Adam West is Kenneth Cabot, a writer sent West to get the real story behind the plight of the buffalo. Not the bravest of sorts, he’s forced to take along The Three Stooges — Moe, Larry and Curley Joe in this instance — lest they lose their jobs because of their ineptitude at photographing Elvis, a skunk.
And so they head to Casper, Wyoming, where Rance Rhoden and his right-hand man, Trigger Mortis, have cooked us a dastardly scheme. They want to take control of the entire territory. And they figure the best way to do it is to exterminate the buffalo so that the Indians will go on the warpath and wipe out the cavalry. They’re even prepared to equip the Indians with a war wagon of sorts.
As soon as they learn Cabot is in town, Rhoden and Mortis decide he must go. But Annie Oakley is taken with the big galoot and comes to his rescue with some fancy shooting from a hidden location so that everyone thinks that fancy shooting was done by Cabot himself.
Before you know it, Cabot is sheriff in a town where a sheriff’s life expectancy is about … oh, one day. And the Stooges are his deputies. Keeping Cabot alive is going to be tricky business for Annie, especially when Rhoden sends for the fastest guns in the West — everyone from Billy the Kid to Bat Masterson — to do his dirty work.
Review:
A full-length Stooges feature that serves as a pleasant diversion. I mean, we do have a gunman named Trigger Mortis, Moe wearing tic-tac-toe markings on his face to infiltrate an Indian camp and pretty Annie (Nancy Kovack) displaying an uncanny knack for firing bullets straight into the muzzle of someone else’s gun.
One of the more clever scenes in the means the Stooges use to help Cabot outdraw and outgun the nine notorious gunmen sent to do him in. After which the Stooges convince at least some of them to lead a lawman life from that point on. Otherwise how would Wild Bill or Bat Masterson ever gone down in history as Wild West heroes.
Speaking of West, Adam would become TVs Batman a year later. And this marked the final feature film for the Stooges, who also made a comedy Western — “Gold Raiders” — in 1961 and made a cameo appearance in the Dean Martin-Frank Sinatra Western “Four for Texas” in 1963.
Directed by:
Norman Maurer
Cast:
Larry Fine … Larry
Joe DeRita … Curly-Joe
Moe Howard … Moe
Adam West … Kenneth Cabot
Nancy Kovack … Annie Oakley
Mort Mills … Trigger Mortis
Don Lamond … Rance Roden
Rex Holman … Sunstroke Kid
Henry Gibson … Charlie Horse
Murray Alper … Crazy Horse
Bill Camfield … Wyatt Earp
Hal Fryar … Johnny Ringo
Johnny Ginger … Billy the Kid
Wayne Mack … Jesse James
Ed T. McDonald … Bat Masterson
Bruce Sedley … Cole Younger
Sally Starr … Belle Starr
Paul Shannon … Wild Bill Hickok
Runtime: 88 min.
aka:
The Three Stooges Meet the Outlaws
Memorable lines:
Larry: “Oh, no. Not me to Wyoming. It’s full of gunslingers, gila monsters, rattlesnakes. And Indians.”
Curley-Joe: “Besides, it’s against our religion. We’re devout cowards.”
Larry: “What are they? Blackfeet?”
Curly-Joe: “I can’t see their feet, but the rest of them don’t look too clean.”
Rhoden: “I don’t know how you got away from my gunslingers, but you’re going to wish they killed you first. Now you’re going to get it the slow way, over hot coals.”
Moe, pointing to a scrub: “Wait a minute. We’d rather you hang us from that tree.”
Indian: “Why that tree won’t be ready for 60 years.”
Curly-Joe: “We’ll wait.”
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