"5 Card Stud" and "Rehearsal for Murder" Bend the Mystery Genre

A simple touch can transform a film from conventional to interesting. As evidence, I offer two exhibits from the mystery genre: director Henry Hathaway's 1968 Western 5 Card Stud and the 1982 made-for-TV movie Rehearsal for Murder, written by William Link and Richard Levinson.

The opening scenes of 5 Card Stud play out like a typical Western. After a card shark is caught cheating in a saloon poker game, the other players decide to lynch him. When Van Morgan (Dean Martin) tries to save the stranger, the back of his head encounters the handle of a Colt .45. The card shark dies at the end of a rope and Van leaves town in disgust. He returns only after hearing about the sudden deaths of two members of the lynching mob. When the deadly pattern continues, Van suspects that someone is avenging the hanged man. Could the killer be the new gun-toting reverend (Robert Mitchum) that just arrived in town?

 This crafty variation of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians never takes itself too seriously. That attitude extends to its two stars, both of whom were past their prime by the late 1960s. Dean Martin is ideally cast as the befuddled professional gambler pressed into service as the de facto detective. Robert Mitchum, an obvious choice for the enigmatic reverend, gives an acceptable performance, but the role requires little effort on his part. 

Still, 5 Card Stud holds one's attention for its 103-minute running time. Its only significant faults are an uninspired conclusion (i.e., it could have used a twist) and the propensity to waste the talents of Inger Stevens.

The pretty Swedish-born actress had wrapped up her fairly popular TV series The Farmer's Daughter in 1966. However, she subsequently found meaty film roles hard to come by and typically ended up as the inconsequential love interest in movies like Hang 'Em High and Firecreek. Emotional instability--she often had affairs with her leading men, to include Dean Martin--may have contributed to her apparent suicide in 1970. After her death, tabloids reported that she had married an African American man in 1961 and kept it a secret.

As for 5 Card Stud, some film buffs claim it's an unofficial remake of the 1950 film noir Dark City. There may be general similarities, but the inspiration is clearly more Agatha Christie. If you find Western mysteries intriguing, I also recommend checking out the 1957 B-movie Joe Dakota with Jock Mahoney.

With a resume that includes creating Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, William Link and Richard Levinson know a thing or two about the mystery genre. And, like Agatha Christie, they're not above breaking the rules of mystery fiction (see S.S. Van Dine's famous Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories). After all, these are the two guys who revealed the killer's identity in the opening scene of each Columbo episode. Still, Rehearsal for Murder requires one's careful attention--even after a character notes that a well-written mystery "takes the audience by the hand and leads them in the wrong direction."

Robert Preston stars as playwright Alex Dennison, who assembles a group of actors in an empty theater to do a reading of his latest work. It quickly becomes evident that his actual intent is to unmask the person who murdered his fiancee the previous year. In flashback, we're shown that stage star Monica Welles (Lynn Redgrave) apparently took her own life on the opening night of her latest play. However, the evidence is sketchy at best--her final words were typewritten. But why would anyone want to kill Monica?

The stage setting provides Link and Levinson with the opportunity to play with the construct of murder as a form of acting. After all, isn't a killer acting when he or she lies about an alibi? And isn't adding a suicide note to a crime scene similar to creating a stage setting for a play? In both cases, the killer plays the role of playwright, trying to convince the police and others (the audience) that they have seen or heard something different from reality.

Lynn Redgrave plays the murder victim.

Unfortunately, despite a game cast that includes Patrick Macnee and Jeff Goldblum, Rehearsal for Murder falls just short of the mark. Even at a short 75-minutes, it seems sluggish in spots. And after one twist at the midway point, the viewer starts looking for another. In the end, despite its cleverness, the murderer's identify becomes pretty obvious. It doesn't help that Link and Levinson, perhaps inadvertently, steal a page from a classic mystery novel (not revealed here...hey, no spoilers!).

Still, there's enough here to warrant a viewing, though I'd steer Robert Preston fans to another 1980s outing that featured the classic film star: the surprisingly entertaining The Last Starfighter.

Dean Martin Ogles the Ladies in "The Wrecking Crew"

I was in the mood for a guilty pleasure recently and up popped The Wrecking Crew (1968) on TCM. Guilty pleasures don't get much guiltier than this fourth entry in Dean Martin's Matt Helm series. With spy movies all the rage in the 1960s, Columbia tried to posture Helm as a poor man's James Bond, Well, sort of. The Helm pictures were actually spoofs--not clever ones like Our Man Flint--but broad tongue-in-cheek efforts. That approach suited Dean Martin, who appeared as the turtle-necked protagonist while still doing his weekly variety TV series on NBC.

The plot resembles Goldfinger with Matt's agency, Intelligence and Counter Espionage (ICE), sending the secret agent to recover $1 billion in stolen gold bullion. Villain Count Contini (Nigel Green) plans to flood the financial markets, thus devaluing the economies of Great Britain and the U.S. Throw in some chases, fisticuffs, and plenty of pulchritude and you have The Wrecking Crew.

