Five Card Stud
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Movie Reviews of Five Card Stud
Movie Review: Five Card Stud
Summary: 3 Stars
Okay, so it will never make a list of the 20 greatest Westerns ever. The problem is, so will a lot of other entertaining movies like the more light-hearted Texas Across the River. On the other hand with the loss of a great star for many of us who admired him there doesn't seem to be enough Dean Martin movies out there. In Five Card Stud you also get to see quite a lot of the lovely Inger Stevens, who passed much to soon, and Mitchum being as menancing as he could obviously be. What the earlier viewers missed was the enjoyable byplay between Martin and Stevens in her "barber shop". Or perhaps the shear delight of seeing Mitchum sing hymns and preach the gospel, his gospel anyway. Enjoy the movie and remember when Poker was an all night process where you bet the cards and not a media event like Texas Hold'em has become. It may suffer what earlier critics have laid on it, but on the other hand, if you want to sit around some rainy afternoon and enjoy it, you might get more than you expected. I wonder if she really did meet him in Denver?Movie Review: Average, But Not Bad
Summary: 3 Stars
This movie is an average movie. It is a western, but not a well written one. Its plot is simply so pedestrian that you cannot really get into this one. The actors were alright, but not stellar in their performances. They simply seem to walk through them without much emotion. All in all it is worth an afternoon, but not much else. It is a shame that is was not better than average because it is a let down after the Deano song comes on to start the movie.Movie Review: Good western but actually typical
Summary: 3 Stars
Quite a few westerns have had a mystery element to them (check out some of John Wayne's 30's westerns). I find those who gave this film a thumbs up for unique mystery to be wrong. But the film has agreat authentic (made in mexico) if Hollywood-style clean setting. The acting is all fine but Inger Stevens is especially beautiful and sexy in her role as Martin's love interst.Movie Review: 2 Star Dud
Summary: 2 Stars
After a man is caught cheating in a poker game a lynch party is formed and the man is murdered. Soon after the murderers begin dying violent and mysterious deaths.
Dean Martin plays a ramblin' gambler in FIVE CARD STUD, a movie that probably didn't, but certainly could have, pounded the fatal nail into the traditional western before handing the franchise over to the Italians. Although it sells itself as a mystery/western - who's killing all these gambling varmints, anyhow? - a five-second study of the movie's poster will pretty much shuffle out who's the good guy, who's the bad guy, and who's going to ride into the sunset with Inger Stevens.
I watched this movie the first time years and years ago, back in the knee-britches days. It's possible some of synapses fired and connected and I somehow, after a generation plus, remembered how the plot - and I use that term loosely - ran. I doubt it, though. FIVE CARD STUD doesn't bother itself with keeping an edge to the mystery. Robert Mitchum plays a gun-toting preacher who opens a church soon after the lynching occurs, Roddy McDowell is an angry young man with a chip on his shoulder. Katherine Justice plays the shapely tomboy sister of McDowell and Inger Stevens is wasted, again, as a hair-cutting floozie. Both women, of course, have lips puckered for the six-shootin' gambling man Martin.
This one was pretty excruciating, and it's really tempting to blame it all on the bored, and boring, Martin. That's probably not fair, though. The script is murky, the dialogue laughable (at the wrong times,) and, like I said, the mystery is never all that much of a mystery. Martin, like Mitchum, was best in movies that let him play it laid-back and coolly bemused. He needs manic energy to react to - think Shirley MacLaine, a young Sally Fields, or even Jerry Lewis. He doesn't have the chops to carry a movie without someone like that, though. Mitchum could, but the movie doesn't put him at the center. It wouldn't matter anyway, because the only hope for this trite oater would be razing the story and starting over. About the only fun this one provides - besides a scene with Mitchum and Yaphet Kotto near the end - is trying to decide who looks more bored, Martin or Mitchum. My money's on Mitchum, but Martin gives him a go at it. A waste of a good cast, and, save for a scene or two, a waste of a viewer's time.
Movie Review: Pair of Aces
Summary: 2 Stars
Western murder mystery is pretty easy to solve but serves as an agreeable vehicle for an amiably cool Dean. And when Mitchum dons clerical black you know there'll be some fun. Otherwise, this is pretty tame fare and the DVD hasn't been restored. (Good luck getting Dean's title song out of your head for days after.)