Wags Out West

Cat Ballou. Silkenly coiffed and carefully educated, the provocative young schoolmarm boards a train headed west to Wolf City, Wyo. To ward off thieves, gamblers and rapscallions, she seats herself across from a Bible-clutching man of the cloth. "I'm Catherine Ballou," she offers demurely.

"I'm drunk as a skunk," says the preacher, leering just a bit.

All too soon, the sham preacher helps a cattle rustler escape from jail. Persuaded to hide the hot-blooded crook in her Pullman berth, Catherine (Jane Fonda) begins to reveal a flair for lawlessness and disorder that turns out to be her most endearing trait. After she blows into Wolf City at gale force, her father is murdered for his land by a hired gunfighter (Lee Marvin). Catherine becomes "Cat," an outlaw queen who scourges the countryside assisted by the amorous rustler, his prayerful accomplice, a Beatle-thatched Indian, and a drunken, generally unemployable gunfighter she can call her own (Lee Marvin again, in a duel role).

As honest-to-gosh westerns go, Cat Ballon is disgraceful. As a shibboleth-shattering spoof, it dumps all the heroic traditions of horse opera into a gag bag, shakes thoroughly, and pulls out one of the year's jolliest surprises. Occasionally the fun seems sophomoric, and a few maladroit asides about red-white race relations give evidence that Cat might have been improved by more careful grooming. But the offenses are minor. What's good about the comedy is nigh irresistible.

What's best about it is probably Lee Marvin. Dressed in snaky black, with a silver schnozz tied on where his nose used to be before "it was bit off in a fight," Marvin soberly parodies several hundred western badmen of yore, then surpasses himself as the dime-novel hero, Kid Shellen. A "good" killer, the Kid arrives in town unable to live up or even stand up to his legend. His eyes are bloodshot from poring over whisky labels. On ceremonial occasions he wears a corset. When he is primed with rotgut, his fast draw is apt to pull his pants off.

Director Elliot Silverstein, freshly sprung from television, sows this wild-oater with all manner of trickery, and most of it works--from speeded-up chase sequences to an entr'acte by a pair of banjo-banging troubadours (Stubby Kaye and the late Nat King Cole) who stroll improbably from scene to scene, keeping the flimsy narrative intact with snatches of song. In a performance that nails down her reputation as a girl worth singing about, Actress Fonda does every preposterous thing demanded of her with a giddy sincerity that is at once beguiling, poignant and hilarious. Wearing widow's weeds over her six-guns, she romps through one of the zaniest train robberies ever filmed, a throwback to Pearl White's perilous heyday. Putting the final touches on a virginal white frock to wear at her own hanging, she somehow suggests that Alice in Wonderland has fallen among blackguards and rather enjoys it. Happily, Cat Ballon makes the enjoyment epidemic.

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