One of the most interesting aspect of the digital age is being able to see how people found their way to whatever you are posting. Of course, this is also how advertisers and marketers try to figure out how to shill more products to you whether you want them or not. That aside, every now and again, I like to sift through and see what it is about what I put up that brings in my audience. The one that keeps popping out to me is that my coverage of the strange tone of gang rape v. comedy in Hannie Caulder starring Raquel Welch has been a frequent tag that brings in the public. That's not so good.
A nicely laid out poster...with unfortunate whiffs of Hannie Caulder to come...
On the lighter side, people looking for stuff on Dean Martin movies also find their searches directed my way. And now, I've been provided an opportunity to bring both those tastes together (...although, I'm not sure how to feel about this...) as well as close the book on Raquel's trilogy of western films with a look at Bandolero! (1968).
The posters for Bandolero! promise a new fangled look at the old fashioned oater, which makes perfect sense as Sergio Leone had breathed new life into the Western in the U.S. following the release of A Fistful of Dollars in 1967. Try as they may, Hollywood never quite figured out the spaghetti western formula, and they shouldn't have: spaghetti's reflect an outsider's view of the media version of the Wild West, and Hollywood's spaghetti imitators were trying to reflect that reflection while being unable to escape the ties to the culture they themselves came from. Make sense?
Dino does not buy my convoluted explanations...
Casting Dean Martin and Jimmy Stewart seems to me a stab at trying to bring in an older audience to this new, grittier version of the West. Casting Raquel...well...I think we all know that was a stab at bringing anything with a Y chromosome to the theater. In the movie, Martin plays Dee Bishop, an outlaw gunslinger formerly of the Confederacy, who ends up caught with his gang after a bank robbery goes south by Sheriff July Johnson (George Kennedy). During the skirmish, Dee's gang shoots the husband of Maria Stoner (Welch), which opens a relationship door for the amorous sheriff. Former Union soldier turned drifter Mace Bishop (Stewart), discovering that his brother's misdeeds will be leading him to the gallows, launches a plan that will free his brother and end up in kidnapping the young widow. This leads to the Sheriff going on a long chase after the gang into bandit country in Mexico where Mace will try and convince Dee to leave his life of crime.
This is the Jimmy that was sent after bad Jimmy impersonations...which is most of them...
The opening third of the movie, from the bank robbery to the eventual escape, is pure, thrilling movie adventure, but unfortunately the middle third sags from too much time in the saddle and a few too many heart-to-hearts between the brothers in between brush-ups between Mace and Dee's surly gang. The final third picks up the pace but is unfortunately a little too predictable from the moment we see, or rather, don't really see the bloodthirsty arrival of the Mexican bandits who slaughter the Sheriff's posse. And while Welch and Martin have the makings of some fun onscreen chemistry, the "falling for the bad boy" angle isn't quite enough to sell her falling so soon for the man who was responsible for her husband's death. Without getting into the details, there wasn't necessarily a lot of love lost in Mr. Stoner's death for Mrs. Stoner, but for a girl who worked her way up from nothing, to prostitution, to some creature comfort, doesn't quite add up to her going for the guy who murdered her meal ticket.
Having said all that, the movie works more than well enough, and I had a fine time watching it. While Raquel doesn't get a whole lot of screen time, Maria was definitely one of her better dramatic roles, and certainly of greater depth than the beautiful harpy she would play the following year in 100 Rifles. Martin and Stewart are, of course, old hands at this sort of thing. While they don't look anything like brothers, their natural ease of delivery sells it well enough, and they are a joy to watch together even when the riffs of their dialogue grows a little tired. The standout in many ways is Kennedy as July Johnson, an intriguing figure for a movie sheriff, who seems more interested in giving chase to these outlaws due to his love or lust for Mrs. Stoner than the sense of justice he keeps touting. In fact, it must've made an impression on Larry McMurtry who also named a sheriff in Lonesome Dove, July Johnson.
