Starring:
Dean Martin
Robert Mitchum
Roddy McDowell
Plot Summary: Dino is a professional poker player in the Old West. Can he outwit, outshoot, or outcool Robert Mitchum? Of course he can, he's Dino.
As the credits flash across the western desert landscape, the title theme song is sung by the star, Dean Martin. The crooner's voice is so full-bodied it takes over your brain and you miss all the details of who directed, produced, or did make-up (Henry Hathaway, Joseph Hazen, and Adelbert Acevedo). Dean Martin was such a smooth singer his voice had a nice ass.
We open, predictably, on a five card stud game in the town of Rincon, with the incomparable Dean Martin (as professional gambler Van Morgan) dealing. Sitting to his left in the one seat is Roddy McDowell fresh off his defining performance as Cornelius in Planet of the Apes (as the young and irritating Nick Evers). Also in the game are five extras. Dino passes the deal and goes to the bathroom, which is always a mistake. Any student of the Old West knows that the moment you turn your back on a poker game, the new guy will be caught cheating and the rest of the table will form a lynch mob.
Dino comes out to find the saloon cleared. The bartender, a pre-Mr.-Big-in-Live-and-Let-Die Yaphet Kotto (as the ironically named Little George), informs Dino that they're off lynching the new guy. Dino rushes off to try to stop the madness, leaving Little George to pilfer the cash on the table. He arrives at the bridge just in time to be of no use whatsoever. Roddy McDowell (on second thought, we'll just call him Cornelius since that's what the rest of the world does) has assumed the lead of the mob. Cornelius then pistolwhips Dino from behind and sends him back into town slumped over his horse like Shane.
If there's one thing old Dino learned out on the road with Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack, it's that drinking and gambling is all fun and games until the new guy gets hanged. Then it's time to skip town and find a new game. He goes out to Evers' Ranch to say goodbye to his love interest Nora (played by a Katherine Justice twenty-odd years his junior), sister of Cornelius and daughter of Sig Evers. The elder rancher is played by Denver Pyle (Uncle Jesse of The Dukes of Hazzard fame), who apparently was born looking 75 years old and made a career as the crusty caretaker of a beautiful young brunette.
Dino makes it to Denver and has enough time to play about three hands of poker before Little George shows up to bring the bad news. Shopkeeper Fred Carson was found drowned in a barrel of flour in his own store, and ranch hand Stony Burrow was found strangled with barbed wire out on Evers' Ranch. They were both in on the poker game/lynch mob and Little George fears their killer may come after Dino next. Given this threat from an unknown maniac and the fact that he wanted to leave Rincon, the logical thing for Dino to do is return to face death, thus setting into motion the ultimate prequel: I Know What You Did 130 Summers Ago.
Upon his arrival in Rincon, Dino checks back into his room above the saloon. He unpacks his framed poker hand, showing the king, queen, jack, and ten of diamonds. Little George comments on the famous hand, and wonders aloud what the hole card was. Was it the ace of diamonds? Did he have the royal flush? Dino says the other guy folded, and puts it away. He finds a few things have changed in town. There's a new preacher in town, Reverend Jonathan Rudd, played by Robert Mitchum. In case the fact that he's Robert Mitchum wasn't threatening enough, he carries around a gun and shoots up bars to encourage attendance to the Sunday sermon.
But let's get back to that poker hand. If the other guy folded, he still had some money left. Poker games don't end with a fold, they end when someone loses the last of their money. This means Dino must have stopped the game, had the hand framed, discarded the rest of the deck, and started up again fresh with a new deck. That is balls above and beyond the call of duty.
Businesses are also springing up in the gold-rush town of Rincon. Dino steps into a barbershop for a shave and finds Lily Langford (played by the very blonde and very Swedish Inger Stevens, former star of The Farmer's Daughter) running the place, and a host of beautiful young women employed as barbers. After he gets cleaned up, he notices that in addition to the one-dollar shave and two-and-a-half-dollar haircut, there is a twenty-dollar "miscellaneous." That is a damn good barbershop.
