Works featuring "gambling" (22)

Fatty's Reckless Fling

If you can't stand The Heat, watch as Fatty and crew show how to handle him.

The Taking Of Luke McVane/The Fugitive

Luke McVane is some geek that moves so slow you wonder what kind of “horse” this cowboy is really on. Wearing his virginity on his sleeve, he goes starry-eyed over the town floozy when she hoochie coochies for a saloon full of drunken cowboys. When Garcia takes her as private property, Luke remembers Broncho Billy And The Greaser and jumps at his chance to score nookie points. But, unlike Broncho Billy, this square flips his roscoe once too often, so the town figures the strange mad dog needs to be put down, and he ends up a lamster. Suddenly the nerd's looking less hero, more antihero - and this sleepy little flick turns out to be better than expected.

Note:
  • The Miracle Cure: Although the wounded sheriff initially had to be carefully helped into the saddle, when Apaches are spotted just a short while later he needs no help mounting the rear of a running horse!
  • An Equal Opportunity Employer: This work is marked as one featuring an “ethnic stereotype” because of the opening standoff with unruly knife-toting Garcia. But it must be noted that closer inspection of the background in later scenes shows an unusual twist for a film of that era: cowboys in similar Mexican garb join the Deputy's posses for lynching Luke McVane and for exterminating Native Americans.

The Ruse

When Hart's character rides up he's introduced as “reformed gunfighter” so we can relax: this ain't yet another one of Hart's No-More-Mister-Bad-Guy yarns. In its place, zoophilic fantasizers are treated to a stunningly explicit shot of big horse booty, center screen. Then, in a scene reminiscent of Broncho Billy And The Greaser (1914), he immediately gets in a rumble - even before he's flirted with the Big Butt that hangs out at the post offices of the cinematic Old West. All this has nothing to do with the story. Maybe it's just to let you know that the reformed gunfighter still can duke it out. But after the first four minutes of testosterone flow, he gets suited up and goes pussyfooting around Chicago, so you'll have to wait another 15 minutes before he gets a-rootin' and a-tootin'. But he's no Yosemite Sam: doesn't say a word until the last minute of the film!

Keno Bates, Liar

Keno Bates, Sleazeball, runs a saloon. As every Hart movie has shown, saloon owners are despicable scumbags who run crooked gambling halls. When one of Keno's victims refuses to accept that he'd walked into Keno's trap, he lashes out in armed revenge to retrieve his money - just as the “hero” of Hart's The Silent Man (1917) does. Although both Keno and his henchman were armed, they offered no resistance (which would be considered legitimate self-defense), made no attempt to dissuade the man, and afterwards never notified the law.

Instead Keno Bates, Lyncher and his henchman set out after the money they'd swindled, and the hombre who had the gall to grab it back - despite knowing he was armed and desperate.

When Keno Bates, Murderer eyeballs a snapshot of his victim's sister, he warns his henchman to get ready to take their lying to a whole new level, as Keno Bates, Slimebucket starts scheming how to use the murder he just committed to bust a move on the dead man's sister.

Later, when the sister learns that she has been deceived, she reacts like her brother. First, she lashes out murderously against the innocent messenger - the only honest person in the whole flick, and the one who legitimately pulled a weapon in self-defense.

Then she lashes out in armed revenge against Keno Bates, Sucker, who has fallen for a wild vixen in sheep's clothing, who will bring into his life the hell that he rightly deserves, and the DNA that would eventually result in Norman Bates, Psycho.

Fatty and Mabel Adrift

This bloated one's for audiences that never tire of watching two hard-boiled city slickers play country bumpkin lovers, as in Those Country Kids and Fatty and Mabel's Simple Life. For the rest of us, there's always Al St. John, whose mugging, crying, violent pettiness, and rubbernecking when being strangled always gets a laugh from me.

The Aryan/La fiera domada

The title raised the excited hope of going beyond the usual stereotyping and slurs, instead delivering an explicit exposition of racial ideology - taking Birth Of A Nation out west. Unfortunately, this is just an incomplete reconstruction of a film considered lost until 2008. The introduction states that this version comes from an Argentine mid-1920s rerelease (dates within the film are given as 1923), with titles that “differ quite a bit from the original”. Most segments have not been digitally restored, and lost segments are replaced by photographs.

The original may have been more directly concerned with racial ideology, but here Cowboy's main conflict is with women: Cowboy is massively Madonna–whore complexed. This is immediately suggested in the very first scene, where Cowboy's sacred love for his distant mother is juxtaposed with images of him petting and kissing his bestial companion. Then after he deludes himself that a sleazy mining camp on the border is his ideal “town inhabited by men of iron heart”, and that his mother would love a girl he met in a bar there, he is of course vamped. But instead of dumping her, he takes her as his whore he loves to hate, as he does a No-More-Mister-Nice-Guy. Finally, he meets The Virgin Mary Jane and he again falls to his delusions as she cons him into believing his White Man's Duty is to give away his riches. He leaves behind his whore to return to his Brotherhood and replay the Heroic Defender role that first got him vamped, before riding off in the sunset to seek his next imagined Madonna to transform into an imagined whore. So goes the life of an iron-hearted Aryan.