Clint Walker stars as an old gunslinger named Cain in this 1968 western. At the beginning, he’s been in prison for eighteen years for murder. He breaks up an escape attempt by his cellmate, who’s brother, Luke Santee(Mike Henry), and a couple of others had entered the prison hidden in coffins. Santee is the only one who escapes alive.
That, along with his good behavior, earns him an early release.
Cain wants nothing more to do with guns, wants to earn an honest living. It’s hard to hide from his past though, the infamous “Killer” Cain with the twelve notches on his gun. Finding work is hard. When people learn who he is, the job is usually over. Then a man gives him two dollars, with a promise of two more, to deliver a wagon load of goods to a mine.
It’s a set-up though. Luke Santee and some of his men are waiting in the mine. They beat him, rob him, and leave him alive, “so we can do it again,” said Santee.
Cain comes stumbling into a ghost town and finds a young woman, Monica Alton(Anne Francis), there who’s an artist. He helps her load her supplies and she treats him to dinner.
Next he encounters Dan Ruffalo’s Shooting Show and Ruffalo(Vincent Price) offers him a job working in the show. Refusing at first, he finally agrees. Ruffalo even has his old gun that he won in a poker game.
The shootist he has is named Billy who, as the old saying goes is “still wet behind the ears.” Good with a pistol, he worships Cain at first, wishing he’d been born twenty years ago in the good old days. The 1890s were to tame. Cain can’t convince him that there was no such thing as the good old days.
Quickly the infamous Killer Cain becomes the star of the traveling show, commanding more attention and bigger crowds, thus a larger cut of the money. Billy becomes jealous. When they hit the town where Cain had his last shootout, which put him in prison, the old Sheriff he’d wounded, and put out of business, still lived there. A confrontation follows, with Billy egging it on, and Cain walks away, drifting once more.
Monica Alton turns up once more, this time living on a ranch. It’s easy to see the pair have feelings for each other. They make a deal for him to rent the ranch and develop a head of cattle. Once again his past confronts him when he tries to get a loan for a seed herd. Too proud to take a loan from Monica, he leaves and returns to Ruffalo to make some money, which doesn’t sit well with Billy.
I though I knew where this one was headed, but a couple of different plot twists fooled me. The ending was a complete surprise. I liked this one, being a Clint Walker fan from his Cheyenne days.
The mighty Vikings, led by diva Brett Favre, dropped their second game in a row, their third of the last four, to a Bears team they had humbled much earlier in the season. They have shot them selves in the foot first, for home team advantage in the NFC playoffs(the Saints get that), and now have probably done so for #2 seed(is that shot themselves in two feet).
All the Eagles have to do is beat the Cowboys(go Eagles) in their final game and they get the #2 seed. No bye week then. Even the Cardinals have a shot at that seed if they win and both the Eagles and Vikings lose.
It looks like that little dust-up between Favre and Childress that finally boiled over last week is wearing down the Vikings. I’m sorry for the rest of the team, and their fans, but, as the pair “sold their souls”, so to speak, for that elusive Super Bowl championship, I’m not real sympathetic to them.
They could still win of course. Unless they can find that edge they seem to have lost, it won’t happen though.
The last undefeated team went down today, really by their own hand, as the Jets beat the Colts 29-15. They really buy into that resting their main players and giving those with nicks and bump-ups time to heal a bit after things are in hand(as in home field advantage). Apparently, the coach’s word is law there, unlike up at the Vikings camp where Favre and Childress are in the midst of a childish spat over who runs the team.
There’s still a jumble for the two AFC wild card spots, but it’s not nearly as complicated as one might assume. I can see five teams with 8-7 records and two more with 7-8 and a not very likely shot. But… all the Jets and Ravens have to do is win and they are in. That’s it. Nothing else matters. The rest are really at the mercy of those two teams. But any losses by those two complicates matters and THAT I’m not going to try to figure.
The Panthers played very well yesterday in swamping the Giants 41-9, virtually eliminating the New York team from the playoffs(they still technically had a shot until the Cowboys won over the ‘Skins later in the day).
Stewart rushed for 206 yards in 28 carries with one TD. Moore threw for three TDs, one to Steve Smith who received a broken forearm on the play while managing to hold onto the ball. The defense looked good as usual, picking off Manning twice, sacking him four times, and recovering two fumbles.
Once again I wonder what next season will bring with Moore and Jake.
The ‘Skins played better this week than that whatever the F last week. Didn’t help as the offense is pretty beat up with a number of their starters out of the game. They went down to the Cowboys 17-0.
Which brings us to the Saints. I’m not sure what’s up with them. All we got was the overtime after the Panthers. I know they went up 17-0, then let the Bucs come back to tie and force the overtime, never getting their hands on the ball, losing by a field goal.
