Early in his career, when films like School Ties and With Honors tried to groom him as a smoldering romantic lead, he was reduced to one more slab of soggy post-Brat Pack beefcake. But Encino Man and The Scout, negligible movies overall, suggested that Fraser had a deadpan way with a joke and a silent-movie soulfulness to his physical clowning. Ever since, in films as diverse as George of the Jungle, Gods and Monsters, and The Mummy, he's been having — and sharing — a lot of fun.
He continues to do so with Dudley Do-Right. The film isn't great — certainly it doesn't come within a Yukon mile of its TV namesake. But it's agreeably bizarre, and when Fraser's riding backward on his horse or getting whacked in the face with a floorboard or blundering around with the stuffed head of a moose covering his own, he seems like a happy man.
Like George of the Jungle, Dudley Do-Right is adapted from one of the cartoons created by Jay Ward Productions. The adventures of the fast-acting, slow-thinking, square-jawed officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, his beloved sweetheart Nell, his even more beloved horse, and their wicked mustache-twirling nemesis Snidely Whiplash was one of the featurettes on NBC's The Bullwinkle Show from 1961 to '64. It's really no exaggeration to say that Ward and his partner Bill Scott are among the most subversive wits ever to have worked in television — they were making Cold War satire, for children, by the late '50s.
For Ward and Scott, heroism was largely the province of the dense or the oblivious — it was the villains who got the ironic wisecracks. Yet the Ward-Scott heroes were no less lovable for their thickness.
Getting that lovability to carry over to the movies is a tricky business, however. Visually, the cartoons employed a stiff, slapdash form of animation to illustrate what essentially were radio comedy scripts — the humor was mostly verbal, and a breathless narrator was required to explain the crudely rendered action. This free-association, two-dimensional style doesn't lend itself easily to feature-length film.
But Fraser fleshes the Mountie out nicely, making him a big lug we can root for, a dunce with whom, rather than at whom, we laugh. Though he's no replacement for the voice of Hans Conried, Alfred Molina makes a pretty funny Snidely, Sarah Jessica Parker twitters well as Nell, and Robert Prosky has the right look as her father, Inspector Fenwick, though he gets little to do. Corey Burton brings the right yeasty-voiced tone to the narration, but it's possible that the funniest of the supporting players is Alex Rocco as the chief of the "Canarsie Kumquats," a little-known South Brooklyn Indian tribe that stages "authentic" corn festivals in the manner of Riverdance.
The only character who is badly compromised is Horse. In the series, he was the brains of the outfit and, rather kinkily, the true object of Nell's affections. Here, though he still whispers advice in Dudley's ear, he's reduced to blowing raspberries and farts. While these gags got howls from the kids with whom I saw the film — and at whom, it must drearily be remembered, the film is aimed — Horse probably put in some angry calls to his agent.
The writer-director, Hugh Wilson, is best known as the creator of TV's WKRP in Cincinnati. Of his feature films, most of them on the forgettable side, one curio — Rustler's Rhapsody, his underrated, deeply weird existential Western spoof of 1985 — stands out as making him particularly fit for this material. As in Rhapsody, Wilson's plot for Dudley Do-Right is built around the confusion that results when the preordained roles of "good guy" and "bad guy" are deviated from. Snidely creates a false gold rush in Semi-Happy Valley, leading to an economic boom that makes him feel uncomfortably like a public benefactor. Dudley, meanwhile, gets drummed out of the Mounties and thus is free to don a black leather jacket and motorcycle and use bad-boy techniques against Snidely — and, even more effectively, on Nell.
Still, as honest to the mad spirit of the source material as this Dudley Do-Right is, it must be admitted that the gags just don't play with the same lightness and hip speed for flesh-and-blood actors as they do for scribbly cutouts. The film rises to real hilarity only once, when a prospector (Eric Idle) who has become Dudley's Obi-Wan-like mentor trains his blindfolded pupil for combat by beating him with a stick. And part of the pleasure in this scene may be envious glee in seeing the fortune-favored Fraser take a few licks.
