Good words to live by: "Produced by Sam Katzman." In the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Poverty Row studios were factories of raw creativity. Sure, they clipped, borrowed, and ransacked ideas and cliches from much better films, and were not unafraid of dipping their toes into exploitation, but when your goal is to crank out films fast you're willing to put anything in a movie. Sam Katzman, who produced through Monogram, the most famous of the Poverty Row studios, brought us Bela Lugosi's Monogram Nine, and consequently I have faith that there's gold to be found in many of the other movies he put his name to. Big Calibre is one of Katzman's Westerns, and while it was not a Monogram movie, it has the feel of one to an amusing extent. I suddenly now have a strong desire to start digging through the B-Westerns of the '30s and '40s to see if there's anything else like this. God fucking help me.
Mr. Neal of the Triple N Ranch is killed in a gas attack. Admittedly, it is partially his own fault, since he does all he can to stick his head as far into the gas cloud as possible. His son Bob learns that the local chemist, Otto Zenz, is the murderer, but Zenz escapes Bob before the younger man can capture him. Admittedly, Bob isn't much of an angel of justice, being rather scrawny and unobstrusive, so the hunched, lean scientist's escape isn't that impressive. However, Bob doesn't give up, and he and his requisite Elderly Comic Sidekick eventually find themselves in a small town where a woman named June Bowers lives. June and her father are deep in debt to a fellow with huge glasses and Richard Kiel teeth named Gadski, and in order to keep her property June robs a truck and frames Bob for it. Around this time, however, June's father is kidnapped and seemingly murdered, and naturally Bob is blamed for this as well. The twist ending will surprise no one (it's one of the most transparent "twists" I've seen in a long while), but the final fight is worth it.
This movie gradually gains its weirdness, starting with its fusion of the Western with the Lugosi-esque horror mystery. Mr. Gadski's appearance is jarring and astonishingly fake, and so when he enters the screen any seriousness the film had quickly dissipates. Then we get the scene where Rusty is reunited with Arrabella, June's cook, who was apparently his "childhood sweetheart." Arrabella has been pining over him all this time, and given the ages the characters are supposed to be, this has been a period of anywhere from thirty to forty years. The other characters gleefully leave Rusty alone with her, as if she isn't about to kill him with an axe for spurning her.
But then we get to the weirdest scene in the film, the hoedown--a sequence which goes on for a disturbingly long time and only gets more nightmarish the more time goes on. It's chaperoned by a particularly ugly fellow in a top hat, who has an assistant named Elmer, who may be a zombie. As in, he looks and acts like a living corpse. So much is unexplained in this scene and it gets even worse when Bob and Rusty show up in disguise. Both are wearing masks: Bob has some sort of Phantom of the Opera/Michael Myers number, while Rusty wears something that makes him look like Ortega from The Incredible Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies! There's so much to look for in this scene, and really, so much to look for in the movie as a whole.
It does manage to drag a little bit, even at 58 minutes, but for my first adventure into Golden Age B-westerns, I found this to be a fun ride. Here's to more of the same sometime soon!
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