Which puts me in a quandary for next week. The Panthers and the Saints play. A win for the Panthers would let them finish 8-8, a nice recovery from the 0-3 start. But I certainly don’t want the Saints to stumble into the playoffs with a three game losing streak.
I’d never heard of Little Chenier before a friend brought it by and insisted I needed to watch. I was amazed at how good this film was and wondered how I’d never heard of it. In following the history, I see it was completed in 2006, had trouble finding a distributor, and was finally released in 2008, quickly going to DVD later in the year.
The heart of the movie is the love between two brothers, Beaux and Pemon Dupuis, one of them, Pemon, mentally challenged, and the lengths Beaux would go to to protect him. The two live a quiet life, selling bait and such to others, and fishing, except when their father infrequently drops in to take whatever cash is on hand for his drinking and whoring. Their Mother had left the day after the younger brother’s birth and hadn’t been seen since.
Note: Frederick Koehler is outstanding as the mentally challenged brother. He brings out the gentle soul there marvelously.
The Sheriff’s son and Beaux don’t like each other, Beaux’s girl friend having suddenly married the other unexpectedly. We wonder what’s going on as she never looks happy when she’s with her husband and “visits” Beaux quite often.
When the sheriff is suddenly killed stopping a robbery, his son takes over and we just know it spells no good for the two brothers. His father had been the only thing holding him back.
He arrests Pemon for a crime that he likely didn’t commit, simply because he’s a “retard,” and gives him three days, keeping Beaux from seeing him. When he finally gets in, he finds Pemon unconscious on a bunk, one arm shackled to the bars on the window. He goes nuts and attacks the new Sheriff.
This was a quiet little movie, no explosions, only a few gunshots, yet it was good. That Cajun music popping up here and there is fine as well.
In reading some of the reactions on IMDB, there seemed to be no middle ground here. It was authentic Cajun, it didn’t ring true. The mentally challenged brother was endearing, he was annoying.
I’m certainly no expert on the Cajun folk, but I liked this one. Worth checking out if, like me, It has slipped by you.
Lee Van Cleef and John Phillip Law star in this 1968 film that is, at heart, a revenge plot, though it rises above that to become one of the better spaghetti westerns of the era.
The opening section sets the tone as an outlaw band attacks a ranch where a shipment of money, $200,000, is being guarded during a thunderstorm. Some sort of layover I suspect. Everyone is killed, including the family, the women raped before being murdered.
It’s particularly effective around the thunderstorm, with Morricone’s score playing, the gunfire, the house set on fire as the gang finishes off any witnesses.
They miss one though, a six year old boy, who sees everything as the carnage follows. A man with four aces tattooed on his chest, an oddly shaped earring, a man with a scar running from his hairline by one eye to his jaw. As the gang leaves, the boy is pulled by the fire from someone. All he sees is a silver skull dangling from a necklace. hr
The last we see of the boy he’s picking up a spur, a specially designed one, lost by one of the gang members as they race away.
Next we see an earnest faced young man named Bill Meceita practicing with guns. The entire sequence has him working with various pistols, sharpening both his aim and draw, rifles, and working on moves to avoid returned fired, diving and rolling while keeping up gun play of his own. We just know it’s that small boy grown up.
At the same time, Lee Van Cleef’s character, Ryan, is getting out of prison after fifteen years. As he leaves, two men are following him. After he ditches them, he turns up at Bill’s ranch looking at the three graves. The two meet and converse a bit.
The two men soon learn they are after the same men after the two he’d lost try to murder Ryan and the sheriff finds one dead man wearing unusual-styled spurs and shows them to Bill.
The main men have become important people in the fifteen years Ryan was in prison and Bill was growing up with a festering hate in him. A banker and a saloon owner in their towns.
A bond grows between the pair in their pursuit, Ryan becoming almost a father figure to Bill, dispensing badly needed advice to the young man. Although now good with any weapon, he’s sadly naive about the ways of those he pursues. Ryan wants money from each because of some betrayal in the past and Bill just wants them dead.
It’s almost amusing as each takes turns leaving the other afoot to get a leg up. it never works as Bill has to rescue Ryan from an arrest for a robbery and murder charge, then Ryan finds Bill buried up to his neck in the hot sun.
The final showdown between the gang and the two is well done down to the final surprise revealed at the end about both men’s motivations.
Growing up, I always looked forward to Christmas. I suppose that’s not unusual for most kids though. Around our house, it was just my Mother, my two sisters, and myself. No dad, a story best left untold.
Mama worked hard to provide for my siblings and me, sometimes to her own detriment. I can say that we always had everything we needed. There was always food to eat and our clothes were always clean and neat. We even got some of the things we wanted. Not everything though.
Mama rarely bought anything for herself. A woman raising three kids alone, with only a high school education, it was a grind for her, had to be, but she never complained. We didn’t think of it at the time, kids you know, but we were never lacking in the important things.
