The Silver Screen Oasis

I woke up early this morning and found a solid western and wonder if any of you have seen it. It stars Dean Martin, Robert Mitchum, Roddy McDowell and Inger Stevens.

Basically a card shark gets lynched for cheating and Martin tries to stop it but fails. Mitchum heads into town as a gun toting preacher who's looking to clean up the place but as he arrives the other card players are being killed one by one. Eventually it leads to the interesting dynamic of one of the card players (McDowell) who's a total scumbag btw trying to convince the surviving players that one of them is feeding information to an "outsider" (code for Mitchum) who is doing the killing.

The problem is McDowell is such a hateful scumball that no one really believes him. Nonetheless Martin suspects that it may be McDowell doing the dirty work himself since the two hate each other.

Well i'm sure you can figure out the rest from that.

It's a solid little western and Dean is cool in his part. Mitchum as the gun toting preacher recalls a similar role in The Night of the Hunter. I especially like the whole "preaching from the bible as a diversion to pulling out a gun" trick he pulls in the later part of the movie.

Roddy McDowell was pretty whiny and quite honestly his acting got on my nerves a bit but I guess that's what made it work for him in this flick.

Inger Stevens BTW is Martin's love interest in the movie but really this is a western that harkens back to an earlier time when the men dominated as the ladies in the movie have very little to do.

Anyways anyone seen it before? Thoughts?

I saw it a long time ago and don't remember it being much more than an average movie. Oddly, I don't remember Roddy at all. I thought the pairiing of Martin and Mitchum unusual but all in all it was ok. I'll have to give it another look.

If I remember correctly near the conclusion of the film Martin confronts Mitchum and Mitchum pulls out his bible and wants to read a prayer and then Martins says "if that's a Bible read it, if it's a gun drop it".Mitchum has a small gun hidden in the Bible which has a cut out to hold the small gun. I haven't seem the film in years, but that line I always remember. The film, directed by Henry Hathaway, is OK.

I haven't seen this film in ages. I'd like to see it again, to refresh my memories. The scene Ken pointed out is the only one I really remember. Dean Martin and Robert Mitchum together had to have been interesting.