TV REVIEW : Wryly Comical View of the Old West in ‘El Diablo’

There haven’t been many inspired comic Westerns--”Cat Ballou” and “Blazing Saddles” are notable exceptions--but HBO’s two-hour “El Diablo” (which premiered last Sunday and repeats at 3:30 p.m. today) is offbeat and off-center enough to be surprisingly diverting.

Right off the top we know our young protagonist by the way he stumbles out of his hotel in a small, dusty town, runs into a chicken and tells the rooster he’s sorry, and means it. As this mild-mannered schoolteacher from Boston, who can’t ride a horse or shoot a gun, Anthony Edwards (who was the cocky young pilot in “Top Gun”) manages a sublime stretch of acting.

The other star is Louis Gossett Jr., a crusty, aging gunslinger who teams up with the greenhorn to chase down a raping, pillaging Mexican gang that has kidnaped a faint-of-heart damsel who was the tenderfoot’s student. When they find her, she’s become the sultry lover of the entitled devil (the dashing but not at all hammy Robert Beltran).

The writers (Tommy Lee Wallace, John Carpenter and Bill Phillips) also dispatch a quick point dramatizing how Western literature historically ignored the black cowboy. In a grubby cantina, the Gossett character complains to Kid Durango, a popular writer of pulp Westerns (a fey, wonderful performance by Joe Pantoliano) that he never writes about cowboys being black. The author waves off the remark by implying his stories wouldn’t get printed if he did.

(Remember when Sidney Poitier, in the 1966 Western “Duel at Diablo,” literally introduced most of America to the black cowboy?)

“El Diablo,” directed with jaunty irreverence by Peter Markle, is full of sly quirks: The bespectacled hero, a clumsy rider, frequently shoots down his horses by accident because he can’t hold a gun, and Gossett, who loves his horse, is always stuffing its ears with cotton before a gunfight because the animal is sensitive to noise.

There’s a lot of wholesale mayhem--guys you like die--and even this gives the movie a tangy edge.