And this is the George Kennedy that could put Cool Hand Luke's George Kennedy in jail...
So if early Westerns are a little too white hat v. black hat for you, and spaghettis are a little too operatic v. nihilistic for you, then Bandolero! might provide a nice middle ground between the two: it's matured from the former, and doesn't strain itself trying to be the latter. For comparison, I would also recommend The Professionals (1966) starring Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, and Claudia Cardinale, which also featured a long chase into Mexico that involves a woman. It too features a cast of familiar and enjoyable old hands, but also has a few more twists to the plotting.
After covering the last Fred Williamson Western Adios Amigo, I figured I'd cover two of Fred's earlier Western entries, which have become infamous if only for their titles.
It appears to be proof of just how much of a comeback the Western had had thanks to the European set that this blaxploitation flick got off the ground a year before Fred starred in perhaps his biggest hit of the era with Black Caesar, and the fact that Fred was coming off his run on the groundbreaking and tender TV series Julia (1968-1971) that The Legend of N*gger Charley (1972) made it to the big screen. And people at the time were no more comfortable with the title than they are now. The story concerns a slave blacksmith who's given his freedom by his dying master only to have it revoked by an abusive heir. In a fit of rage-fueled revenge, Charley kills the heir and escapes to the West with his two compatriots, Tobey and Joshua. They're pursued by a fugitive-slave hunter and his posse, and after confronting them in a western town shootout, they're hired by a farmer to rid himself of a crazy outlaw preacher and his gang.
Sound like too much for one movie? Well, simply put: it is. Any one of the three acts of the story could've been enough for a decently constructed movie, but as it is, it just kinda ends up as a structural mess. When Charley and gang have the shootout with the slave-hunter in the middle of the movie, it seems as though that would be the end except that we're given a whole new storyline that doesn't have enough time to be set up properly for their to be any kind of tension before it's all over. As it is, it's an adequate if disjointed piece of entertainment. Fred is his usual charming self. D'urville Martin is competent comic relief. And for being on the lower end of the genre, it's not a wholly bad looking film (although the print I saw was awful). And both villains, the slave hunter and the outlaw reverend both seemed ripe for being entertaining villains if only either of them had enjoyed adequate screen time or development.
In the end, Legend was either successful enough or demand was still great enough, that Paramount (yup, the big movie studio paid for both of these movies) put Fred back in the saddle for The Soul of N*gger Charley (1973) the following year. This time Charley's mythos has spread through the West, and when he comes across a murderous band of former Confederates capturing former slaves to take to a new slave state in the Mexican wilds, you know damned well Charley's going to put a stop to it. This bigger and badder affair features a Quaker community, crazy Confederates, a big train robbery of $100,000 in gold, and more bandidos than you can shake a six-shooter at.
As a story, Soul is a far more cohesive affair that dumps you right into the action with an opening massacre, but occasionally stalls out with unnecessarily long riding sequences. A good twenty minutes could've been stricken from the run-time merely by cutting to the chase so to speak with many of these long vista rides. Still and all, it doesn't quite gel into a great Western as their are still a sizable number of gaps in logic and in both movies, there's a tendency to hit jags of unnecessary and out of place moments of melodrama. And again, there was a lack of development on the part of the villains. Primary villain, Colonel Blanchard is adequately crazy and creepy, if his crack squad of soldiers seem appallingly inept much of the time, but it almost feels as though it needed more of just how awful the evil new Confederacy they were building was going to be. I suppose it's like what I call "Nazi Shorthand", meaning that if you make an obvious villain/s the villain/s you don't have to waste time developing him, her, or them. And while most of us are all too familiar with the evils of the slave plantations, the movie barely answers what that would look like in the north of Mexico. In any event, a superior effort, if lacking a bit of the vitality, to the original.
(Sorry folks, couldn't find any trailer to go with these.)
