The Great Scout & Cathouse Thursday (1976)

Lee Marvin dusted off the rapscallion character he played in both Cat Ballou and Paint Your Wagon to star in The Great Scout&Cathouse Thursday. Marvin is the great scout at least by his lights and Cathouse Thursday is Kay Lenz.It's 1908 and the scout's seen his best days gone by. But the sight of his old prospecting partner Robert Culp who is now running for governor of the state on a fortune that was started with the money that they prospected and Culp stole sends Marvin into action. Marvin contacts Oliver Reed and Strother Martin the other two partners and they formulate several plans for revenge. The plan they eventually settle on is to kidnap Culp's wife Elizabeth Ashley who used to be with Marvin and hold her for ransom. Along in all of this is Lenz who is left over from a raid on a bordello she works at when Oliver Reed decides to keep her after he rescues the others. Lenz isn't crazy to go back there and be the special favorite of lesbian madam Sylvia Miles. In fact she comes in quite handy in dealing with Culp.The Great Scout&Cathouse Thursday is a rollicking western with Marvin, Reed, and Martin all competing to see who can ham it up the most. I think Reed's scene in which he gets cured of the clap after being led down a garden path by Marvin is the best. Let's just say that Marvin was years ahead of his time in predicting the treatment.The final fight scene between Marvin and Culp was borrowed from the John Wayne classic, McLintock. It still works in this film and provides a fitting climax.

The American Western had gotten kind of tired by the early 60's and ended up moving overseas during that decade where it begat the Spaghetti Westerns or Euro-Westerns. There is no doubt these films really revitalized the genre, but what was especially interesting is the influence they in turn had on the American genre in the 1970's. This is most obvious perhaps in early American Clint Eastwood Westerns like "Hang 'em High" and "High Plains Drifter" which traded on Eastwood's mercenary "Man with No Name" character. The more left-wing political Eurowesterns, meanwhile, probably had at least some influence on American films like "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Pat Garret and Billy the Kid" (as well as on overtly political pseudo-Westerns like "Billy Jack"). This rather obscure American film is especially interesting though because it really betrays the influence of the third type of Eurowestern, the slapstick-comedy Westerns typified by the "Trinity" films of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer.This movie is also interesting in that it casts two the scariest screen heavies of all time--Lee Marvin and Oliver Reed--in roles that sre not only sympathetic but funny. Reed plays an Indian(!), which easily could have been a disaster, but he turns out to be quite funny as a resentful half-breed who kidnaps a bunch of prostitutes in order to infect them with a dose of clap he has in order to create an epidemic that he hopes will reach all the way to the White House! He quickly forgets about this hare-brained scheme, however, when Marvin's character enlists his aid in getting revenge on an old partner (Robert Culp) who swindled them both and stole the Marvin character's perpetually unfaithful wife (Elizabeth Ashley). Rounding out the gang is character actor Strother Martin and Kay Lenz as "Cathouse Thursday", one of the prostitutes who decides to stay with her abductors. And this itself becomes a problem because she is the favorite of a lesbian madame (Sylvia Miles), who commands her own gang and owns the only motorcar around. It all comes to a head at a boxing match/political charity for the election of William Howard Taft.Besides Marvin and Reed, the other main asset of this film is Kay Lenz. Lenz was a very appealing actress but not a traditional Hollywood beauty (she was kind of like Sissy Spacek or Hilary Swank), which often got her cast in "loser" or "outsider" roles like the title role in the ridiculous TV movie "The Initiation of Sara". After her memorable debut in "Breezy", she also kind of got typecast as a younger woman romantically involved with much older male partners ( William Holden in "Breezy", Lee Marvin in this). She was definitely very cute (she was once married to 70's heart-throb David Cassidy) and Hollywood should have done a lot more with her.This isn't really a classic Western (and it's pretty hard to find right now), but is an interesting and entertaining film.

I saw this film when I was about 13 and remember laughing till I cried. I have never had the opportunity to see it again, because it never seems to be on TV and IMDB says it isn't available on DVD or video. I would love to see this movie again and find out if it has stood the test of time and memory.

This movie has not received the best reviews but I have always loved this picture. I'm not an old movie buff, I'm only 19 but I've always been a huge Lee Marvin and Strother Martin fan. This movie has three great actors together Marvin, Martin, and Oliver Reed as the Indian "Joe Knox". Watch this film and you'll see three screen legends in a comical role with a good story plot. Marvin and Martin show the comical side to themselves and Oliver Reed presents a superb and funny performance as an Indian. "The Great Scout And Cathouse Thursday" is a Great movie with Great actors. A beautiful movie that deserves a 10 rating!