"Five Card Stud" is one of a few westerns that combine a western background spun with a murder mystery. As such, the formula works fairly well. Starring Dean Martin as a gambler and Robert Mitchum as a preacher with a hidden past, the scene takes place in Rincon, Colorado, where a gold strike of some size has been discovered and where tensions are a bit high. One night, Martin, as Van Morgan, hosts a 7 player game of 5 card stud, a game at which he is fairly competent with. He takes a break, Roddy McDowell takes over, and immediately catches an outsider trying to palm a card, and a lynching ensues. Morgan attempts to stop the lynching, but is knocked unconscious for his effort, and the hanging concludes. Later, two murders occur, and the connection seems to be that both murdered players were in this particular card game. Mitchum arrives on the scene, playing a western preacher as only he could, and unfortunately, the murders keep happening, again by some form of strangulation or hanging. Tensions continue to mount, until finally only Morgan and McDowell's character are left, and the preacher, Jonathan Rudd, is watching with some degree of mystery and an aura of suspense. The final confrontation does take place, and the murders do stop in Rincon. Good musical background by Maurice Jarre, fine support cast in Inger Stevens, Denver Pyle, Yaphet Katto, and Katherine Justice, with able direction by Henry Hathaway. Good western fare.

Thank God it has a great opening song!Frankly, as a Western aficionado and a big fan of Dean, this movie is a tough one to get through. And yet, it's a stellar cast! Dino, Mitchum, McDowall, Yaphet Kotto! You know the problem doesn't come from there! The pacing is all wrong, the staging is all wrong, I'm guessing the shooting script was all wrong... Even Maurice Jarre score is all wrong (for this movie)!This is a big, full fledged train-wreck of a movie! So awful you can't look away but yet, you cringe all the way through. Hard to believe this was directed by Henri Hathaway (who directed the original "True Grit" a year later) and produced by the great Hal Wallis (who had produced all the Martin & Lewis movies, back in the 50's)!...It's a shame... I'd like to be able to enjoy this movie more, but seeing it could have been done so much better in a variety of ways just takes all the fun out of it. That is one movie that would benefit being remade... Except for the cast... Those legends are all gone now (except for Kotto).

After a poker player is lynched for cheating, the members of the lynching party start dying one by one. This Western is fairly well made by veteran Hathaway, but the plot is too simplistic to raise it above mediocrity. The identity of the killer is so obvious that even a two-year old can figure out who done it. Apparently, there are no two-year olds in town, as nobody seems to have a clue who it could be. Martin is his usual unflappable self as one of the card players who tried to stop the hanging. Mitchum plays a variation on his psycho preacher character in "The Night of the Hunter." McDowall seems out of place in a Western. Stevens provides love interest.

