After scoring a surprise box-office hit with the
independently made canine adventure Benji (1974), director Joe Camp was
in a position to try something different—so for his second feature, he used a
little-known historical episode from the pre-Civil War era as the basis for a gentle comedic romp. Hawmps! depicts the misadventures of a U.S. Army
squad tasked with testing camels as possible replacements for horses in desert
outposts. Given the nature of Camp’s previous film, it’s surprising that very
little of the picture is devoted to the specifics of animal behavior—in fact,
only two of the camels are given memorable names and “personalities.” Instead
of focusing on critters, Camp builds jokes around the broadly sketched—and unapologetically
clichéd—characters populating the Army squad, including a drunken Irishman, an
inexperienced lieutenant, and a stalwart drill sergeant. The only surprising
character is an Arabian camel trainer named H. Jolly, played by Gino Conforti,
because the character is a British-schooled dandy with a monocle.
Hawmps!
is shallow and silly, but it basically works in an undemanding sort of way. Whether
Camp is staging elaborate slapstick sequences of barroom brawls or vignettes of dehydrated
soldiers trudging through the desert, the director keeps things amiable and
lively. Plus, the picture is billed right in the opening credits as “a family
film by Joe Camp,” so the mandate clearly was to make lighthearted
entertainment suitable for very young viewers. And if Hawmps! is
ultimately little more than a Disney knock-off made without the glossy
cinematography and lavish production values one normally associates with
Disney’s live-action fare, the movie has the benefit of an offbeat historical
basis, and Camp resists the sentimental excesses that make similar Disney
movies (such as the Apple Dumpling Gang pictures) unnecessarily
saccharine.
James Hampton, a pleasant comic actor who costarred in the ’60s
series F Troop, which was something of a stylistic precedent for this
movie, plays Lt. Clemmons, a Washington, D.C., gofer who gets assigned the
thankless task of supervising the camel experiment. Upon arriving at an outpost
in the West, Clemmons takes command of a squad led by Sgt. Tibbs (Christopher
Connelly), even though Tibbs’ men all misunderstood their orders and thought
they were getting Arabian horses instead of Arabian camels. High jinks ensue as
the camel-riding soldiers clash with the cantankerous sergeant (Slim Pickens)
of a rival squad, and with an outlaw (Jack Elam) who commands a town filled
with criminals. The movie features lots of chaotic physical comedy—people
falling off camels or tripping into mud, and so on—and the dialogue is occasionally
cartoonish. Still, most of the actors in Hawmps! are stone-cold pros,
including those previously mentioned plus Denver Pyle, and the sight of
bluecoated U.S. soldiers chasing after crooks or Indians while riding on camels
is reliably amusing.
Hawmps!:
FUNKY
