Poker with Pistols Review
- 1967
- Dir: Giuseppe Vari
A little-known genre entry that seems to divide those who have seen it. It has been called completely forgettable by some, but others think it’s one of the best films of director Vari, a solid runner-up in the spaghetti western directors division and a personal favourite of some of the people on our forum. It has both George Eastman (Luigi Montefiori) and George Hilton in fine form, and was written by some of the finest screenwriters in the business, Ferdinando di Leo and Augusto Caminito. At the same time it suffers from a limited budget and a script that often seems more appropriate to a thriller than a western. It is full of twists, turns and sudden revelations, which makes it also hard for reviewers to write about the movie without giving too much away …
The film opens with an extended card game. Lucas (Eastman), a professional card player, is challenged – and beaten – by a mysterious passer-by called Terrail (Hilton). Completely cleaned out, he borrows money from a Mexican called Lazar (José Torres), but is again beaten by Terrail, who makes him an unusual offer: he is willing to pay Lucas’ debts to the Mexican if Lucas, in return, is willing to bring a wagon containing a useless load of paper (!) to the town of Chamaco. Like you and me, Lucas asks himself what might be the catch, and soon he is in all kinds of trouble: the wagon is held up by a gang of Mexicans and the town of Chamaco is controlled by the shady businessman Masters (Mimmo Palmara), who doesn’t like people nosing around …
I’ve never been a fan of poker, and in this case I don’t mean the game itself, but the scenes of poker games in spaghetti westerns. Like musical interludes with singing saloon girls they tend to hold up the narrative (and often are merely a waste of time). Director Vari tries to remedy this by moving the camera around, in search of unusual angles, but it helps only to a certain extent. The drawn-out poker and gambling scenes detract from the ‘noirish’ story-line, with Eastman/Montefiori representing a western counterpart of the shady detective wandering about in a world in which nobody can be trusted, except (maybe) that one angelic girl (Annabella Incontrera) begging for help. When she tells him her father disappeared years ago under mysterious circumstances, you know he will pop up later in the movie and that his character is part of the plot. In true noir style Eastman is beaten up a few times (they only forgot to provide him with the typical Philip Marlowe wisecracks), but near the end there’s also a symbolic crucifixion scene, which is of course italissimo, as Italian as can be. Although Vari directs well, Poker with Pistols belongs above all to the actors. Lee van Cleef lookalike José Torres (he probably had his finest hour in the famous opening scene of Any Gun Can Play) is the mysterious man in the background, Incontrera the damsel in distress and Palmara a typical slimy and calculating villain. Hilton is cast against type as the very ambiguous stranger who’s hiring Eastman. His rather restrained performance is spot-on, but it’s Eastman/Montefiore who steals the show. He is a very underrated actor (and writer of the original story of Keoma), whose career was severely harmed by the fact that some stars refused to work with him because of his tall stature. Well-plotted, the film still is a bit sluggish here and there, and it has a rather cheap look (Demofilo Fidani was responsible for the set design!). It’s also a bit top heavy, with nearly all the trump cards (the crucifixion scene, the shootout at Masters’ place) played out near the end. But Eastman seems to have practiced a lot with the gun, which lends a special flair to the smaller action scenes that are thrown in here and there to liven things up a little.
How to see this movie. That might be a problem. There’s an old German VHS, but as far as I know no official DVD release. I watched a DivX-file of an English fandub version of a (I suppose) German TV showing (actually I didn’t recognize the logo, but the credits were in German). There were a few audio drop outs and video quality varied from not bad to mediocre, bad, worse, headache inducing and even completely absent for a few minutes (luckily I was warned for this).
--By Scherpschutter
