That looks like a real (reel?) doozy! But--

I can't remember the name of the worst Western ever made, but I saw it—at least a chunk of it—actually, too large a chunk of it—sometime back in the early 1940s.

The scene is the neighborhood theater near where I lived back then. I was in my very early 'teens at the time. Saturday afternoon matinee, double-feature, complete with "Prevues of Coming Attractions," newsreel, cartoon, and an episode of a fifteen chapter serial (such as "The Perils of Nyoka," "The Mysterious Dr. Satan," a somewhat pot-bellied "Batman," "Don Winslow of the Navy vs. The Scorpion"—Great Stuff!!), and my sisters and I used to go every week. [Great for our parents. It got us out of the house for a few hours, and it only cost 25¢ apiece. Cheaper than baby-sitting.]

Anyway, my little sister, Pat, was off doing something else that afternoon, so my older sister (by two years), Mary, and I went. Don't remember what the first movie was, but the second was a Western. It was like every really bad Western we had ever seen, as if it had been pieced together with clips from a whole bunch of other bad Westerns. Then, there was a chase scene, in which the cameras kept switching back and forth between the bank robbers galloping to beat hell, followed by the sheriff's posse galloping to beat hell after them. It went on . . . and on . . . and on . . . and on. . . .    The robbers . . . the posse . . . the robbers . . . the posse . . . the robbers. . . .

I checked my wrist watch, which had "glow in the dark" hands and numbers. The chase had been going on for at least fifteen minutes, which is an eternity in movie time. You could hear bored sighs from all over the theater. And the audience was composed of kids like us, whose aesthetic and dramatic tolerances are generally very open and flexibile, and able to absorb incredible amounts of pure crap, just for an opportunity to watch a good punch-out, shoot-out, or chase scene. But this had gone on so long that, by now, the entire audience had lost interest. Eye-rolling time!

My sister said, "This is stupid! Let's get out of here!"

"But we haven't seen the next chapter of 'The Scarlet Avenger' yet!"

"C'mon. I have an idea."

The theater manager, who generally hung out in the lobby, was a nice lady, and since we were regulars, she knew us pretty well. So Mary said to her, "This movie is really boring! Could we leave now, and come back in time to see the serial without having to pay again?" As I say, she was a nice lady and we were reasonably well-behaved regulars, so she said, "Sure. But be sure to be back before 5:15, because that's when it's scheduled." And she scribbled us a quick note to give to the fellow taking tickets at the door.

So we went to the drug store (complete with soda fountain) next door, had milk shakes, and returned in time for the next episode of "The Scarlet Avenger."

Relative to Westerns in general, this movie—whose name I have undoubtedly repressed—was not quite up to the cinematic standards set by such classic films as science fiction's ""Plan 9 from Outer Space," said by some to be the worst movie ever made.

Don Firth