Bandolero!

As westerns go, this one doesn't. It saddles up a big-name cast, but the giddyap! gets mired in a lot of giddy yapping. The intent was to lighten carnage with comedy; the result is heavy-handed Grand Old Horse Opry.

Desperado Dean Martin and four of his scruffy gunmates are set to swing for murder. The visiting hangman (James Stewart) rides into town looking like Ichabod Crane with a bad case of saddle sores, and cacklingly tells the condemned that they have the kind of "necks that'll snap pretty good." The joke, see, is that Stewart is really Martin's square-shootin' brother, and the hangman bit is a ruse to spring Dino and the boys. The trick clicks, and the gang gallops off into the bandolero (bandit) country of Mexico. On the way they pick up a shapely senorita (Raquel Welch) as a hostage.

With a posse in hot pursuit, Big Brother Stewart keeps calling Martin aside for lectures about Mom, the meaning of life and how to make out with Raquel. When the gang is finally attacked by some bandoleros, Martin falls mortally wounded and gaspingly tells Raquel that if a girl like her could like a guy like him, then "there must be something good in me." Nursing a ventilated chest, Stewart staggers by to add that old Dino "always wanted the right things" but somehow "it was always hard for him to see the light at the end of the trail." And so, fans, ever true to the old Hollywood epitaph, they died with their boots in their mouths.

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