Movie Review: A Big Hand For The Little Lady (1966)

A comedy western, A Big Hand For The Little Lady is a fun and sweaty adventure that stays well within itself and plays a strong game.

Five rich men, including the gruff Henry P.G. Drummond (Jason Robards), gather in Laredo for their annual high stakes game of poker in the back room of a local saloon. Soon after the game starts, the humble family of Meredith (Henry Fonda), his wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and their young son Jackie wander into town.

Meredith is a recovering gambling addict and perpetual loser who had promised Mary he will never play again. But the lure of the game draws him in, first to watch, then to join in. Before long Meredith is on a long losing streak, and has risked the family's $4,000 in savings. Things get a lot worse when Meredith collapses at the table while holding the strongest hand of his life. To the horror of Drummond and the other men, Mary takes over.

Produced and directed by Fielder Cook, who was better known for television productions, A Big Hand For The Little Lady is a tightly focused 95 minutes of solid entertainment. With a willing cast enjoying the theatre-like setting of just a couple of key locations, the film builds up its premise, sketches in the main characters with admirable efficiency, and stokes the fire of a family's future riding on a single poker hand.

Most of the action takes place around the poker table, and Fielder makes the most of a confined macho ambiance invaded first by the anxious and clearly emotionally fragile Meredith and then by the incredulous Mary. Meredith has the stamp of a loser on his moist forehead, Mary then has to display grim yet clueless determination to rescue their modest fortune.

Drummond leads the brusque howls of objection as a man who interrupted his daughter's wedding to attend a game now seemingly descending into farce. Meanwhile Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy), another of the rich men around the table, finds Mary attractive and is the only one of the players to extend her some sympathy.

Fonda excels in a relatively small role, exaggerating his worried eyes and luxuriating in gallons of sweat as the losses mount. Woodward is the perfect prim and proper wife, exasperated by her husband's addiction then holding her cards very close to her chest. Secondary characters become prominent as the film progresses, with the town doctor (Burgess Meredeith) then the local banker C.P. Ballinger (Paul Ford), a tycoon who despises poker, finding themselves sucked into the drama.

With plenty of humour and some added spice, A Big Hand For The Little Lady works its way to a moment of realization and growth for the rich men of Laredo. Drummond in particular gains new perspective on what matters in life as he returns to his daughter's wedding, even if the true identity of the sucker at the table remains a mystery.

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Movie Review: Dan Candy's Law (1974)

A Canadian western barely a notch or two above an amateur student production, Dan Candy's Law tries for a few artistic touches in recounting a long-winded tale of pursuit in the Great White North. There is just too much vacuum where characters and plot are supposed to reside, and the film is eventually sucked into a black hole of uninteresting nothingness.

It's the 1800s, and Dan Candy (Donald Sutherland) is a member of the Northwest Mounted Police in frigid northern Canada. The Mounties keep an eye on a nearby community of Cree Indians, and when Almighty Voice (Gordon Tootoosis), a member of the Cree tribe, kills a government-owned cow without permission, he is imprisoned.

Almighty Voice escapes and kills Mountie Malcolm Grant (Kevin McCarthy), Candy's partner. Despite receiving no support from his supervisor Inspector Brisebois (Jean Duceppe) and no help from local tribal leader Sounding Sky (Chief Dan George), Candy insists on going after Almighty Voice, although the hunter and the hunted sometimes switch roles before a final showdown.

Inspired by apparently true events, the movie is also, incomprehensibly, known as Alien Thunder, a title astonishingly more stupefying than the content. The atrocious audio and video quality of some surviving prints in circulation do not help, but Dan Candy's Law was unlikely a pleasurable experience even in pristine condition. Director Claude Fournier, filming a script by George Malko, spends no time on character development or context setting. With choppy editing and clumsy, sometimes jarring transitions, the film simply offers an Indian who inexplicably kills a Mountie, with the dead man's partner launching a one-man year-long hunt for justice.

Despite displaying a could-not-care-less attitude for the duration of the long chase, Candy's superiors suddenly show up with an entire cavalry at the movie's climax, complete with artillery pieces to counter one holed-up Indian with a shotgun. To add to the confusion, Candy's character just as suddenly transitions from blood thirsty avenger to a champion for justice, abruptly demanding that Almighty Voice be captured and brought to trial rather than killed.

Donald Sutherland lends his talent to a home country project, but while he is grim with determination and grimy from the unforgiven terrain, the thin material gives him next to nothing to work with, and the few acting scenes, mostly Candy arguing with his superior, are theatrically stiff.

With a glacial pace suggesting a mammoth struggle to stretch out the material to 90 minutes, Dan Candy's Law frequently occupies itself with shots of snowy scenery from the Saskatchewan locations and close-ups of etched faces, attempting, and failing, to find meaning in almost static imagery.

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