[Originally published in Movietone News 50, June 1976]
The Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday may rate a footnote in film history as the first Hollywood Western to include oral-genital humor, and if that’s your idea of cinematic immortality, enjoy. As American-International Pictures’ first “class” production, the film does not bode well. Any one of AIP’s beach party flicks was funnier, and quite a few of their horror and action programmers have shown more class. You can wonder about the title for a while (Great Scout and Cathouse Thursday … is it a train? a medicine show act? a holiday?), but what it refers to is this old scout (Lee Marvin) who helped win the West and then misplaced his share of it; and this young refugee from a whorehouse (Kay Lenz) whose name becomes Thursday only momentarily, and irrelevantly. They travel some together, along with a clap-ridden halfbreed who went to Harvard (Oliver Reed) and an ineffectually randy reprobate (Strother Martin). There’s an old pal of the male trio’s (Robert Culp) who’s boondoggled and bombasted his way to a position of political prominence, along the way marrying the scout’s erstwhile girlfriend (Elizabeth Ashley), and we can’t forget—although we try, oh do we try!—the putatively lesbian madam (Sylvia Miles) our adventurers have “stolen” Thursday from. The Old West was a pretty silly place, you know: people fell in the mud a lot, and everybody was basically some kind of cheat. The music tells you when things are supposed to be funny, which is about 95 percent of the time; and about 100 percent of the time, it’s wrong.
RTJ
THE GREAT SCOUT AND CATHOUSE THURSDAY
Direction: Don Taylor. Screenplay: Richard Shapiro. Cinematography: Alex Phillips Jr. Production design: Jack Martin Smith. Music: John Cameron. Production: Jules Buck, David Korda; Executive: Samuel Z. Arkoff.
The players: Lee Marvin, Oliver Reed, Kay Lenz, Strother Martin, Robert Culp, Elizabeth Ashley, Sylvia Miles.
© 1976 Richard T. Jameson
A pdf of the original issue can be found here
