The Rounders [VHS] Overview
Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns. The Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere between Support Your Local Sheriff (high) and Dirty Dingus Magee (low). Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their own admission, "ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived." Somehow they always end up owing rancher Jim Ed Love (Chill Wills) one more year of indentured servitude. The year we observe is dominated by a purely diabolical roan and capped by a randy brush with two showgirls (Sue Ane Langdon and Hope Holiday) who play "Dumber" to Ford and Fonda's "Dumb." It's all very amiable and unassuming, but the toot-plunk-whistle-boom soundtrack--to signal "This is the funny part"--is sheer torture. --Richard T. Jameson
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