The Sunday Round-Up: Preaching, Saloons, and Really Bad Vaudeville

Is it worth your time?

If you have a soft spot for weird, low-budget westerns that don't quite know what genre they want to be, you might have a good time here. If you prefer your movies to have a coherent plot or, I don’t know, actual pacing, you should probably skip this one. It feels like a fever dream you’d have after eating too much canned beans.

The whole premise is just absurd. Ted Burke is a pastor who can't get the boys into the pews because they're all hanging out at the Mustang Saloon. Fair enough. But his solution is to hire a bunch of washed-up vaudeville performers and a knife-thrower to compete with a saloon quartet. It’s the 1930s equivalent of a TikTok dance-off, I guess.

Wait, why is there a knife-thrower?

Honestly, I have no idea. But watching Steve Clemente just show up in a church setting is the kind of baffling, specific detail that makes old movies worth sitting through. It’s the kind of thing you only notice because the movie spends so much time focusing on it instead of, say, the dialogue.

The vaudeville act, Chase and Chase, really earn their “down-and-out” status. They aren’t even charmingly bad; they’re just sort of… there. You can feel the screen losing energy whenever they start their routine. It reminded me a bit of the awkwardness in The Concentratin' Kid, where you just wonder how any of this got greenlit.

• The saloon henchmen are remarkably polite about tossing the pastor out.
• The "competition" musical numbers sound like they were recorded in a very small, very empty tin shed.
• There’s a horse named Smoke that clearly has more screen presence than half the human cast.

The fighting scenes are exactly what you’d expect from this era. Everyone swings their fists in giant, looping arcs, and nobody ever actually hits anybody. It’s all very choreographed and safe. It feels like a play where the actors are afraid of sweating too much. 🤠

I found myself wondering if this was meant to be a comedy or a serious drama about community values. It fails at both, but in a way that’s kind of endearing? It’s not as soul-crushing as The Warfare of the Flesh, but it certainly isn't a masterpiece. It's just a dusty, weird artifact of a time when you could throw a knife-thrower into a church and call it a plot point.

The movie doesn't really conclude so much as it just stops. Which is probably for the best. I don't think I could have handled another song.