"Garden of Evil" director Henry Hathaway's western whodunit "5-Card Stud" pits 'hellfire gambler' Dean Martin against 'gunfire preacher' Robert Mitchum in a frontier tale about lynching, murder, and revenge. Mind you, deducing the whodunit will pose only a minor challenge for astute audiences. You will spot the actor committing the crimes long before the film identifies him in its second-to-last scene. If you study the stable strangling scene, the killer's headgear reveals his identity. The characters in "True Grit" scenarist Marquerite Roberts' screenplay, based on Ray Gaulden's novel, are flat since they change neither their mentality nor their morality. Nevertheless, Roberts boots around a provocative question about "who people were before they became who they are" which segues with the mystery. Otherwise, this Hathaway horse opera is sturdy enough, contains a believable cast and knows how to blend comedy with drama nimbly enough so it rarely becomes either heavy-handed or repetitious. Compared with Hathaway's other oaters, "5-Card Stud" doesn't top "True Grit," "The Sons of Katie Elder," "Garden of Evil," "From Hell to Texas," or "Rawhide." "5-Card Stud," however, does surpass "Shoot Out" and "Nevada Smith." Although some critics didn't cotton to Maurice Jarre's orchestral score and even denigrated it as "Dr. Zhivago" on the range,' I contend it is superb music and differs from anything that Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein, or Ennio Morricone would have provided. Jarre's score enlivens the action and enhances the atmosphere. The Dean Martin "5-Card Stud" title song marks this sagebrusher as a traditional western. As far back as the 1950s, most major sagebrushers contained a ballad about the story or the hero with lyrics like ". . . play your poke and he'd leave you broke." The song here paints a portrait of the protagonist and his poker playing skill.Interestingly, "5-Card Stud" makes some racial references that chipped away at the usual barriers. In one scene, Mitchum's gunslinging preacher doesn't think it inappropriate that a black man be buried among whites, something that marked this western as a departure from Jim Crow mentality. John Sturges' "The Magnificent Seven" had broken ground earlier with a gunfight so an Indian could be buried in a white graveyard.Professional gambler Van Morgan (Dean Martin of "Sons of Katie Elder") takes a break from a Saturday night poker game while Sig Ever's son Nick (Roddy McDowell of "Planet of the Apes"), stableman Joe Hurley (Bill Fletcher of "Hour of the Gun"), Mace Jones (Roy Jenson of "Big Jake"), storekeeper Fred Carson (Boyd 'Red' Morgan of "Violent Saturday"),and Ever's ranch hand Stoney Burough (George Robotham of "The Split") continue to gamble with newcomer Frankie Rudd (Jerry Gatlin of "The Train Robbers") until Nick catches Rudd cheating 'red-handed' and assembles a lynch party. They haul Rudd against his will out to a stream and string him up from the bridge. Barkeeper George (Yaphet Koto of "Live and Let Die") warns Morgan, and Morgan lights out after Nick and company to thwart the necktie party. "You don't hang a cheat," Morgan growls, "you kick him out of town." When Morgan arrives, Frankie is swinging with a noose around his neck, and Nick buffalos Morgan on the back of the head with his six-gun.Mama Malone (Ruth Springford of "Vengeance Is Mine") discovers Morgan strewn on the boardwalk the following morning and summons George to help the battered gambler to his room. Morgan decides to pull out of Rincon and try his luck in Denver. Before he leaves, he rides out to Sig Ever's spread to bid goodbye to Sig's comely daughter Nora (Katherine Justice of "The Way West") and deck Nick as repayment for clobbering him at the hanging. Naturally, the town marshal (John Anderson of "Young Billy Young") can neither identify the lynch mob nor can he identify the hanged man. Later, participants in the card game begin to die. One is wrapped up in barbed wire. Another is hanged in the church. Still another is suffocated in a barrel of flour. Indeed, Hathaway and Roberts make each death look different. Eventually, George visits Morgan in Denver and Morgan decides to return to Rincon. Two things have changed since Morgan rode out. First, the town has acquired a gun-toting pastor who renovates the church and holds services. Second, Lilly Langford (Inger Stephens of "Hang'em High") has opened a barbershop that features a $20 item that intrigues Morgan when he visits her establishment. Lilly and Nora contend for Morgan, while our hero closes in on the new preacher Jonathan Rudd. "5-Card Stud" boasts several good scenes. Hathaway does a good job of staging a shoot-out in the streets of Rincon when paranoid miners go berserk because they fear they may be the next victims of the local serial killer. If you slow down your DVD or VHS copy, Dean Martin loses his Stetson when he seizes an axle to let a wagon haul him out of harm's way. You can see his headgear fall off completely. In the next scene, Martin's hat is back on his head. Nevertheless, it is still a neat gunfight with Morgan and Rudd standing back to back against the opposition. The scene at a windmill where Rudd hits each of the windmill blades because he was aiming at the spaces between the blades is fun, too. George plays a role in the story and provides his buddy Morgan with a clue to the killer's identity. The animosity between Nick Evers and Van Morgan is feisty throughout the action with Nora trying to do her best to dampen it. Van Morgan and Lilly have some amusing banter. The expository scenes about Nick's childhood almost make his character marginally sympathetic.Indeed, "5-Card Stud" is no classic, but it is good enough for a rainy day.