The Sheriff of Rock Spring (1971) (orig. Lo sceriffo di Rockspring) - Director: Mario Sabatini - 2/10.
The movie is both tough to categorize and to digest: the story pivots around a small town in which there is a custom of appointing a child deputy sheriff for one week; though this tradition is meant to enshrine peace and harmony in the small community as indicated in a series of dialogues, none of this amounts to any concrete social commentary or anything which could be construed as a deliberate attempt at conveying some sort of message, so what constitutes one of the more crucial plot points seems to be there just for the sake of it. Though the flick is apparently intended to function as some kind of children’s production, kids start to figure more prominently only past film’s midpoint. Prior to that, the narration helplessly juggles around the characters of the sheriff played by Richard Harrison, the Mormon acted by O’Brien, a handful of journalists covering the election of “the small sheriff” and the villain.
Consequently, narrative’s focus is all messed up and it probably would have been hard to follow the story had it featured more plot devices along the line. In reality, the project almost appears to be something along the lines of a TV show episode which has been stretched out to achieve the feature length. Since there is merely a handful of occurrences to portray, the whole enchilada unfolds at a torturously sluggish pace, taking its sweet time depicting events of no importance whatsoever; the storyline proves so sparse, laggard and vacuous that what is ultimately outlined in pic’s proceedings may as well be gathered from project’s synopsis without viewing the movie in the first place, especially considering that there are no shootouts or bloodshed here. In other words, there is no conceivable reason to watch this really, it really is pointless, just don’t do it.