Four Fast Guns (1960, directed by William J. Hole, Jr.)

Posted on April 5, 2024 by Jedadiah Leland

Outlaw Tom Sabin (James Craig) rides into Purgatory, a frontier town that is so dangerous that even the welcome sign warns that those entering should say goodbye to God.

The townspeople take one look Tom and hire him to clean up the town. The town is controlled by a ruthless saloon owner named Hoag (Paul Richards). Hoag is a self-styled intellectual and a dangerous man but he is considered to be untouchable because he is crippled and no one wants to be known as the person who shot a man in a wheelchair. Instead, they would rather hire a stranger to do it for them but Tom has more honor than they originally realized.

Hoag summons three gunmen to kill Tom. Two of the gunmen prove to be no match for Tom but then he meets the third and is shocked to discover that it’s his own brother, Johnny Naco (Brett Halsey).

Four Fast Guns is a better-than-average B-western. What sets it apart from other films about strangers being hired to clean up a town is that the characters are portrayed with more depth than usual. The towns people are not innocent victims but instead want to pay Tom to take the risks and do the dirty work that they’re not willing to do. Tom is not a cut-and-dried hero and the gunmen who are hired to kill him are not portrayed as being one-dimensional villains. Johnny Naco may be a killer but he also has a code of honor. He may be willing to kill his own brother but he’s not willing to see him humiliated. The wheelchair-bound Hoag is himself a more interesting bad guy than usually shows up in movies like this. He’s the type of bad guy who quotes Dickens and Whitman while waiting for his hired guns to do their job. Hoag feels that his cultured background sets him above the rest of the town’s rabble but he ultimately proves himself to be just as petty as those that he looks down on.

Four Fast Guns feels like a forerunner to the morally ambiguous Spaghetti westerns and films like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. It is essential viewing for fans of the genre.

30 More Days of Noir #7: Hell Bound (dir by William J. Hole, Jr.)

Posted on November 7, 2020 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Like so many film noirs, 1957’s Hell Bound opens with a narrator. As we watch scenes of a group of thieves robbing a Naval ship of World War II narcotics, the narrator explains to us what each criminal is doing and how their plot will hopefully lead to them getting rich. Again, this is something we’ve seen in a countless number of film noirs. What makes Hell Bound unique is that the narration keeps going long after one would expect it to stop. And the expected cops and federal agents are never introduced….

That’s because we’re watching a film within a film! Jordan (John Russell) has made and produced the film himself, all to convince a gangster named Harry Quantro (Frank Fenton) to support his plan to …. well, to rob a Naval ship of narcotics. Jordan promises that the real-life theft will go just as smoothly as the theft in the movie! And, it must be said, Jordan’s movie was really well-made. He hired actors and everything. Harry agrees to give Jordan his backing on the condition that Jordan use Harry’s girlfriend, Paula (June Blair), in the operation. That, of course, means that Jordan won’t be able to use his own girlfriend, Jan (Margo Woode). That’s going to be awkward.

Anyway, Jordan starts to assemble his crew and they’re the typical film noir collection of misfits. One of the more fun things about Hell Bound is that it’s full of odd and eccentric characters, the types who would you actually expect to find trying to rob the U.S. Navy of narcotics in the 1950s. My favorite character was the blind drug dealer named Daddy (Dehl Berti). He has the perfect attitude for someone who had the luxury of not having to see the damage caused by his professions.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect plan. Whenever you get a bunch of criminals together to pull off the perfect heist, there’s bound to be some betrayals and some paranoia. We’ve all seen the ending of Goodfellas and we all know what the piano coda from Layla means. Complicating matters is that a big part of the scheme requires Paula to fake being an ambulance nurse and that means that she’s going to have to work with an honest ambulance driver named Eddie Mason (Stuart Whitman). Eddie is a good, working class guy who just wants to help people and make the world a better place. How can Paula go through with her part of the plan when she’s got Eddie looking at his hands and saying that he wants to use them to be a healer!?

