A Big Hand for the Little Lady

As I've mentioned on a reasonable number of occasions, I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I need to get around to watching before they expire from the DVR. With that in mind, I've got movie posts scheduled a good three weeks in advance, along with several left in draft form either so I don't have a bunch of movies in the same genre or with the same star coming up in rapid succession. Some draft posts then get re-edited if I seem them on the TCM schedule only after I write the first draft, so things might look a bit off. Such is the case with our next movie, A Big Hand for the Little Lady. I had written a post some time back and scheduled it, and then saw the Summer Under the Stars schedule release. Henry Fonda is being honored tomorrow, August 24, and A Big Hand for the Little Lady shows up at 2:00 PM.

It's sometime in the late 19th century, possibly in the New Mexico Territory or west Texas, although there's reference to a "Laredo Territory" which I don't think ever existed. Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) is driving his hearse as the town's undertaker, picking people up, although he's not picking up the dead, and the people he's picking up seem to want to be picked up. The other men he picks up are Drummond (Jason Robrds), a cattleman whose daughter is about to get married; and prominent attorney Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy); another rancher named Wilcox is already in town as is storekeeper Buford (John Qualen). They all gather in the back room of Sam Rhine's saloon, and everyboy in town seems interested in their presence.

The reason for this gathering is that it's that time again for the annual high-stakes poker game, which seems to have as its only rules that they'll play a marathon session until one person has all the money, and that if you can't call the current bet, you're out. This, combined with no mention being made of a maximum bet, is something that I'd think would cause a problem if one person could just bet everyone else out of the game, but then maybe their game doesn't work like this. You get the impression that these men have been coming together for years, and budgeting to take part in the match.

Into town comes Meredith (Henry Fonda). He's got a wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie. They're traveling through Texas to San Antonio, where Meredith is intending to buy a plot of land for the family to make a new start in life. That also means that Meredith has the money for that plot of land on hand, in cash since this wasn't an era of electronic funds transfers. And he's going to be in town for a night because the wheel on their wagon needs to be repaired before the family can get back on the road. Everybody else in town is interested in the poker game, so it seems natural for Meredith to be interested in what's going on too. But he also has more interest as he's an inveterate gambler, with the assumption that the family is moving in part to escape Meredith's past gambling losses.

As you can guess, Meredith gets really interested in the poker game. The others have never really been interested in bringing somebody new into the game, but they get the feeling that Meredith might make a good mark: if you don't know who the mark at the table is, it's probably you. So they do let him into their game, and he predictably starts losing money, up until it comes time to make the big wager, at which point he suffers a medical issue that will force him out of the game and giving him no more chance to win back the family money he lost. At that point, Mary makes the insane request that she should be allowed to finish the game for her husband, even though she doesn't even know how to play poker.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved would read the script and think it's the sort of material they could have a lot of fun making. And to be fair to all of them they do a reasonable job with the film, while looking like they're enjoying making this one. The only thing is that the material is pretty darn thin, the sort of thing that in the generation before World War II probably would have been written to be a two-reel short instead of a feature-length movie. So A Big Hand for the Little Lady will probably appeal more to other people than it did to me. Not that it's not worth watching, however.