The Spikes Gang (1974)

From my favorite movies..

A different way of telling a story

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

I saw this movie when I was up late. I was bored one night. It was one of the only interesting-looking thing on. I absolutely love this movie! I wish this was the "must watch" for the wanna be gangsta rappers, the way Scarface is.Even though basically they end the same, there is an underlined sense of repentance in this movie's end that is completely absent from movie themes today. It was real. Getting half way in something (especially crime) and then wishing you hadn't started it is a real factor. This is something rare to see in these movies. Instead of leaving the movie thinking "I could do that, I just won't make those mistakes," the way other gangsta flicks make people feel, you leave thinking "maybe this isn't at all what I thought or want."

Three miscreant youths, Gary Grimes, Ron Howard, and Charles Martin Smith find a wounded Lee Marvin on the road and take him to the barn of Gary Grimes father's farm. They patch him up, feed him, Grimes gives him his horse and he makes a getaway. That doesn't sit well with Grimes' father who has lied to a posse about Marvin not being around. He takes off his belt and tans the hide off Grimes back. Grimes runs away then and there and the other two join him.Like a lot of youth back then, when I was young, when this picture was made and today; these kids are bored. But back then there just weren't any diversions. Life was hard on those homestead farms, Grimes' father is a hard man, he had to be. The story of these kids is the story I'm sure of a lot of youth in the west. They take up bank robbing like their new hero Lee Marvin and make a botch of it. They kill a State Senator accidentally and don't even get away with the money. Fleeing to Mexico, they meet up again with Marvin who takes them under his wing now, to show them how to do it right.The rest of the movie is the unfolding of their disillusionment. They've killed a State Senator and they're hot. Lee Marvin does not turn out to be the hero they had in mind. But by his lights, he's operating quite logically.The three young actors convey nicely what it must have been like to grow up on a bleak prairie homestead and to get a chance at what they perceive will be adventure. Lee Marvin strikes the right note in a difficult part. In some ways at first he appears to the kids to be just like his character in Monte Walsh, a rugged individualist who lives by his own code. He has to be that to appeal to the kids in the first place. He tries to make them shuck their boyish illusions about outlawry, but when push comes to shove the kids can't do it. Marvin is not like Liberty Valance in this film, a sadistic bully. But he does what he has to in order to survive as an outlaw.The kids fail their apprenticeships, but they and Marvin give the audience some great entertainment.

I happened to catch this film on a late night showing on a classic movie channel. I was REALLY surprised by this film!! I have seen other comments on it that refer to the movie as "under-rated", and I couldn't agree more!Lee Marvin does a fantastic job portraying bank robber Harry Spikes who meets and befriends three teen aged boys who gradually come to admire Spikes and his lifestyle. After Spikes leaves the boys, circumstances lead them to run away together and begin what they thought would be the adventure of thier lives. They soon find that adventure, life, and Harry Spikes are not all they seemed to be! Ron Howard, Gary Grimes and Charlie Martin Smith play thier parts perfectly. The film also benefits from the reality lent by the dilapidated and run down buildings in the various towns shown in the movie, rather than the cheesy 'gunsmoke" type sets that are normally seen in films of this genre and time.I can't recommend this movie highly enough!! 8/10

A gem of a movie.Very realistic and exciting.A good combination of an established actor (Marvin) combined with up & coming actors (Grimes,Smith & Howard).It portrays the american west in a realistic manner (like most westerns from the late 60's & early 70's)