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DON COLLIER'S MOVIES Five Card Stud
Directed by Henry Hathaway It begins with a friendly game of stud poker among six men who knew each other and one stranger in a saloon after-hours in the mining town of Rincon, Colorado. While one man, Dean Martin, deals himself out and heads out back of the saloon to the latrine, the stranger is caught cheating by the others, who promptly decide on frontier justice at the end of a rope. Leading the lynch mob is Roddy McDowell. Into town rides a preacher a few days later, played by Robert Mitchum. He is no ordinary preacher, as townsfolk begin to discover, by the way he handles a gun and carries himself in the face of danger. One by one, the members of the midnight poker party begin dying. Not easy, clean deaths, either, but vile, vicious deaths as befitting a revenge-seeking killer. Since no one can fathom why, except the original poker players, who are not talking, the deaths stir up the town. Everyone begins to think they might be next. It becomes a cat-and-mouse game for the remaining poker players to find the murderer before they can become his next victim. For western mystery adventure, this has got to be one of the best movies, although for some reason, critics panned it, probably because most critics have no sense of humor. In this movie, the good guys are squeaky-clean good, the bad guys are dastardly evil bad, and there's even the not-so-good good guys and the not-so-bad villains to round out the cast. One of the best scenes is between Don Collier as the miner Rowan and Bob Hoy as Deputy Otis. It happens right on Front Street, where the two of them get into a shouting match which leads to a gunfight. It must have been hard for them to keep straight faces, since Don and Bob played very close brothers, Sam and Joe Butler, on The High Chaparral, which was their television series at the time this movie was filmed. It's a real treat for their fans because they are always supporting each other in the television series, and in this movie, they get to gun each other down. Another bit of trivia. The stunt people and cast extras played various roles throughout this movie. If their part was written out in one scene, they'd come back in another as someone else.
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