Our home, the one in which I now live, was a small shotgun house, three rooms. Living room, one bedroom, the kitchen. We had running water, but our first bathroom was that little building in the back of the property.
As we grew, in addition to the essentials, Mama paid for the house, added two rooms and a bath, built porches front and rear, and two cars as well. All on a single salary, no help from “dear old dad.”
Christmas was a fun time for the four of us. One of the things we did together was sit before the fireplace at night, sharing fruit and nuts while we talked and watched television. One favorite treat was an orange rolled a lot to break it up a bit, then Mama would cut a hole in the end and poke in a stick of peppermint candy, the porous type. We loved squeezing juice up through that candy.
Santa Claus, when we were small, was a lot of fun. I remember one year being worried that, not being asleep when I though I heard reindeer hooves on the roof, he might not stop. Mama reassured me and I went on to sleep, waking early, as always, to rush into that front room to see what was left. I never could figure how he got down that small chimney.
I wasn’t disappointed to learn the truth when I got older. On that note, Mama’s youngest brother and my aunt always refused to play Santa with their children, not wanting to “lie” to them. I always believed my cousins missed something with that attitude.
My adopted team had a misstep this week. I don’t get the NFL Network, so all I had was highlights to go by. They seemed to play bad in the first half, only three points, then rallied in the second a little late. They let the Cowboys beat them 24-17, but I won’t hold that against them, much as I dislike their opponent.
The undefeated season is gone, but that may be for the best. They were still likely to win home field advantage throughout the playoffs anyway, but that was almost guaranteed by the Panthers trouncing the Vikings last night.
You’re welcome, Charles.
The Panthers played the best I’ve seen them in a while in the night game. The Vikings looked almost helpless as they went down 26-7. Peppers harried Favre all night long, rushing passes and getting one sack(four total for the team), causing one pick in the end zone. Stewart rushed for 107 yards(the first given up by the Vikings in 36 games). Matt Moore was 21/33 for 299 yards and three TDs.
It will be interesting to see what happens next year with Moore and Jake.
The Jets probably ended their playoff hopes in losing to the Falcons 10-7 in a pretty ugly game in the cold. One mishandled field goal snap, one missed field goal, and one blocked attempt certainly didn’t help their cause.
We’ve still got the ‘Skins tonight against the Giants. Doesn’t look good. The Giants need this one bad in their hopes for a playoff berth.
OH MY LORD!
That first half was ugly. I didn’t expect much as the ‘Skins didn’t have much to play for, but WHEW! 24-0 and it wasn’t that close.
John Ireland stars as the Colonel in this 1968 western. As the movie opens, he’s looking for his two partners in a bank robbery that double-crossed him and disappeared with $200,000 in loot. One, Roy Fulton(Gordon Mitchell), had been shot in the gut in the heist and Ireland finds him being buried. That leaves the third partner, Il Portoghese, to find.
When the Colonel tracks him down, he learns that the funeral had been faked and the fat man knows where Fulton is hiding. That’s where the pair head.
The priest that had done the burial, Glenn(George Hilton), was a fake and Fulton’s new partner. The coffin held the bank loot. He goes for a doctor and when he returns, Fulton is gone and Glenn believes he’s been double-crossed. Digging the coffin up, he’s surprised to find the money gone and Fulton’s body there instead.
This was an okay movie, but it was filled with coincidence and double-cross. The Colonel crosses the Portoghese and leaves him afoot, barefoot, and takes the money. Along comes Glenn, who stops when he sees a man lying in the road. It’s a trap and now Glenn is left afoot. The fat man catches up and is ready to kill his ex-partner until he finds that the money has been hidden. They slug it out until both are worn down, then decide-what the hell?-let’s split the money, each heading for the “only” woman they trusted. Turns out to be the same woman, Liz(Sandra Milo).
Meanwhile Glenn goes to town, only having a description of Fulton’s two partners: a fat Portoghese and the Colonel who wears a heavy ring. He wanders into the wrong room, it’s dark, and gets invited to bed by a woman who thinks he’s her man. When her man arrives, a fight breaks out, disturbing the one in the next room, who just happens to be the Colonel.
Liz is the next double-cross, who grabs the money and leaves town. A gang shows up, lead by the banker who wants his half of the money for the robbery he arranged. He’s then double-crossed by the gang and teams up with the three men and Liz to take them on.
Everyone is out for themselves in this one and the double-crosses are not through yet. A decent western, but not outstanding. About a B-, maybe a C.
The silliest thing happens near the end of the movie when Glenn and Liz are enjoying a turkey dinner in her rooms. Why we were subjected to extreme close-ups of their lips gnawing and chewing the bird, I have no idea. I suppose it was some sort of sexual innuendo as it ended with Liz licking her lips, her forefinger, and extinquishing a candle with the damp digits.
Not The Baseball Pitcher 