4 For Texas

They surely don’t make `em like this anymore. Frank and Dino smoking cigars and sipping champagne in the Ol’ West, behaving just cool enough to stumble upon thousands of dollars and two of the most beautiful women on the planet: Anita Ekberg and Ursula Andress.

I’ve never understood the world’s fascination with Dean Martin. For an actor who made dozens of films and emerged with only a handful of effective moments, Martin gets praised wildly for being a charismatic drunk. Pie-eyed and greasy, he looks completely absurd anywhere but behind a bar or on a stage.

I love the man’s voice and admire his stage presence, but that never translated to the celluloid for these eyes. Sinatra on the other hand, shone on the silver screen. I suppose it must simply come down to a question of raw talent: Frank had it, Dino could find it underneath layers of dead brain cells once or twice a season.

“4 For Texas” might be a cult classic, if it were any good. It’s got all the credentials: a terrific director, lavish costumes and sets, the world’s longest legs (Andress) and the world’s largest breasts (Ekberg), a cameo from The 3 Stooges, Charles Bronson being bad, and two members of the Rat Pack just being themselves.

It’s really a shame how sometimes the finest ingredients can still make a god-awful cake. I always think of one example from not so long ago: Neil Jordan directing a David Mamet script, performed by Sean Penn, Robert Deniro, and Demi Moore. What should have been a film for the ages ultimately became “We’re No Angels.”

Aldrich struts behind a very proactive camera, and the sets and costumes are so colourful they almost make a case for Technicolor. Andress and Ekberg look positively stunning in corsets and lingerie, and it is pretty amusing watching Frank and Dino have a fistfight. All in all, your eyeballs will certainly be satisfied with “4 For Texas.”

However, there’s far too much plot, and far too little mayhem. This looks and feels like a musical with the songs removed. Can you imagine Frank serenading Ekberg or Andress doing a Dietrich song and dance on her riverboat casino? Now we’re talking classic.

The 3 Stooges feel like an afterthought, Bronson is only given a couple of scenes, and Andress doesn’t even appear until the one-hour mark of this long-ish film. “4 For Texas” gets an 8.5 on the masturbation scale and a 4.0 on the movie-quality scale.

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