Dean sniffs Sharon Tate.

It's a far cry from Donald Hamilton's 1960 novel, the second of 27 Matt Helm spy thrillers. Indeed, the only resemblance is that Helm's cover was as a photographer in both the book and film. Otherwise, Hamilton's tough-minded hero had little in common with the cigarette-smoking, Scotch-drinking ladies man played by Dean Martin.

Martin's film series kicked off in 1966 with The Silencers, which co-starred Stella Stevens as Matt's klutzy cohort (the poster proclaimed: "Girls, Gags & Gadgets! The best spy thriller of Nineteen Sexty-Sex!"). A follow-up, Murderers Row, appeared later that year. It's probably the best of the four films, simply on the basis of a cast featuring Ann-Margret and an over-the-top Karl Malden as the bad guy. Still, the formula was wearing thin by the time The Ambushers (with Senta Berger) was released a year later.

Elke Sommer's "come hither" look.

What redeems The Wrecking Crew is its cast. Tina Louise and Nancy Kwan have little to do other than look glamorous (or, in Kwan's case, also manage a few karate kicks). However, Elke Sommer and Sharon Tate are perfectly cast. Sommer's European sultriness poses a perfect counterpoint to Martin's lecherous looks. In addition, she has a grand time playing a villain and (spoiler alert!) "dies in perfect beauty" (as she described in her interview with the Cafe). In contrast, Tate mixes kooky charm with buckets of sex appeal as Matt's female sidekick. I'm not sure that Tate would have evolved into a major star, but she shows her potential as an appealing comedienne in The Wrecking Crew.

While the karate fights leave much to be desired, they were still choreographed by a young Bruce Lee (granted, he didn't have much to work with). Also, if you look closely at the henchmen in the House of 7 Joys fight, you may notice Chuck Norris (in his film debut).

Dean takes a look at Sharon.

Although the closing credits of The Wrecking Crew promise a fifth installment to be called The Ravagers, another Matt Helm film was never made. Weak boxoffice receipts doomed the franchise and Martin, tired of the series, wanted out. Sharon Tate's murder, which occurred just a year after The Wrecking Crew, also cast a shadow over the series.

Still, decades later, the spirit of Dean Martin's Matt Helm movies lives on. It's hard to watch Mike Myers in his Austin Powers spy spoofs without concluding that he's channeling a lot of Matt Helm.

Rio Bravo: Howard Hawk's "Response" to High Noon

The classic status attributed to Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo (1959) has always puzzled me. While it's a solid, well-done Western, it doesn't rank with the best Westerns of the 1950s (e.g., Shane, The Hanging Tree, 3:10 to Yuma, the Anthony Mann-James Stewart collaborations, etc.). It's also not as good as the movie that allegedly inspired it: High Noon.

Hawks, who disliked High Noon, famously said: "I didn't think a good sheriff was going to go running around town like a chicken with his head off asking for help, and finally his Quaker wife had to save him." Thus, Rio Bravo is often considered to be Hawks' and John Wayne's cinematic response to High Noon.

Dean Martin as Dude.

The plot is simple: Sheriff John T. Chance (Wayne) arrests Joe Burdette when the latter guns down a man in cold blood. Joe's brother, Nathan (John Russell from TV's Lawman) "bottles up" the town and hires a bunch of professional gunfighters to spring Joe from jail. That leaves Chance, his elderly deputy Stumpy (Walter Brennan), and his alcoholic former deputy Dude (Dean Martin) to guard Joe until a marshal arrives in six weeks. One of Chance's friends states it eloquently: "A game-legged old man and a drunk? That's all you got?"

In Hawks' world, though, that's all that Chance wants. Unlike Will Kane (Gary Cooper) in High Noon, Chance doesn't solicit help. It's not the job of married men with families to face hired guns. That's what Chance was hired to do (although he does eventually accept help from a young fast gun played by Ricky Nelson). This exaggerated view of public service lends a little thematic density to an otherwise lightweight plot.

A brown-haired Angie Dickinson.

Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, who co-wrote Hawks' The Big Sleep (with William Faulkner), certainly provide a quotable screenplay. After Chance and con woman Feathers (Angie Dickinson) follow up their first kiss with a sequel, she quips: "I'm glad we tried it a second time. It's better when two people do it." Granted, it's a line that seems more appropriate for The Big Sleep than a Western--but it's still entertaining. Indeed, Feathers seems to be a character lifted from a late 1940s film noir, as evidenced by the following exchange in which Chance confronts her with a "wanted" poster:

Feathers: This isn't the first time that handbill has come up. I'd like to know what to do about it.

Chance: Well, you could quit playing cards...wearing feathers.

Feathers: No, sheriff. No, I'm not going to do that. You see...that's what I'd do if I were the kind of girl that you think I am.

