After 77 Sunset Strip ended its TV run in 1963 Edd Byrnes who became the legendary teen idol Kookie from the show was having some trouble sustaining his 15 minutes of fame as most teen idols do. By 1967 he was off to Europe to see if spaghetti westerns would do for him what they did for Clint Eastwood. Any Gun Can Play bares some faint, but very faint resemblance to Clint's pasta epics.Byrnes and Gilbert Roland are the only two names American fans will know in this cast. The nominal lead is George Hilton who really is from Uruguay and named Jorge Hill Acosta y Lara and he plays a bounty hunter who's after Roland and $300,000.00 Roland and his gang robbed, but that one of his own men stole what the stole and hid it. Edd Byrnes is the banker they stole it from, but he's got his own plans for the loot.Any Gun Can Play has a real hard time making up its mind whether it is being played straight or it's going to be a satire on the genre. About 2/3 of the way through the film it switches gears, almost like a new team of writers were brought in.I didn't really enjoy Gilbert Roland in this and that's hard for me because he's good no matter how bad the film is. But for his sake I hope his paychecks all cleared.

Unlike the other spaghetti Westerns, this one has characters that almost make sense, and can be identified to some degree. It still has the goofy gunplay of other spaghettis Westerns. A spaghetti, by the way, is another word for a Western with no plot, no characters you can care about, and goofy gunplay that doesn't make a bit of sense for the era, and relying on great music to make audiences feel something. This one is more lighthearted, like the ones that Bud Spencer and Terence Hill made together. They, too, were superior to the junk made by Eastwood and others, which sado-masochists make their friends watch, if they get a chance. It looks like everyone had a lot of fun making the movie, too. It was good to see a giant actor like Gilbert Roland, who wasn't even mentioned on the movie rental box, yet who was clearly the biggest name. His character was very enjoyable. There is a three way standoff at the end, which is much superior to the one it spoofs (The Good the Bad and the Ugly), simply because the characters are at least a bit likable and a bit identifiable. Not a good movie, but has a bit of fun to it.

This movie does have its moments. For instance, the opening segment features three badmen obviously modeled after the main characters in "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly", only they are like inferior, generic, "Rent A Center" versions of Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach; and you think, "Oh geez, are we going to have to watch these wannabes for a whole movie??" Only then they get killed off by the "real" hero, and you breathe a sigh of relief. I liked the movie a lot for that.It actually took me a while to realize that this was more of a "spoof" of GBU than a rip off, I thought the title ("Go, Kill, and Come Back") represented some ESL translator's clumsy attempt at Spaghetti Western nihilism...but later I realized that it was meant in fun. (The original title, "Any Gun Can Play" would have made it a lot more obvious.) In my defense, most of the scenes are devoted to straightforward action, gun-play, and exposition. For instance, the train robbery scene was done "straight" and fairly well, and most of the other actual killings and gunfights weren't at all campy or cheesy in any way I could see. And Gilbert Roland played his role absolutely straight throughout the movie. (BTW, now that I've actually seen him act, I understand what all the fuss was about. What a great screen presence!) And with a lot of the minor roles, such as the bandits' chief assistant, who could tell the difference? So here's my main problem with the movie. Anyone who has paid any attention to "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" knows that it is already packed full of dead-pan gallows humor and misanthropy. The characters are both enigmatic and completely venal - you never know what they are going to do or say, but you do know that it will be consistent with everything else that has been revealed about them. That's what makes it watchable; without that humor, the movie would have been a mind-numbing death-march toward a pointless conclusion with despicable characters we hated and wanted to see dead. Think about it; Eli Wallach's character "Tuco" was already a comedy relief character (much of the humor and jokes were at his expense) and Eastwood and Van Cleef got off deadpan one liners in almost every scene. The famous three-way "Mexican Stand Off" is funny, because when Tuco discovers that his gun was empty the entire time, his outraged reaction is priceless. Even the very last scene is screamingly funny and the resolution, perfectly timed, evokes a huge sigh of relief (although once again, it is at Tuco's expense.) "Go Kill and Come Back" simply isn't as good - or as funny - as the movie it spoofs. Most of the scenes, even the intentionally funny ones, drag on far too long; substituting broader, more genial humor for dead pan misanthropy and overcomplicated plot twists for atmosphere and character revelation relegate it to "minor league" status. As a contrast, the Terence Hill and "Trinity" movies, which have much of the same feel, are much funnier and show what can be done it the screenplay really wants to be tough and funny at the same time. If GBU had never come out and this movie was released, it still would have sunk without a trace except for the archives of Spaghetti Western fanatics.Still, "Go Kill" is not all that bad viewed as a pastiche. It was worth watching just to see Gilbert Roland in a major role.

I watched this today after not having seen it since it was released in 1968. It was a lot of fun, but admittedly it is not the equal of the Sergio Leone works, or even those of Sergio Corbucci - although both are spoofed here.In the opening scene we see a trio that has two resembling Eastwood and Van Cleef's characters in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and another who is clearly based on Franco Nero's Django. Clearly here Castellari is letting us know that he's going to have some fun at the expense of what had preceded him in the spaghetti western canon. George Hilton's bounty killer dispatches these three and we're informed that his next target is Monetero, played by veteran Gilbert Roland, then in his early 60s and still the epitome of machismo elegance. At this point he had been in the business for 40 years, and with the slightest of gestures, blows away his younger cast mates.Monetero and his gang rob a gold shipment from a train loaded with the cavalry as well as Edd Byrnes playing a bank employee. Kookie, Kookie, lend me some money. His gang gets away with the loot, but the money gets away from Monetero. The bank man is after Monetero for the gold shipment, Hilton's character ("They call me the Stranger" - a nod to Tony Anthony's films?) is after him for the reward, and the rest of the film play out a series of crosses and double-crosses, all with a fair dose of humor. The film even anticipates some of the later spaghetti westerns - particularly Gianfranco Parolini's "Sabata" films which also relied heavily on circus-styled gymnastics. Byrnes' character Clayton gets into some Faibanksian-styled gymnastics fights with both Hilton and later about six members of Monetero's gang, and then later both Byrnes and Hilton take on many of the same gang in a bathhouse.None of this is to be taken any more seriously than Terence Hill's antics in MY NAME IS NOBODY, it's probably just that this early in the game, it wasn't obvious that it was a spoof as the sub-genre was barely around for four years. A scene where Hilton and an insurance man spot each other through binoculars tips its hat to a similar scene in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, and the overall tale of three men and the search for hidden gold is obviously based on THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY. But the best homage comes at the end, a face-off among the three main characters that satirizes the similar scene in the latter film. Only the music fails to make the point here, whereas in other scenes the score is appropriate - as long as one keeps in mind that this is just an affectionate spoof, and on its own, it is an appealing film. The leads are more than capable - although the looping is often flat, and the production design quite attractive. Even at 105 minutes, the film moves quickly and never runs out of steam.