Support Your Local Sheriff

I try to put a movie on occasion on my blog to show the wide variety of movies available for free on Youtube. Here is one of my "guilty pleasures." Since my family were big James Garner fans, we probably saw this in a theater. 

Here is the Wikipedia summary of Support Your Local Sheriff!

The Old West frontier town of Calendar, Colorado springs up almost overnight when the rather klutzy and hotheaded Prudy Perkins (Joan Hackett) discovers gold in a grave during a funeral. Her father Olly (Harry Morgan) becomes mayor of the new settlement. He and the other members of the town council bemoan the twin facts that the place has become a drunken round-the-clock free-for-all, and that to ship out all the gold they are mining, they must pay a hefty fee to the Danbys, a family of ranchers/bandits who control the only route out of town. Most people are too busy digging to take time out to be sheriff, and those who are willing to put down their shovel quickly die.

This all changes with the arrival in town of Jason McCullough (James Garner), a calm and exceptionally competent man from "back East" who says he is passing through town on his way to Australia.

The same producers made a movie two years later that is remarkably similar to the Sheriff movie, this one titled Support Your Local Gunfighter. 

Here is the wiki summary to that.

Support Your Local Gunfighter is a 1971 comic western film starring James Garner, directed by Burt Kennedy, and written by James Edward Grant. The film shares many cast and crew members and plot elements with the earlier Support Your Local Sheriff! but is not a sequel. It actually parodies Yojimbo and its remake A Fistful of Dollars, using the basic storyline of a stranger who wanders into a feuding town and pretends to work as an enforcer for both sides.

Latigo Smith (Garner), a gambler and confidence man, is traveling by train in frontier-era Colorado with the rich and powerful Goldie (Marie Windsor). Goldie is besotted with Latigo and wants desperately to marry him, a fate that he wants no part of. He manages to slip off the train at Purgatory, a jerkwater mining town. Assessing the situation, he discovers that two rival companies of miners, led by Taylor Barton (Harry Morgan) and Colonel Ames (John Dehner), are racing each other to find a "mother lode" of gold buried somewhere nearby. Massive dynamite blasts periodically rock the town to its foundations, creating or embellishing various moments of comic relief throughout the film.

This movie is not available for free on Youtube, but is still available on Netflix as a mailed-to-you DVD. I have embedded the movie below, but it may not last so if you have an interest in it watch it soon before it disappears.

One final note, I find it interesting that when they did the second movie they chose to replace the Sheriff with a gunfighter. I am not sure that today there is much difference. It is not that the police are corrupt, although they may be, it is that the system changes you. Leave the system as much as you can, leave Babylon the Great.