"The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw" (1958)

Jayne Mansfield made a career out of playing up the fact she was a knock-out platinum blonde. Like her contemporary Marilyn Monroe she was essentially always playing herself, or at least a highly fictionalized version of herself. Mansfield was playing to and against what we expected, never merely a “dumb blonde”, but certainly always a type.

Mansfield’s roles all essentially involved her playing what amounts to a cartoon character. But that’s entirely part of what makes them entertaining. In The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw, Mansfield is a feisty, savvy saloon owner who represents the warm-hearted vulgarity of the United States at its most raw and wonderful. 

Mansfield’s blunt Americanism is set against Kenneth Moore’s prim-and-proper English gentleman Jonathan Tibbs, and the film’s pleasures derive from putting Tibbs deep into one fish-out-of-water situation after another. 

Jonathan is a stuck-in-the-clouds employee of his family’s firm, which sells professional firearms. When business subsides on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Jonathan begins looking across the ocean to make a bold business venture. The Wild American West is full of lawless gun fighting and thus, Jonathan believes, is a perfect market to get in on.

When he arrives stateside, Jonathan is beyond being out of his depth, but he is so good-natured and sincere that he constantly unwittingly solves problems with a Mr. Magoo-like zen-beauty. Indians attack his caravan and he simply steps out to negotiate peace with them, and succeeds – on accident and without any awareness it was on accident. Jonathan is thoroughly optimistic and chipper and every American is so bone-deep cynical that his hopefulness can’t help but win out by the laws of Hollywood film logic. His earnest bumbling indvertedly leads to him being made the sheriff of the town, a fact completely, ironically at odds with how little Jonathan knows about using the guns he is out to sell. 

The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw is a slight, slightly under-baked film. Howard Dimsdale's script often time doesn’t seem to have enough material to warrant a feature film length. Anytime the plot moves forward the film creaks under the minor herculean effort it takes to be anything more than a highly charming trifle. The film also falls into groaning, groan-inducing territory when it turns Native Americans into some of the supporting live-action cartoon characters on its roster (though they’re admirable ones; so there’s that!). It’s a weird representational issue where it’s not exactly offensive (it’s even oddly progressive in its way), but it reads really weird (It’s trying to be smarter than it actually is, but it just comes off politically incorrect).

The film looks to skewer Western film conventions in an almost similar, but far, far tamer and less successful, manner to Blazing Saddles. When it finds time for the elasticity of a cartoon world there are some laughs to be found. Like a Saturday morning animated feature, there is a nice, silly, inviting space created by The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw that is warm and friendly if a little fleeting and forgettable.  

Grade: B-