The Rounders [VHS]
Burt Kennedy wrote several of the finest Westerns ever for director Budd  Boetticher in the late '50s--marvels of austere, subtle storytelling. Yet on his  own, writer-director Kennedy tended to very broad comedy-Westerns.The  Rounders, based on a novel by Max Evans, falls somewhere betweenSupport  Your Local Sheriff(high) andDirty Dingus Magee(low). Glenn Ford  and Henry Fonda play two bronc busters in the pickup-driving West who, by their  own admission, "ain't exactly the smartest cowboys that ever lived." Somehow  they always end up owing rancher Jim Ed Love (Chill Wills) one more year of  indentured servitude. The year we observe is dominated by a purely diabolical  roan and capped by a randy brush with two showgirls (Sue Ane Langdon and Hope  Holiday) who play "Dumber" to Ford and Fonda's "Dumb."  It's all very amiable  and unassuming, but the toot-plunk-whistle-boom soundtrack--to signal "This is  the funny part"--is sheer torture.--Richard T. Jameson