Candy and Lewis deserved better

“Wagons East” does a lot very wrong but its chief sin is casting two very funny people and then requiring them to play straight men to people who aren’t funny. That one of them is John Candy, and this would be the last completed film he would star in, only makes this frontier comedy memorable for all the wrong reasons.


Candy plays a drunken wagonmaster named James Harlow hired by a doctor named Phil (Richard Lewis) to lead a wagon train out of a hellhole town called Prosperity. It’s a place with a population of 67 and dropping due to gunfights, bar fights, and the general unkemptness of the people and their dwellings.


The general unpleasantness of many of these people is one of the main gags in screenwriter Mathew Carlson’s arsenal but where the film gets really tired is that after a while it becomes clear the general grossness, childishness, and toilet humor is about all the film has.


That doesn’t serve Candy well at all, who winds up only reacting to many of these people more than allowing anything about his own character to register. Harlow becomes almost a background figure here- he has nothing to do, nothing funny to say, and the film doesn’t allow him to play the drunk for any real laughs much past the opening moments. Even his few moments of slapstick seem shoehorned in and forced. Lewis, a king of dry wit, is also a disappointment as there’s no real wit to the film. Even his best laugh (“do you want me to turn this wagon around”, threatening his bickering backseat kids) isn’t all that good.


Carlson and director Peter Markle have no sense of the story they’re trying to tell- any idiot who was an avid Oregon Trail player back in the day could come up with more exciting events for these people than they do. A trip into Indian country yields nothing. There’s a villain (Ed Lauter) who winds up falling off mountains and getting blown up in his attempts to stop the wagon train (sort of like Wyle E Coyote), except live action cartoon humor is hardly ever funny. There’s a gay stereotype character (John C. McGinley) much less funny now than back then. But he’s practically the most compelling person here compared with the rest of the townsfolk- a bunch of cartoons who have relations with their cows, love fart and dick jokes, get hit in the crotch a lot, and participate in general idiocy. The movie tosses out land speculators and old situations and people from Harlow’s past, though what it never does is make any of this substantial enough for Candy to play against or make laughs out of.


Some of this idiocy can be sporadically funny but it’s hard to latch on to any of these characters. This movie needs one who’s intelligent enough to root for and situations worth rooting for them to succeed in. It has neither.