“God uses the good ones, and the bad ones use God.”

Few will mistake Fools’ Parade for the best work of either its director or its star, but not for lack of charm. James Stewart, as affable and persnickety as ever as ex-con Mattie Appleyard, sports a glass eye that he believes—or at least pretends to believe—is both sentient and clairvoyant. Isn’t that a sufficient hook? If not, how about the out of the blue diversion to a houseboat brothel where a gaudily made-up Anne Baxter keeps a reluctant prostitute (Katherine Cannon) and rants about joining the Daughters of the American Revolution before whipping out a revolver and making demands? Or maybe it’s George Kennedy’s corrupt prison captain, a lumbering troglodyte who obscures his sordid behavior beneath the guise of a hideously perverted religion, that will do it for you? Its eccentric tendencies might not equal the quirky pleasures of a Thunderbolt and Lightfoot or a Stay Hungry, but Andrew McLaglen’s Depression era crime comedy certainly deserves better than its current status of obscurity.

Anyway, the glass eye. Mattie has christened the thing Tige and pops it out in times of crisis to let it “see.” One of these crises comes along when Mattie’s released from the West Virginia state pen in the middle of the Great Depression and given a check for $25,452.32 for his decades of prison work. That’s something like a half million in today’s dollars, a small fortune that Mattie plans to use to open a general store with two of his jailbird buddies, Lee (Strother Martin) and Johnny (a baby-faced Kurt Russell). Captain Dallas Council (Kennedy) has other ideas, though, and enlists the services of two henchmen (Mike Kellin, Morgan Paull) to help him run a scheme with the shyster manager of a local bank (David Huddleston) that will relieve Appleyard of his fortune—and his life. Under the pretense that they’re ridding the world of atheists, the trio of evildoers doggedly track the former prisoners, leading to pleasurable concoction of action, comedy, violence, whimsy, and an occasional hint of real menace. There’s also a few blasts of dynamite, including one instance that is momentarily shocking and then deeply funny in a way that only a few directors can pull off. Indeed, one wonders if the Coen brothers didn’t take a few notes on McLaglen’s uncanny balance between calamity and farce.

Based on the novel of the same name by Davis Grubb—who also penned the source novel for The Night of the Hunter (and doesn’t Kennedy’s fraudulent grotesque call to mind Robert Mitchum’s sadistic country preacher?)—Fools’ Parade reverses the standard bank robbery template, with the reformed murderer simply trying to cash a check while bank officials and government agents do the shooting and looting. McLaglen, typically a director of Westerns and action films, seems slightly uncertain how to handle all of the literary digressions and oddball characterizations, landing in a middle ground between enigmatic and conventional that misses on some rich opportunities to lean into the text’s strangeness. But it should have been obvious that you can’t really play it straight when the climax of your film involves a dog dutifully fetching a lit stick of dynamite.

In any case, McLaglen wisely lets his cast do the heavy lifting. Stewart and Kennedy carry the picture well, the first with his characteristic commitment to his role come hell or high water—there’s an utterly ridiculous scene where he hoodwinks a would-be assassin by pretending that God speaks to him and tells him to pluck his eye out that only works because of Stewart’s verve—the second through the extravagant embodiment of spiritual corruption with his stooped neck, clumsy gait, and country-fried utterances. And those nasty teeth! That these two disparate performances can coexist speaks to the general air of conviviality that the film exudes. Minor contributions give the film some additional depth, including Strother Martin’s grocery-obsessed dolt, small performances from William Windom and Robert Donner, a charming period aesthetic (Alfred Sweeney, Marvin March, and Guy C. Verhille), a location shoot in Moundsville, WV, and a mildly witty if lumpy script from James Lee Barrett.

It’s a little gem of an offbeat thriller, overlooked because it came out in an era where idiosyncrasy was in vogue. It doesn’t match the stature of Stewart’s abundance of classics—it doesn’t even equal McLaglen and Stewart’s wonderful Shenandoah—but it’s a respectably interesting way to close out a superlative career as a leading man.