THE MOONSHINE WAR was based on a 1969 novel written by Elmore Leonard, who also did the screenplay for the 1970 film that followed. Perhaps the 236-page book was a hoot but the 100 minute movie is a pig on ice. In a year chock full of disappointments and duds, this multi-bungled mess dragged a slew of interesting actors down the drain.

With FDR coming into office, Prohibition’s days are numbered. Corrupted Internal Revenue agent ‘Frank Long’ (Patrick McGoohan) is in backwoods white-trashy Kentucky to try and convince/threaten Army acquaintance ‘John Martin’ (Alan Alda), nicknamed ‘Son’, to cut him in on a share of Son’s bootlegging business. Son plans to save the stash until booze is legal again. Frustrated, Frank gets aid (and little comfort) from a gleefully venal dentist, ‘Dr. Emmett Taulbee’ (Richard Widmark) and ‘Dual Metters’ (Lee Hazelwood), Taulbee’s sadistic dope of an underling. ‘Sheriff Baylor’ (Will Geer) is no help. Neither are any of the local yokels. Liquor. Guns. Bad attitudes. Add a ditzy hooker (Suzanne Zenor) for the hell of it.

Marketed (badly) as a crime comedy-drama, it had promise in the setting, basic storyline and array of old pros and new blood in the cast. But the humor elements are coarse and just not funny, there’s too much meanness with no-one to cheer for, the action scenes are unexciting, the editing is sloppy, the sound effects are flat, the photography lackluster, the anachronistic music score from Fred Karger and Neal Hefti belongs in another era, and the dry hills around Stockton, California just can’t pass for Kentucky. Widmark is fine (the character reprehensible), Hazelwood and Geer likewise. Zenor (notable as ‘Gen.Dreedle’s secretary in Catch-22) and Melodie Johnson (as Son’s gal to tussle with) are merely there to be pawed over sex objects. Crucially, McGoohan and Alda are both woefully miscast, their performances easily the worst in either career, with faux folksy accents better suited to Saturday Night Live. It’s embarrassing.

Even the colors in the credits look cheesy

Richard Quine directed, but the smooth touch he brought to Bell Book and Candle, Strangers When We Meet, The World Of Suzie Wong and How To Murder Your Wife is nowhere to be seen: this rates with his hack jobs on Sex And The Single Girl, Oh Dad Poor Dad and The Prisoner Of Zenda (the woof with Peter Sellers). The gross of $2,100,000 limped into 103rd place.

Wasted: Bo Hopkins, Joe Williams (object of racial insults and attempted lynching—so much for the ‘comedy’), Tom Skerritt (overplaying to the hateful point), Max Showalter (hidden behind a beard), Claude Johnson (there to be humiliated in another ‘funny’ scene), Teri Garr (same treatment), Dick Peabody, John Schuck, Charles Tyner and Harry Carey Jr (old pro doesn’t get a single line of dialogue).