We'll kick off with the bigger disappointment. Pretend you're a filmmaker in the 1970's. You want to make a western, which are on the fade again...BUT you want it to be funny, which thanks to Blazing Saddles (1974), should be a go. You take the handsome, charismatic hot black property, Fred Williamson, and you take the hottest black comedian of the time, Richard Pryor...and you should be able to spin gold, yes?
Of Fred Williamson's four forays into Westerns, Adios Amigo (1976) is far and away the most disappointing, especially as it was his last one. Now Richard Pryor...well, Richard's motion picture legacy despite his stand-up genius is wildly uneven, mostly skewing to the not-so-great, unless Gene Wilder is around. If you don't agree or don't believe me, spend the evening with Adios Amigo double-featured with Superman III and see if you still feel the same. The story is simple, Fred gets into a fight in town, which thanks to corrupt locals gets him shipped to prison on a stagecoach that's robbed by Pryor setting Fred free. Inexplicably, instead of going home to avenge himself on the corrupt townsfolk that ran him off, Fred chases after Pryor for his part of the loot from the robbed stagecoach. What follows is a repetitive formula of Pryor encountering people, messing with them, stealing from them, and running off, leaving the pursuing Fred to take the blame in a series of mostly flat scenes that are neither funny nor exciting. Fred as usual seems earnest and game for the antics, but they're just not there...and neither really is Pryor who seems to mumble his way through most scenes as if half-asleep/half-crazed and/or half-drunk, which, sadly, he may have been all at the same time. Even the dread Cactus Jack (1979) had more inspired moments than this and it too was awful.
But being no stranger to the weird and the awful, I tried again. So this time we're going to rewind the clock back to 1969. Now we're in the hot stretch for Westerns following Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy, and Hollywood wants to cash in. You've got young up-and-comer Burt Reynolds whose already been in one Italian oater (Navajo Joe, 1966), and you've got black football sensation Jim Brown whose was in one of the action hits of the 60's, The Dirty Dozen (1967). Add to that the smoldering sex-pot that is Raquel Welch, and again, you should have gold, yes?
Well....100 Rifles (1969) seems to take much of its direction for the great Sergio Corbucci's The Mercenary (Il Mercenario), which also featured a cunning peone, a hard-fighting foreign outsider, and a hot girl in the midst of some Mexican revolutionizing. But while Rifles seems to have the characters and have the chemistry, it never coheres into the adventure that The Mercenary pulls off. Instead it sort of wobbles, betwixt endless chase scenes, between half-comical banter and Peckinpah-esque brutality. Still, it's not all a bad time, if you can get past the stunning gaps in character-driven logic. All I know is, if I'm trying to escape from a pursuing Mexican general, who's a tad on the butchery side, and his well-armed troops, I don't stop for a chat or a fistfight until I'm way way way far away. Having said that, it was a generally enjoyable way to pass some time. Burt was well on his way to being Burt. Raquel Welch has a sexy shower under a train cooling tower. And the film was cut or banned in a number of places for some smoldering horizontal monster mashing between Jim Brown and Raquel. The movie's well-shot, the scenery gorgeous, and the action, especially the finale, exciting...it just never adds up to much.
Now, I remember cracking up watching Mel Brooks' glorious Blazing Saddles (1974) with my dad as a kid, and I have often tried to plug the wildly underrated Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985). (I must state here, however, that as much as I am a fan of Spaghetti Westerns, I'm no fan of the comedy Spaghettis.) In fact, as bad as The Villain flopped, I'll have to admit that I'm amazed Rustlers' ever got made...though director Hugh Wilson was coming off the success of the first Police Academy at the time. Which also makes this one confusing as famed stuntman turned director, Hal Needham, also made two of the biggest hits of the era with Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Cannonball Run (1981). Not that either one of those were plot-heavy masterpieces...but whoa nelly...
This photo looks like the opening to a pretty good joke...
