TV REVIEWS : ‘Eyes’ a Low-Key Western Comedy

“Four Eyes and Six-Guns” is that rare comedic Western that doesn’t trash the Old West. Instead of spoofing the genre, it delicately balances a love for the myth of the West with low-key comedy that serves rather than detracts from that myth. (It shows at 5, 7 and 9 tonight on TNT cable.)

Judge Reinhold, in a rich variation on the greenhorn who turns into a reluctant hero, plays an earnest, almost fastidious optometrist who flees the dull East for adventure in Tombstone. Much like Stephen Crane’s foolhardy Swede in his ironic short story, “The Blue Hotel,” Reinhold’s Ernest Albright comes West like the quintessential rube, filled with romantic visions that are quickly squelched.

Writer Leon Prochnik’s fable finds its exact tuning fork in the deft direction of Piers Haggard, a Britisher, surprisingly enough, who helmed the innovative BBC serial “Pennies From Heaven.”

The charm of the production, which was shot in Old Tucson, is greatly enhanced by the conscientious, straight-arrow Reinhold, whose four eyes and comical shooting stance save the town from the 10 deadly Doom brothers.

Further nourishing the action is a near-blind Wyatt Earp (Fred Ward) suffering a midlife crisis of doubt and a delicious performance by Patricia Clarkson as the determined, love-smitten woman who follows the optometrist West and is largely responsible for his remarkable transformation.

“Cat Ballou” and “Blazing Saddles” might be funnier Westerns, but “Four Eyes and Six-Guns” is the flip side of satire, humorously targeting the Western myth with Cupid’s arrow. In spirit, it actually echoes the romantic imagination and offbeat comedy of the little-seen “Hearts of the West” (1975), in which a starry-eyed Jeff Bridges ventures to Hollywood in the 1930s to become a Western screenwriter and ends up in B-cowboy movies instead.

The lure of the West beats on.