There was a crooked man...

Quite some time ago I recorded There Was a Crooked Man off of TCM, but I never did a post on it since it turns out that the movie is out of print on DVD. It's going to be on TCM tomorrow morning at 9:45 AM, so now is your chance to catch it.

Kirk Douglas plays Paris Pitman, whom we see at the beginning of the movie leading a gang that robs a wealthy rancher's house. Although he's ruthless, killing other members of his gang who survive the heist so that he'll be the only one with the money, he's also charming in that he suggests his victims just let him be done quickly so they can get back to their hot dinner before it cools. Anyhow, Pitman winds up with a whole bunch of money that he hides in a rattlesnake pit out in the mountains. He's the only one who knows where it is, and even if anybody else got the idea that it was there, they probably wouldn't know about the rattlesnakes. However, he gets caught back in town.

Cut to scenes of other criminals getting caught. Coy (Michael Blodgett) is a young man who accidentally kills his girlfriend's father. Cyrus (John Randolph) is a phony preacher with has assistant Dudley (Hume Cronyn). There's Chinese killer Ah-Ping (C.K. Yang), and Floyd (Warren Oates), who shoots the sheriff Lopeman (Henry Fonda). All of them get transported to a prison in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona territory, where they're put in the same room as veteran bank robber the Missouri Kid (Burgess Meredith).

Pitman, of course, thinks only of breaking out so that he can get to all that money he's got stashed away. The Missouri Kid, however, points out that it's going to be nearly impossible to escape. Not that it's going to stop Pitman from plotting. Of course, prison is a violent place, so there's a melee in which the warden, Le Goff (Martin Gabel), gets killed.

The new warden is... Lopeman, who takes a decided interest in Pitman. Lopeman seems to take an interest in actually reforming these prisoners (good luck with that), and he also wants to know where all that stolen loot is. Not that Pitman is going to tell him. But Lopeman sees Pitman's charisma, and sets Pitman to helping build a new mess hall for the men. Pitman sees that as his opportunity to organize a breakout....

Westerns have never been my favorite genre, and the more I watch, the more I find that I have a difficult time with a lot of the westerns from the beginning of the post-Code era. With that in mind, I had a good deal of problems with There Was a Crooked Man. It started off with the terrible and irritating title song, sung by Trini Lopez over the opening credits. The movie tries to be a comic western, but I found that for me most of the humor missed its mark. And it's also a terribly slow buildup to the climax.

Still, I always like to suggest that other people judge for themselves when I don't much like a movie. People who like westerns, especially 70s westerns, may enjoy this one.