Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9786302877878
Format: Color
ISBN: 6302877873
Label: Warner Home Video
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Warner Home Video
Release Date: 1994-01-18
Running Time: 123
Studio: Warner Home Video
Theatrical Release Date: 1970-12-25

Shelved for more than a year and released as an un-holiday-like afterthought at Christmas 1970, this sardonic comedy-cum-Western-cum-prison movie immediately dropped off the radar and has scarcely been heard of since. We can understand that. By their own admission, hotshot screenwriters David Newman and Robert Benton (just off Bonnie and Clyde) and veteran director Joe Mankiewicz (more typically associated with the likes of All About Eve) never found the right focus for their mix of sociopolitical satire, frontier bawdiness, and brutal Western action. Still, the very unevenness makes for fascinating tensions, and the myriad insights and moods created by a cast comprising Kirk Douglas, Henry Fonda, Hume Cronyn, John Randolph, Warren Oates, and Burgess Meredith more than repay a visit.

Douglas plays one of those charming bastards at which he excelled--here, Paris Pittman Jr., a bandit capable of seducing virtually anyone into doing his will. Pittman has a fortune in gold stashed somewhere. Inconveniently, he himself has been stashed in the territorial penitentiary in the middle of the desert, so he begins conniving to escape. This means betraying everyone in range, including the liberal-minded warden (Fonda) who's determined to redeem him. The stellar adversaries are ideally cast, with Fonda cannily subverting his own image (as he recently had in Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West). Cronyn and Randolph are priceless as "an old married couple," and Oates is heartbreaking as a congenital loner who thinks that, in Paris Pittman, he has at last found a friend. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Rating:
Summary: Cynical, Fun, Well-Cast, But Ending Is A Head-Scratcher
Comment: A noble experiment, this film was certainly interesting and its goals broad -- social commentary, prison reform, morality, corruption, wry comedy, you name it, all packed into a film laden with great performances by top-notch character actors, not to mention the leads Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda.

As much as I wanted to like this movie, and I did, I found the end somewhat disappointing. From what I have read, much of Henry Fonda's plot development toward the end was left on the cutting-room floor, which makes it difficult, given the narrative of the film, to understand or accept his motivations in the final sequence.

Still, on balance, I would rate this one a keeper, and worth watching for all the wonderful scenes by so many great actors, most of whom have left us now. A quirky find.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: That pretty schoolteacher..
Comment: On one of the discussion boards was a question about the pretty schoolteacher being carried along with the rioting mob, losing another piece of attire every time seen (yelling "warden," asking for help) for part of the riot sequence and then disappearing. And mention of seeing a still picture where she wore a hat, boots and a smile while running through the desert. Question was about the editing.
An acquaintance saw the sneak preview of the picture in Long Beach while it was still being edited and mentioned that the striptease continued until she was chased into the desert through the hole dynamited in the prison wall.
Should there ever be a DVD released with this "deleted scene," you let us all know, you all. (But after forty or fifty years, doubtful.)

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Customer Rating:
Summary: JOSEPH L. MANKIEWICZ, OPUS 19
Comment: ***** 1970. Produced and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. How to transform the screenplay of a western dealing with a daring prison escape into a smart and satiric film about honesty and prison reforms ? Well, just ask Mankiewicz, one of the top directors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The quality of this WB release is average with a good sound and so so images. Too bad that the featurette is mainly about Michael Blodgett's first serious step into cinema. But, nevertheless, this release stays as an indispensable DVD to store into the honest man's library.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Kirk Douglas plays a bad guy as does Henry Fonda
Comment: Actually I thought that this was a different movie before I viewed it.
I confused this one with the movie 'Scalawag' also starring Kirk Douglas.
It's an ok movie. so if your a Kirk Douglas or Henry Fonda fan it's worth you while.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Early Seventies Western From Legends Douglas and Fonda
Comment: Kirk Douglas and Henry Fonda are two of the Western genre's alltime greats, and seeing them together in a movie like this is always fascinating. Perhaps even more so in a early 70's Western with all of its characteristics, including rampant cynicism, blatant anti-heroism, and surprise endings.

There Was A Crooked Man features Douglas as a bank robber who has hidden his loot away, and then gets caught and sent to prison. In prison, he and the warden form a grudging respect for each other. The warden, played by Fonda, was a well known lawman who was wounded in the line of duty, and ended up taking a warden's job because he couldn't perform his old job anymore. Douglas begins to make friends with other inmates, including Warren Oates, who plays a convict with whom no one else wants to bother.

This film is cagey, and turns lots of traditional Western themes and philosophies on their ear. The performances are good, and the ending will please some, and infuriate others.

There Was A Crooked Man was definitely a Western for its time, and not a bad one at that.

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