Dickinson and Dean Martin stand out in the cast. She hits all the right notes as the sassy Feathers, who keeps missing the stagecoach out of town because she has finally found a man that interests her. Martin has a more difficult role, playing a drunk trying to sober up in the middle of a life-threatening situation. He's quite effective in the film's first half before getting cleaned up a little too quickly for the big climax. As for Wayne and Brennan, they plays roles that each has done at least a half-dozen times.

Ricky Nelson as Colorado.

That brings us to Ricky Nelson, who seems miscast as Colorado, the young gunfighter. Still, he tries hard and it helps that he doesn't have a lot of lines. He does fine in the singing department when he and Dino duet on the memorably-titled "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me" (which Dimitri Tiomkin adapted from his own theme for Red River). Allegedly, Elvis Presley was interested in playing Colorado, but his business manager Colonel Tom Parker nixed the idea.

Director Howard Hawks, who was a master at crafting lean movies, surprisingly lets Rio Bravo drift along at a leisurely 141 minutes. He still musters some exciting action scenes, although his best set piece contains little action and comes at the beginning of the film. Rio Bravo opens with a four-minute scene with no dialogue, but contains plenty of information. We learn that Dean's character is a drunk that will stoop to anything for a drink. We see the murder committed by Joe Burdette that sets the film's plot in motion. And we see that the townsfolk, after witnessing a senseless murder, are too intimidated to do anything about it.

Interestingly, Hawks, Wayne, and screenwriter Brackett teamed up again seven years later for the semi-remake El Dorado. This time around, Wayne is a gunfighter, Robert Mitchum is an alcoholic sheriff, and James Caan is a young gun named Mississippi. It's not as good as Rio Bravo, but, like its predecessor, is a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours.

The Duke and Dino Re-team for "The Sons of Katie Elder"

John Wayne had recently recovered
from lung cancer.

Katie Elder lived modestly in the frontier town of Clearwater. Her alcoholic, gambling husband lost their ranch in a poker game and was fatally shot (in the back) that same night. She made dresses and gave guitar lessons to earn the money to send the youngest of her four sons to college. Katie only owned two dresses herself--one for the winter and one for the summer. She never heard from her sons, but told the town's residents that they sent her money on a regular basis. She counted her oldest sons' letters among her most prized possessions and read them frequently--though he had stopped writing new ones long ago. She even prepaid for her funeral.

Michael Anderson, Jr. replaced
Tommy Kirk after a scandal involving
the latter.

All of this is news to her sons, who arrive in Clearwater at the beginning of The Sons of Katie Elder to bury their mother. We learn that the eldest son, John (John Wayne) left home ten years earlier and eventually became a gunfighter (the sheriff notes: "John Elder isn't wanted for anything...around here"). Matt Elder (Dean Martin) is a con man and gambler. Youngest son Bud (Michael Anderson, Jr.) doesn't want to return to college. And Matt Elder (Earl Holloway), well, he just seems to be wasting his life away. In short, the Elder boys are not a very sympathetic lot.

Instead of going their separate ways again after the funeral, the brothers decide to look into their father's murder. Though they can't find any witnesses nor evidence, they become suspicious of Morgan Hastings, a gun-maker who now owns the old Elder ranch. The town's mortician confides to John: "Hastings' bent on taking over the whole county." As the audience, we already know Hastings is bad--he has hired a gunfighter (George Kennedy) to dispose of John. It quickly becomes apparent that The Sons of Katie Elder is heading steadily toward a major showdown.

John Elder watches the funeral.

While Sergio Leone was reinventing the Western in Europe in the mid-1960s, American filmmakers like Henry Hathaway were churning out solid, traditional Westerns like this one. There are effective moments in the opening scenes of Katie Elder, such as John watching his mother's funeral in the distance, knowing his presence would only cause disruption. Hathaway frames his celluloid images like a painter, with colorful mountains often adding visual majesty to the backgrounds. There are some potentially rich themes in The Sons of Katie Elder, too, principally that tragedy can reinvigorate the bonds of family. After spending time with his brothers, John apparently wants the camaraderie to continue and proposes they join together to deliver a herd of horses. It's not a long-term solution toward reuniting the family, but it's a start.

Anthony Mann explored the importance of family masterfully in his adult Westerns of the 1950s. One wonders how Mann would have handled this material with a different cast (e.g., imagine an embittered James Stewart as John!). But The Sons of Katie Elder has no intentions of being a "serious Western." Yes, there are killings, but the bickering brothers also brawl playfully whether carousing in Mom's cabin or throwing each other in a river. And when it turns somewhat serious toward the end, the film jettisons its "importance of  family" theme in favor of two lengthy shootout scenes.

Dean co-starred with the Duke twice.

One can't fault the cast, which certainly appears game. However, it's unfortunate that Katie Elder re-teams  John Wayne and Dean Martin--simply because it recalls their earlier pairing in Howard Hawks' superior 1959 Western Rio Bravo. My recommendation is that you block out that movie and just accept The Sons of Katie Elder for what it is: a well-made, likable, but disposable Western that missed the opportunity to be more.