Here's the plot: Charming Jones (the always lovely Ann-Margret) comes into town to pick up her father's money for his mining endeavor from the crooked banker, Avery Jones (Jack Elam), who has hired the outlaw Cactus Jack (Kirk Douglas) to steal the money back, which will garner Avery both the investment and control of the mine; however, Charming's father has hired Handsome Stranger (Schwarzenegger) to escort her safely home. Fair enough, right?
The movie starts off well enough in the town with a series of gags that has Cactus Jack failing to rob the bank from the drunken comedian Foster Brooks, and a hilarious sequence between Handsome Stranger and the telegraph operator played by the stuttering country singer Mel Tillis. In fact, the first half-hour is pretty consistently good, but once Charming and Handsome hit the trail, the movie becomes one Looney Tunes-esque failed robbery attempt after another. They start off somewhat fun, but by another twenty minutes in, I was liberally employing the fast forward button. And it all leads to a wildly unsatisfactory ending...not that I was expecting much by then...but it still managed to evoke a feeling of "What the hell was that?"
Like me, Mel Tillis is not amused...
Now apparently Kirk had regretted passing on two other western comedies: Cat Ballou (1965) which garned Lee Marvin an Oscar, and the aforementioned Blazing Saddles. Watching the movie, you can tell Kirk got into the work of being funny with zeal, and for a while his commitment keeps it entertaining. (Sadly, he would follow this up with the equally awkward failure Saturn 3 (1980).) In fact, it's one of those movies where it seems like everyone involved was having a good time, it just came to nothing. Ann-Margret is one note as Charming, as all she's given to do for an hour is to luridly hit on the embarrassed and/or oblivious Handsome Stranger. Likewise, Schwarzenegger, as the hero, is given almost nothing to do after the first 30 minutes apart from look hunky. Now, he may not have fully developed them yet, but Arnie does have comedic chops, and either way he's always had considerable presence on screen. But, with nothing to do, he's just sort of...well...there.
Whatever was going on here was likely funnier than what was getting filmed...
I already mentioned the highlights of the supporting cast above: Jack Elam, Foster Brooks, and Mel Tillis. Strother Martin, who was in the previously reviewed Hannie Caulder, is a fantastic character actor whose wasted in his brief appearance as Charming's father. And strangely, he's not even brought back once they arrive back at his mining outpost. Most painful of all is Paul Lynde's final screen performance as the "Indian" chief Nervous Elk. Now Brooks' turn as the Jewish chief in Saddles has a strange but relatively funny air to it. Lynde's, however, is so drab as to barely register as racist as it is. Lynde was a great purveyor of innuendo and wordplay in his day, and this was not the note to go out on.
The happy face but heavy heart of a man that could have blazed a saddle...
Well now I've seen it, and now I know. I was due for a reminder in this internet age of rediscovery that more often than not when one finds a film with stars that seem to big to be forgotten, there's usually a reason.
We're gonna take a break this week from Matt Helm, but I haven't forgotten that I still have The Wrecking Crew left to cover. See, that's the only way I know Dean Martin: from comedy. Though, I'm sure Dino wouldn't have any problem with that legacy. I first saw him as a kid in the Cannonball Run movies, and then later from clips of his old roasts on PBS, and later on it was with the rest of the Rat Pack in the original Ocean's 11. So, since I like to fill in the spots where I see gaps in my experience, I decided to take in the serious side of Dean Martin and watched Howard Hawks' 1959 western, Rio Bravo.
The movie opens with Dude (Dean Martin), the town drunk, reaching for a dollar that's been mockingly thrown to him into a nearby spittoon by Joe Burdette, the brother of the town's wealthy rancher, when John Chance (John Wayne), the sheriff, kicks it away out of pity. Dude hits Chance knocking him out, and Burdette's men hold up Dude for Joe to go to work on. When a bystander tries to intercede, Joe shoots him in cold blood. This leads to Joe's capture and the start of a long stand-off between the sheriff and Nathan Burdette, the wealthy rancher while they wait for U.S. Marshalls to come for Joe.
