framing story.
The most entertaining part of both versions is probably
Sammy Davis Jr's extraordinarily eccentric performance
as a hipster gunslinger. He dresses entirely in modern
leathers which are embellished with a little fringe to
make the outfit look kinda-sorta Western. His outfit is
so garish and so anachronistic that he makes Cleavon
Little's spiffy and contemporaneous "Sheriff Bart" (from
Blazing Saddles) seem in comparison to be a Dickensian
waif.
In his role as the cocky gunfighter, Sammy performs some
twirling and fast-draw tricks in real time, and he's
actually brilliant at it. He's so graceful and quick
that he probably could really have been a gunslinger.
While I'm in the mood to find some silver linings in
this cloud, I'll note that Stephanie Powers speaks very
good Spanish. Those are about the only good things to be
said about these two "sister movies."
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Our Grade:
If you are not familiar with our grading system, you
need to read the explanation,
because the grading is not linear. For example, by our
definition, a C is solid and a C+ is a VERY good movie.
There are very few Bs and As. Based on our descriptive
system, these films are:
F and D
Gone With the West (F) is incomprehensible, amateurish
gibberish. Little Moon and Jud McGraw is not as bad
simply because it's shorter and has a voice-over to tell
you what the hell is going on.
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