The Frisco Kid is a 1979 American Western comedy film directed by Robert Aldrich, starring Gene Wilder as Avram Belinski, a Polish rabbi who is traveling to San Francisco, and Harrison Ford as a bank robber who befriends him.

Avram, an innocent, trusting, and inexperienced traveler, falls in with three con men, the brothers Matt and Darryl Diggs and their partner Mr. Jones, who trick him into helping pay for a wagon and supplies to go west, then brutally rob him and leave him and most of his belongings scattered along a deserted road in Pennsylvania.

From their simple black clothing, he assumes fellow Hasidic Jews, until he notices Christian cross on the Bible carried in the pocket of one of the men, at which point he faints.

On his way west again, he is befriended and looked after by a stranger named Tommy Lillard, a bank robber with a soft heart who is moved by Avram's helplessness and frank personality, despite the trouble it occasionally gives him.

The two also experience Native American customs and hospitality, disrupt a Trappist monastery's vow of silence with an innocent gesture of gratitude.

Avram, regaining his composure, shows his wisdom and courage in front of the entire community by disarming and exiling him from San Francisco with Tommy's help.

"[5] According to Gene Wilder's autobiography, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, the Tommy Lillard role, played by Harrison Ford, was originally planned for John Wayne.

John J. Puccio of Movie Metropolis writes that Wayne was "eager to take it on as a comic follow-up to True Grit and Rooster Cogburn.

Salary concerns nixed the idea, though, and it's questionable he would have finished the shooting, in any case, as he died shortly before The Frisco Kid opened.

"[10] Ford later said "It was fun to work with Gene... [but] every time the director, Robert Aldrich, looked at me, he was thinking about how unhappy he was that he didn't have John Wayne, instead.

The consensus summarizes: "Not even a genial Gene Wilder or a dashing Harrison Ford can rescue The Frisco Kid from a monotonous procession of gently comedic sketches that never cohere into a memorable yarn.

"[13] Vincent Canby of The New York Times described The Frisco Kid as "harmless chaos": "People keep coming and going and doing ferociously cute things, but never anything that could appeal to anyone except a close relative or someone with a built-in weakness for anything ethnic whatsoever."

[14] Roger Ebert gave the movie a mixed review, admitting that after seeing Cat Ballou he was "forever after spoiled on the subject of comic Westerns."

It's very hard to fault on a technical level, and he brings a strong visual sense to bear on a number of sequences that raise them several notches above the TV flavor of the material.