Dino does a little investigating for an hour or two, and then heads right back to the combination barbershop/whorehouse. Realizing that he is Dean Martin, he seduces the madame Lily instead of settling for one of the dime-a-dozen barber/whores. For the rest of the picture he alternates days with her and with Nora, since as twice the man anyone else is, he should have twice the women any other man has.
Afterwards, Dino and Bob Mitchum see each other on the street. Usually, two strangers crossing paths in the middle of the night would probably not even result in eye contact. With two alpha males like Dino and Bob, it immediately becomes a showdown. But before they can figure out what they're having a showdown over, they hear the churchbell ringing. This not being standard operating procedure at 3 in the morning, the two rush in to discover Mace Jones hanged on the cord. Now that three members of the poker game have been killed, Dino really only has to wait until everyone else dies to figure out who the killer is by process of elimination.
At Mace's funeral, Cornelius and Joe Hurley, the two other survivors of the five card stud game, confront Dino. Little George stands by Dino, and for his troubles gets accused of being the murderer by Cornelius. Cornelius then picks a fight, but not being a fool, he picks it with Dino, not Little George. He hits Dino in the face with a shovel, a potted plant and a cross ripped from a nearby grave, and still manages to lose the fight. It's a scene that really makes you wonder what that hole card was.
Joe Hurley, despite being the last surviving extra in the poker game, commits a classic rookie mistake by turning his back on the camera in an attempt to relight a lantern in his barn. The killer of course takes this opportunity to sneak up from behind and strangle him, dumping him in the trough. Dino gives chase to the man in black, but can't quite catch him. See, if the hole card was an ace, nine, or a diamond, that would make a straight or flush and enough to win. But maybe he only had a king high. You can't help but think that the hole card will reveal a lot about Dino's soul.
Since Cornelius is the only survivor of the card game besides Dino, and he's evil, we are forced to conclude that he is behind all of this. However, since he is also the biggest candyass in the West, he must have some help. We learn the answer when we cut to Bob leaving flowers on the tomb of the unknown card cheat. Cornelius meets him there, and we discover that he's been feeding names of the lynch mob to Bob one by one so Bob can avenge the death of his brother, the cheat.
Cornelius gives Bob the second to last name: Little George, trying to frame him since he is his nemesis for some reason. Bob lies in wait in Little George's room, and attempts to strangle him. Unlike the poker playing degenerates, though, Little George is very strong. And if Bob couldn't handle Gregory Peck in Cape Fear, you know he's going to have trouble with a future Bond villain. Sure enough, Bob is forced to shoot him and run off, ruining his streak of ironic strangling-related deaths and giving Little George a few last moments alone. With them he smears his own blood on his hands and glues them together in prayer to implicate the preacher, the most deranged clue since 38 orphans left for dead spelled out the social security number of their kidnapper with their bodies in the Lifetime movie Betrayal of Innocent Courage.
Dino finds the hands of the outspoken atheist clasped in prayer, but the clue takes a little time to sink in. Just enough time to tie up all the loose ends of the plot, in fact. Bob meets Cornelius in the graveyard for the last name, but ends up on the wrong end of his gun. It seems that evil will triumph over vengeance, but Cornelius lets Bob read a prayer for his brother out of a bible that conceals a derringer. This fatal mistake perhaps seems understandable to a modern audience, but in the Old West, at least half of the bibles in circulation were hollowed out to hold guns, so Cornelius really should have seen it coming.
After making that prayer-preacher connection, Dino comes looking to make a citizen's arrest on Bob right after he's finished his mission of killing half the people in town. Bob tries the same bible scam, but Dino has had that pulled on him at least a dozen times, so he outdraws Bob and completes the Old West circle of life. He bids a fond farewell to both of his girlfriends, and rides off into the sunset. As the movie fades out, we never find out what his damn hole card was, further whetting our appetite for Five Card Stud 2: I Still Know What You Did 130 Summers Ago. Sadly, we are left with only a Godfather and no Godfather: Part II. Still, I would have to say that this is the greatest movie I have ever seen.
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