With all the singers, John Wayne fights to keep the movie from becoming Paint Your Wagon...
For the most part, the movie is good fun if a little slow for a couple of jags. It never exactly gets tiresome, but every now and again, I felt like I kept waiting for something to pep things up just a hair. There's a lot of walking from the jail to the hotel, banter in the hotel, walking back to the jail, banter in the jail, and then walking back up the street again. Now, when I say it's a stand-off, that's because Nathan stashes men in the town to make sure that the sheriff doesn't try to sneak his brother off to the authorities under his nose. The only problem is, his men largely just stand around and aren't really all that intimidating until they finally make a move here and there.
A lot of this is because the movie was in reaction to the western High Noon (1952). High Noon starred Gary Cooper as a marshall who had to face down the vengeful members of the Miller gang all alone when no one will come to his aid. It's long been known to be an allegory of the House of Un-American Activities hearings in Hollywood that led to the black-listing of the Hollywood Ten, a group of filmmakers who had affiliations with the Communist Party. John Wayne was famously not a fan of High Noon, and enlisted Hawks to help him make Rio Bravo as a response. So as the sheriff who can't help but turn down help, Bravo definitely wins the "feel good" prize, but it simply can't compete with the desperation and suspense, the palpable dread, of High Noon.
But it does feel good, and it is nice and enjoyable to see a movie that's not so jaded and shows a whole town pitching in with its sheriff to keep the rich guy from bullying his way into setting his murderous jerk brother free. It's just not very nail-biting.
Considering his reputation, Dino deserved an award for this scene alone....
The only thing that had me nervous was Dino's character, Dude. He's essentially the heart of the picture. See, the problem too often with Wayne is that he's always John Wayne in nearly every picture, and the "Duke" is almost a little too indestructible. I can only think of two exceptions where he wasn't Wayne: 1) The Conqueror (1956), the strange movie that saw him playing Genghis Khan, and 2) my favorite Wayne picture, The Searchers (1956), which was one of his most complex and extremely unlikable characters. Dude, on the other hand, is all too vulnerable, though he's greased lightning with a gun. The sheriff explains that Dude was a former deputy who ran off with a girl who was no good only to return to take up his new position as the town drunk. And Dino gives a strong performance as he fights off the shakes and set-backs that keep pointing him back to booze. It was the surprising amount of screen time they gave his resurrection that had me waiting for the inevitable fall...but I won't say how or to what degree the movie delivered on that score.
The movie gave the ladies Ricky, I'll leave this for the fellas...
The supporting cast also does a fine job. The obvious stunt casting of Ricky Nelson as the new kid with a pistol only really grates during a song number late in the film; however, having both Ricky and Dino in the movie, I knew they had to sing something at some point. But it arrives late, and just when you feel the final action should be swinging into motion. Angie Dickinson is very enjoyable as the Duke's love interest, the gambler's ex-girl, Feathers. The scene where she has Wayne on his heels suggesting he give her a strip search is quite a corker. Unfortunately, her fast paced dialogue, a Hawks' trademark, seems a little ill-at-ease as the movie wears on, especially in a western setting, and it seems like the tender scenes are being forcibly wedged in there for the benefit of the women in the audience. As if throwing them Ricky wasn't good enough.
Looks like Howard would concur...
In all, for soaking up a few hours on a Sunday afternoon, you could do a whole lot worse than this relaxed and enjoyable picture. After all, Howard Hawks and John Wayne must've been happy with it as they more or less remade it two more times.
I sit around most days and create. I've written 4 books (2 available through my site or Amazon), a small stack of screenplays, and a bunch of ad and web copy. When not using words, I paint and draw quite a fair bit. Occasionally, I'm paid for doing this. I like paper, pens, india ink, celluloid and alcohol. I hope you enjoy a little of what I've made for you, my love...my storm...my anonymous public...
