Support Your Local Sheriff!

Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) is a sharp western comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Burt Kennedy. James Garner plays Jason McCullough, a drifter passing through a gold-rush boomtown who takes the sheriff's job not out of any sense of duty — strictly because the pay is good.

What follows is a deadpan dismantling of every western convention it can get its hands on. McCullough improvises a jail cell by sitting his prisoner in a hole and drawing the bars on the dirt. The Danby clan, led by Walter Brennan playing the genre's archetypical patriarch with visible glee, expects the new lawman to fold. He does not fold. Joan Hackett brings genuine comic timing as the mayor's accident-prone daughter, and Jack Elam, usually cast as a heavy, turns his deputy role into one of the film's best running jokes.

Garner's gift was underplaying everything, and here it's perfectly calibrated — the whole film bends toward his complete lack of alarm at situations that should be alarming. Stream Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) online on iFILM.