I really liked Hell Bound. I wasn’t expecting much from it but it turned out to be a really effective and clever 50s film noir. Clocking in at 70 minutes, it doesn’t have any time for excess padding or anything else. As soon as the film-within-a-film comes to an end, it jumps right into the action and it doesn’t let up. Add to that, you’ve got John Russell giving a tough and gritty performance as the wannabe criminal mastermind and then you’ve got Stuart Whitman managing to make his self-righteous character likable and June Blair doing a great job as the femme fatal. Hell Bound is bit of an unsung classic, a tough and gritty film noir that packs a punch.

Horror Film Review: The Devil’s Hand (dir by William J. Hole, Jr.)

Posted on October 3, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Rick Turner (Robert Alda) has a problem.

Because he’s continually haunted by strange dreams, Rick hasn’t been getting much sleep. As he explains to his incredibly understanding girlfriend, Donna (Ariadna Welter), the dreams involve a vision of a beautiful woman named Bianca (Linda Christian), who appears to be standing in the clouds while wearing a sheer negligee and calling out to him.

Donna insists that it’s probably nothing but Rick says that, after his last dream, he felt himself being drawn to a doll shop in downtown Los Angeles. When Rick and Donna go down to the shop, they discover a doll of Bianca sitting in the window. The owner of the shop, Frank (Neil Hamilton), insists that Rick came in earlier and specifically requested that Frank design the doll so that he could send it as a gift to another woman. You would think that would upset Donna but she’s more interested in the fact that she’s found a doll that looks exactly like her.

Well, you can probably guess what happens. Eventually, the doll that looks like Donna ends up pinned to the wall of the shop and Donna ends up in the hospital with a mysterious illness. Rick manages to track down the real-life Bianca, who greets him in her apartment while wearing the same negligee from Rick’s dreams. Bianca explains to Rick that she’s been reaching out to him because she wants him to join a cult that worships “Gamba, the Great Devil Dog.”

It turns out that the cult meets in the back of Frank’s doll shop. Rick attends a meeting with Bianca and discovers that the cult is made up of exclusively of beautiful young women and bland, middle-aged men. He even gets to witness a near-human sacrifice involving a wheel that’s studded with knives. As Bianca explains it, Gamba sometimes turns the knives into rubber and then sometimes, he doesn’t. Gamba’s unpredictable like that.

Bianca explains that Rick can have everything he wants if he just gives his soul over to the Devil Dog. But what about Donna, who is still in the hospital?

The Devil’s Hand is a low-budget but occasionally effective horror film from 1962. (Apparently, it was originally filmed in 1959 but it wasn’t released until 3 years later. Linda Christian later said that she never actually got paid for appearing in this film, as the production company apparently ran out of money during filming.) Oddly enough, the film opens with extremely cheerful surf music, which leads you to suspect that you’re about to see some sort of weird beach comedy. Instead, The Devil’s Hand turns out to be a film about a cult operating in the shadows of Los Angeles.

The cult is probably the most interesting thing about the film. Though the film doesn’t specifically call attention to this fact, it’s hard not to notice that most of the male cult members appear to be either accountants or middle-management types, the type who wear cheap suits and too much cologne. It’s impossible not to be amused by the idea of a bunch of middle class nobodies gathering in the back of a doll shop so that they can worship the Great Devil Dog. Neil Hamilton and Linda Christian are both perfectly cast as the leaders of the cult. Hamilton is properly menacing while Christian seems to be having fun tempting Rick into the darkness.

Unfortunately, Rick’s not a very likable protagonist. Even though his girlfriend is in the hospital, Rick doesn’t have any problem with going to the horse track and playing the stock market with Bianca. In short, Rick comes across as being a bit of a jerk and you can’t help but feel that Donna might be better off without him.

Anyway, The Devil’s Hand is an entertaining occult film, one that’s definitely not meant to be taken too seriously. It’s only 71 minutes long so it really plays more like an extended episode of an old anthology show than anything else. (It just needs a narrator.) The story moves quickly and you’ll never forget those accountants in the back of the doll shop.