Awful repetitive music by Maurice Jarre. It's not every day you see Roddy McDowell pistol whip a man.
Dean Martin tries to stop them, but guys playing poker in a small town saloon drag a man out and lynch him for cheating. Although, in fairness, the guy also tried to shoot one of them when he was caught.
Now someone is killing off the men who had been in the game that night, peeling them off one by one.
With Yaphet Kotto five years before Live and Let Die.
While eating breakfast, Denver Pyle tells son Roddy McDowell that he sometimes seems like he's not human, like he was built in a factory. I would have wondered if it was a compliment, but Roddy McDowell takes it as a grave insult.
"If I was made by a machine, then you made it and you ran it!"
At one point, Roddy briefly waves a large cross as a weapon a year after Dustin Hoffman did the same in The Graduate.
With Robert Mitchum as a gun wielding nondenominational minister in the town's only church. A little like Night of the Hunter. Also like every other movie where the town has a single generic church.
Had the look of a typical 1960's western. The interiors were too bright to have been lit by kerosene lamps, the women's hair was too carefully coiffed and obviously sprayed in place. Their teeth were way too nice, but that's true in all movies. Dean Martin wore a polyester shirt.
Most of this was kind of nice for a change. Realism is probably what killed the western.
Written by Marguerite Roberts who sold her first script in 1932.
Directed by Henry Hathaway.
Available on The Criterion Channel.
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