The Shakiest Gun in the West

This is a Don Knotts movie--and that says it all. It says, for one thing, that the plot deals with a weak little worm who turns and triumphs, after ten reels of old-style pratfalls. It also says that Universal City Studios will almost surely make $3,000,000 on an investment of $1,200,000. For Don Knotts comedies are what the trade calls "regionals"--movies turned out for rural audiences. In New York City, Chicago .and Los Angeles, the film Shakiest Gun was buried as a second feature after a Japanese-made disaster called King Kong Escapes. But it will pack them in as a feature in other areas, where Don Knotts is known and loved for his grape-eyed, slack-jawed frailty in the face of just about anything life sends his way.

This is Knotts' thing, and he has been doing it since graduating from radio, where he played a he-man cowboy ("As long as they can't see you, you're all right"). For five years he was Deputy Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show, where he earned five Emmy Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series, and then starred in such low-budget flicks as The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. In Shakiest Gun he is a Philadelphia dentist in frontier territory to "spread dental health through the West like a plague." There are some funny moments--Don trying to bring his dentistry to bear on a pneumatic redhead (Barbara Rhoades), Don nonshooting it out with a badman, Don explaining his perennial bachelorhood ("I always thought I was a little too thin for marriage"), Don shaking, shaking, shaking. Anyone who remembers Bob Hope in The Paleface 20 years ago knows the whole routine. But for Don Knotts fans, deja vu is half the fun.

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