Fairplay (1971)

Fairplay is an adequately produced but otherwise inept frontier comedy featuring a number of vaguely familiar actors with marginal credits in mainstream film and television. Given the popularity of farces set in the Wild West circa the late ’60s, from Cat Ballou on the big screen to F Troop on the small screen, making something like this on the cheap was not an unreasonable proposition. Alas, Texas-based indie director James A. Sullivan and his collaborators lacked comedy chops, originality, and storytelling acumen, so Fairplay is flat, meandering, and unfunny. That said, it’s also coherent and harmless, which is to say it lives a few layers above the bottom of the ’70s-cinema barrel. The big man in the tiny God-fearing town of Justin is Jova Purvis (Robert Middleton), and he’s in perpetual conflict with grandfatherly crook F.O. McGill (Paul Ford), boss of the neighboring town Fairplay—really just a run-down hotel filled with hired guns who plunder Justin for F.O.’s benefit. One day, F.O.’s naïve great-nephew Teddy (Phillip Alford) arrives in Fairplay, unaware of his relative’s criminality, then falls for Jova’s daughter Pearlie (Barbara Hancock). Yet despite occupying much of the film’s screen time, the subplot is secondary to the machinations of retailer Skinner Bindleshaft (Paul Glaser), who contrives a scheme to sell a fake Gatling gun to whichever town leader offers the highest price. Beyond the usual “comedic” gunfights (which involve characters shooting everywhere except at their opponents), Fairplayfinds most of its anemic humor in contrived character flourishes, such as the lineage of hired gun Bela Running Eagle (Norris Domingue), who talks about how the Hungarian side of his personality balances the Paiute Indian side—and, yes, those gags are just as laborious as they sound. Presumably Sullivan and his collaborators envisioned an hour and a half of lighthearted entertainment. They got the lighthearted part right.

Fairplay: LAME