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Sam Whiskey
A widow hires an ex-gambler to retrieve gold bars from a sunken river boat in Colorado and discreetly return them to the Federal Mint, from where they had been stolen by her dead husband.
Release : | 1969 |
Rating : | 5.9 |
Studio : | United Artists, Brighton Pictures, Levy-Gardner-Laven, |
Crew : | Art Direction, Set Decoration, |
Cast : | Burt Reynolds Angie Dickinson Clint Walker Ossie Davis William Schallert |
Genre : | Comedy Western |
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I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.
A different way of telling a story
The acting in this movie is really good.
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Playing the title role Burt Reynolds settles into the cynical good old boy character he would really shine in for the 70s and 80s in Sam Whiskey. Burt's playing a man no better than he should be who often goes back and forth on both sides of the law who gets an interesting proposition from widow Angie Dickinson.It seems during the late war between the safe her late husband robbed the Denver Mint of a lot of its bullion. She wants to give it back, but not so anyone would know it was ever stolen because some fake bullion was left in its place and about to be discovered as the U.S. government is about to withdraw Greenbacks and resume specie type money. He gets $20,000.00 from Dickinson for he and his associates Ossie Davis and Clint Walker.They to devise quite the caper and that I won't go into. Reynolds took a lot of his style and persona from James Garner and his Sam Whiskey could have been Jim Rockford in the old west. Dickinson's the kind of woman you don't turn down, she knows how to keep a man's interest.Special mention goes to Woodrow Parfrey as the inspecting Treasury man from the east. Without knowing it Parfrey and his hapless checker playing self become an integral part of the caper.A caper western in the tradition of The War Wagon and a good one.
Sam Whiskey is directed by Arnold Laven and written by William W. Norton. It stars Burt Reynolds, Ossie Davis, Clint Walker and Angie Dickinson. Music is by Herschel Burke Gilbert and cinematography by Robert C. Moreno. Widow Laura Breckenridge (Dickinson) offers Sam Whiskey (Reynolds) a $20,000 reward for the return of some gold that her late husband had stolen from the Denver mint. However, she doesn't want the gold for herself, she wants Sam to put it back into the mint before it's found to be stolen and soils her family name! Maybe it's because I consider myself a Reynolds fan that I found this to be a whole bunch of fun? That I appear to be at odds with critical consensus about Sam Whiskey's worth as entertainment? Stolen money burns a hole in your pocket. Sam Whiskey knows exactly what it's doing, it mixes the caper movie with a Western setting and lets the principal players have fun with it. The quadruple lead players bounce off of each other with considerable charming results, the set-up is suitably daft, a reverse robbery if you like, and there's no shortage of suspense and action. In fact the various twists that arise as Reynolds, Davis and Walker go about their mission of goodwill for the sultry Dickinson, are well implemented into the plot. The De Luxe colour photography is most pleasing, though the absence of scenic panoramas is sorely felt, and the music score is complementary to the tone of the story. True, the direction is hardly inspiring, the quirky nature of the whole thing narrows down the number of film fans it might appeal to and the idea is indeed thin. Yet for Reynolds fans it should be sought out, to see him at the end of the 60s before "his" time would come in the 70s. Watch him perform with a comedic glint in his eye, see Dickinson smoulder and raise temperatures, Walker play at odds with his macho persona, and Davis having fun being the tough boy of the group. Enjoy the cheekiness (Re: ludicrousness) of the caper, the early diving technique on show or sample the verbal amusement that comes from the stars. I just know I had a big enough grin on my face come the end to make this a strong 7/10 rating. Non Reynolds fans should probably knock a point off that rating, though.
This is a forgotten Burt Reynolds film, that is not really that bad. This is some humor in Burt's character, and Ossie Davis, The two were paired again years later in evening shade. maybe united artists will put this on dvd, or at least tape.
Not even Reynolds is able to muster up charm in this fairly dreary western. Actually, though set in the wild west, the movie is more of a caper movie than a western. This wouldn't have been so bad had the capering been exciting and executed with vigor, but it isn't. Some clumsy filming techniques and the production values make it resemble a television production of its era.