5 Card Stud

When he played he played for blood.

5 Card Stud is directed by Henry Hathaway and adapted to screenplay by Marguerite Roberts from a novel written by Ray Gaulden. It stars Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Inger Stevens, Roddy McDowall, Katherine Justice, John Anderson, Ruth Springford and Yaphet Kotto. Music is by Maurice Jarre and cinematography by Daniel L. Fapp.

Rincon, Colorado and when a gambler is caught cheating at poker, the rest of the players administer frontier justice and hang the man. All except one man that is, Van Morgan (Martin), who tried desperately to stop the lynching. When members of the card school from that night start being killed off, it's clear that somebody is also administering their own brand of retribution justice. Morgan teams up with the new unorthodox preacher in town, Reverend Jonathan Rudd (Mitchum), to try and crack the case.

I don't think anyone would seriously try to argue that 5 Card Stud is a great movie, but it is a fun picture made by people who knew their way around the dusty plains of the Western genre. Basically a Western take on Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians, it's a whodunit at the core, but surrounded by Western staples as fights, gun-play, murders, barroom shenanigans and thinly veiled prostitution exist during the run time, while the Durango location photography is most pleasant (TCM HD print is gorgeous).

It's not short of flaws, mind. Jarre's musical score is simply odd, I'm not even sure what film genre he thought he was scoring, but it's about as far removed as being in tune with a film as can be. McDowall as a whiny weasel villain doesn't work, the costuming is a bit sub-par and the reveal of the perpetrator is revealed too early. Yet film overcomes these problems because being in the company of Mitchum and Martin brings rewards.

Dino harks back to his Western glory days in the likes of Rio Bravo, and Mitch gets to parody his Night of the Hunter preacher whilst adding six- shooter charms into the bargain. The girls are short changed by the writing, but both Stevens and Justice grace the picture with their presence, and Kotto enlivens a role that quite easily could have been standard fare. A good time to be had with this Poker Oater © 7/10

Western in the Southwest with Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum and Roddy McDowall

In 1880, a mysterious preacher (Mitchum) comes to a frontier town a hundred miles south of Denver. That’s when the players of an infamous card game start dying and a smooth gambler (Martin) tries to figure out who’s doing the killin’. McDowall plays the rebellious son of the local mogul rancher.

“5 Card Stud” (1968) is a decent town-bound Western from the late 60s with a quality cast and a good sense of a Western town in the Southwest, but the story is so contrived little of it seems real. It doesn’t hold a candle to Martin’s previous Western “Bandolero!” or even “The Sons of Katie Elder,” although it’s superior to his future “Something Big.”

Blonde Inger Stevens is on hand as the new madam in town; unfortunately, she committed suicide at the age of 35 less than two years after the release of this movie. Meanwhile winsome Katherine Justice was 25 during shooting and a highlight as Nora, although her brunette hair looks fake (she’s actually a redhead).

For anyone who objects to a black man being a bartender out West (Yaphet Kotto), the fictitious town of Rincon is located a hundred miles south of Denver, which means it was in the state of Colorado, admitted to the Union four years earlier. This is decidedly the West, not the South. The story is set fifteen years after the Civil War wherein the Colorado Territory was majority pro-Union. Mama's Saloon was a private business and anyone who didn't want to be served by a black man could take their business elsewhere (at the time, it was the only saloon in town, but a competitor was being built). The fact that George (Kotto) was a muscular 6'4" helped keep racists at bay.

While not on the level of contemporaneous Westerns like “Duel at Diablo,” “El Dorado,” “The War Wagon,” “Hombre,” “Firecreek,” “Hang ’em High” and “The Train Robbers,” it’s cut from the same cloth and worth checking out if you liked those. I’d put it on par with “Young Billy Young,” which came out the next year and also starred Mitchum.

The movie runs 1 hour, 43 minutes, and was shot in Durango, Mexico, with studio stuff done at Paramount in Los Angeles.

GRADE: B-/C+