The Frisco Kid
With Gene Wilder, Harrison Ford, Ramon Bieri.
US, 1979, digital video, color, 122 min.
Recasting Apache’s cross-country trek in a more cartoonish context, Aldrich’s penultimate work gives Blazing Saddles icon Gene Wilder the spotlight as a Polish rabbi en route to San Francisco by foot with hopes of establishing a synagogue. After a series of misfortunes on the road alone, Wilder’s character enlists the help of an itinerant robber played by Harrison Ford, then newly popularized as Hans Solo. While the casting ploy provides the film much of its droll energy, and broad gags about cultural misunderstanding pepper the script, Aldrich gradually downplays the story’s comic elements in favor of its underlying themes of empathy and human decency. Light as it may be on the director’s trademark pessimism, though, The Frisco Kid does offer a vision of frontier life consistent with his other Westerns—which is to say, a world defined more by its divisions than its unities. That the film stages an effort to transcend these divisions makes it a sobering genre farewell.
