Movie Review--Five Card Stud

With nothing better to do, the dogs and I decided to review another free movie that we found on Amazon.

This one is Five Card Stud, starting Dean Martin as gambler Van Morgan. Morgan is one card player at a game one night where a new payer is caught cheating. The other players, led by a young Roddy McDowall, lynch the new player despite Morgan's effort to stop them. A disgusted Morgan then leaves town, but returns when other players from that game start turning up murdered. Also new to town is a gunslinging preacher named Jonathan Rudd, played by Robert Mitchum. Rudd preaches repentance as Morgan hunts the killer and romances the town's barber/madam, Lily Langford, played by Inger Stevens. The body count rises and eventually culminates in a pretty epic showdown between Morgan and the killer. It also stars Yaphet Kotto and Denver Pyle. (You couldn't very well have a western back in the late 1960s without Denver Pyle in some role.)

Watch the whole movie, or just enjoy this trailer.


Dogs and I give it 4 paws up, just for Martin and Mitchum being cool.

Saturday Man Movie

All right...I have the epic fun fight scene from Cannonball Run (1981) here, the one where the racers, stranded together by road construction, join forces to fight a biker gang.

Featuring, among others: Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLuise, Farrah Fawcett, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Roger Moore, Jack Elam, Adrienne Barbeau, a young Jackie Chan, Bert Convy, Terry Bradshaw, Mel Tillis, and Jamie Farr as racers and Peter Fonda and Robert Tessier as bikers.

How could any movie fail with a cast like that? (And this one didn't, but its sequel sure did.)

Saturday morning man movie

In Five Card Stud (1968), Van Morgan (played by Dean Martin) confronts the mysterious Reverend Rudd (played by Robert Mitchum). It seems that people who'd played in a particular card game have been dying lately, and Morgan just figured out who the killer is.

And yes, that's character actor Denver Pyle with the beard in the end.

Moral of the story: Beware of preachers who hold their bibles upside down.

Just because it amuses me.

So what happens when two entertainers doing a live show are working with horses that obviously haven't read the script? Enjoy watching two great stars of days past as they joke and sing and improvise repeatedly due to the restlessness of their horses.

Modern-day "stars" like George Clooney, Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio would have stomped off in a hissy fit ten seconds into the horses' antics, but Dean Martin and Lorne Greene were better than them and the rest of today's crop of no-talent pretty boys on their worst day.

Saturday Western

A great bar scene from the movie Rio Bravo starring Dean Martin and John Wayne.

I never tire of this one...and Angie Dickinson was smoking hot in her first major movie role.

When movies were movies

I happened to catch a part of this classic at work today. Rio Bravo, starring John Wayne, Dean Martin, Ricky Nelson, Walter Brennan, Angie Dickinson and Claude Akins. Filmed back in 1959, it was one of the Duke's best. And here's a scene where the four heroes are sitting in the jailhouse guarding the brother of the town's baddest man. Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson casually sing as the men prepare for the big showdown that everyone knows is coming. They don't make movies like this any more and it's a damned shame. Of course Hollywood today doesn't have this sort of talent to draw on either. Could you see that effeminate poser George Clooney standing tall on the big screen like these guys? I can't either.





Of course the film is chock full of conservative values like Honor and Integrity. We see real men taking the hard road and accepting probable death just because it's the right thing to do. But they still have a good time and watching them, you can't help but have one yourself. See if you don't wind up humming one of these songs later...I'll bet you do.