Money, Women and Guns (1958)

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

This Western is a great example of what was good in old fifties Westerns, compared to the Hollywood tripe the control freaks shoved down our throats after about 1965.It's a Western murder mystery complete with fantastic scenery. The only drawback is that the hero's outfit never gets dusty. But that's okay.In the mid sixties, the control freaks wanted to "fix" what wasn't broke by trying to claim their realistic dust was enough for realism, but they gave the worst of both worlds by giving us the most idiotic one dimensional caricatures ever.Here, we go through a more realistic series of characters. No "super demi god" Greek characters, though the hero has the demi god attributes. Still, he isn't traditional Greek hero. He doesn't butcher people for no motivation the way Odysseus and other Homeric legends did.In effect, the hero here, while being much like a small portion of the better fifties heroes, was actually an "anti-hero", a truer "anti-hero" than we had ever gotten. The fifties gave us a small segment of this man who actually attempted to have some morality. Before and after the fifties, we got almost none of this. And to be honest, even in the fifties, this was not a majority of heroes, even in the Westerns. John Wayne, Audie Murphy, William Holden, even Joel and Randolph usually played "outlaws reforming" more than "guys seeking good from an early age".Now, the story. An old miner is held up by three masked men. Two of them are homicidal gun crazy brothers, who issue his mortal wounds at the cost of his own life. The third is the first to be shot, but not seriously. He winds up being one of the five names the old man writes in his final will and testament. He makes this known in a final gasp to another old friend who hears the shots and comes by to find him."Quit it Judas" becomes a great switch ending line in this film that actually shows lots of character in its characters. Unlike the "control freak era" of Westerns, we get much more credible characters instead of the "bubble boy Beavis and Butthead" spaghetti nonsense of people acting like the smell of guts and corpses is good to drink coffee to.Why does this matter? Because we get the impression there is more action than there really is. We are fascinated and drawn in by this collection of characters, and fooled into thinking there is more action, even though there is so little bloodshed, and even less cockeyed bravery in the face of guns.While the control freaks of the late sixties onward would make idiotic Westerns where everyone killed everyone else (makes you wonder how the West could have a population over "1"), their "hate mongering" became tedious and boring compared to what we get in real Westerns like this.

The first thing one has to do is overlook the title of this story - there was money involved of course, but just one woman of note, and guns didn't come into play all that much. It appears most of the other reviewers before me gave this picture short shrift, but with a deviation from the standard formula, I thought the story line provided some clever elements to Silver Ward Hogan's (Jock Mahoney) search for a dead prospector's beneficiaries and the man who murdered him.As for that dead prospector, Ben Merriweather (Edwin Jerome), if you keep an eye on him as he scrawls out his dying note, there's no way his erratic, shaking hand could have produced anything legible. But it's that note that provides the premise of the story, as Merriweather's fortune of three hundred thousand dollars is to be split between five intended heirs and the man who locates them, as long as the killer is identified in the process.Where the story gets interesting is how the identities of the named persons play out. One of them is just a young boy, another spent some jail time with the old codger earlier in their lives. The revelations are more than a surprise for detective Hogan, who turns up pieces of a puzzle that don't seem to fit until he identifies the last of his quarry. The Johnny Bee gimmick was a pretty good one in the final resolution, though I don't think I would have been quite so understanding as Hogan if Bee/Briggs took a couple of shots at me.Through it all, Ward Hogan comes to terms with his wanderlust, finding romance with the mother (Kim Hunter) of young Davey Kingman. Set around Christmas time, the story allows for some mention of a benevolent Santa Claus looking out for Davey, who in the final analysis is rewarded for his wishful thinking - "You gotta wish special hard, but it works".But you know what the topper was? What's Judas going to do with fifty thousand dollars?

Money, Women and Guns is directed by Richard H. Bartlett and written by Montgomery Pittman. It stars Jock Mahoney, Kim Hunter, Tim Hovey, Gene Evans, Tom Drake and Lon Chaney Jr. Music is by Joseph Gershenson and CinemaScope photography is by Philip Lathrop. A strange bag of oats is this one. The makers have offered up CinemaScope and parked up at Lone Pine to film it. The colour lensing is beautiful, while the story has promise unbound, yet it still struggles to come out in credit.Story sees an old prospector murdered at pic's start (we don't see who done the deed), so in comes detective Silver Ward Hogan (Mahoney). Hogan sets out to find the killer and also an heir to the dead man's fortune.And thus we have a sort of Hercule Poirot in the Wild West. Which is fun, and the mystery element is engaging and constantly strong. Yet the Scope potential is barely utilised, action is in short supply, and the acting performances - whilst adequate - reek of easy paycheck time.Not a waste of time by any stretch of the imagination, but it sure as hell is frustrating. 6/10

Jock Mahoney, TV's Range Rider, stars in this routine B-western involving gold, pretty gals and greed. Mahoney, who had also doubled for Charles Starrett in the Durango Kid movies, strikes an imposing figure in this routine oater.Kim Hunter and the always reliable Gene Evans turn in decent performances as Jocko tracks down the heirs to a fortune in gold. The budget as well as the writing are barely adequate, but the cast makes the best of a familiar plot. Look also for the great Lon Chaney, Jr. in another post-Wolfman supporting role. Recommended for B-western fans only .....