Oh, John Candy. This isn’t how we wanted to remember you. For your last film, you deserved better than this pale shadow of Blazing Saddles and a character that gets more screen time to look serious than to be funny. I suppose it’s silly, this desire for an actor’s last film role to be somehow an embodiment of what that actor meant to the movies, a summing up of his most magnetic qualities and bits, as if the actor had an inkling that he’d die before making another film and could work up an apropos screen farewell. Still, any filmmaker fortunate enough to cast the Rabelaisian Candy should have known enough to give him a part he could roar through and make hilarious. Of course, it’s possible that director Markle still had the really funny scenes with Candy left to shoot when the actor died unexpectedly during production. But given the lackluster quality of the humor in the rest of Wagons East, that seems unlikely. The story, about a crew of disgruntled, dyed-in-the-wool Easterners in the old West who pack it in and head back home, has plenty of room for jokes, but screenwriter Matthew Carlson serves them up only sporadically, and an awful lot of them focus on the groin (knee in crotch, boot in crotch, cactus in crotch, etc.). The low humor in itself wouldn’t be so bad if the film had much else going for it (as Blazing Saddles did), but it doesn’t. It has no consistent satirical sensibility, no rhythm to its comedy, just a good cast plodding along like committed pioneers. Worst of all, the film devotes the time between gags to schmaltzing up the characters with attempts at tenderness and drama. That’s what cripples Candy. He’s set up as a drunken, inept, buffoonish wagonmaster — an ideal role for him — but he isn’t allowed to play it. Instead, he’s given a “tragic past” and has to play noble, betrayed, ashamed, etc. It isn’t that he’s bad at it, but it isn’t the John Candy we loved in Stripes, in Splash, in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, in the brilliant satire of SCTV. It isn’t the big, smirking, boisterous, rowdy clown I would have liked to see bluster across the screen one last time.
This article appears in September 2 • 1994.