Subject: Guns of Honor
Happy birthday, Rob!
Well, I considered writing a review of Guns of Honor simply by copying all the stream-of-consciousness notes I jotted down while watching it, but since some of you have already threatened more than once to have me put away, I think I'd better go ahead and form sentences as best I can.
Unlike Trigger Fast, Guns of Honor has a plot. I considered this a good thing (even though the plot-advancing scenes were dull)... up to a point. Then I changed my mind about it.
I'm famous for my inability to follow any plot that has more than 3 things and/or people to keep track of, and Lord knows I tried this time. But eventually there was a pack of ex-Confederate soldiers; a pack of ex-Union soldiers; a pack of French soldiers; a pack of Mexican soliders; a pack of Mexican peasants; a pack of ex-Confederate soldiers who weren't with the other ex-Confederate soldiers; a Mexican with a father and a long-lost brother; a British officer who was hanging out with the French; a woman; a Mexican bandit who was hanging out with the first pack of ex-Confederates but didn't get along with them; a half-Mexican who was hanging out with the second pack of ex-Confederates but didn't get along with them and who wanted to kill the Mexican bandit hanging out with the first pack of ex-Confederate soldiers because he'd killed his father; another woman; a lieutenant who probably belonged first to the second pack of ex-Confederates and then to the first pack of ex-Confederates but didn't get along with them very well but was in love with the first woman, who was hanging out with the first pack of ex-Confederates; a secret stash of guns; a pardon from the President of the United States; and Boris the Snoogy German Shepherd.
So you can't imagine how relieved I am that you couldn't care less about the plot, because I just told you everything I know about it.
Someday when I have even less to do than usual, if that's humanly possible, I'm gonna get a stopwatch and find out exactly how much of this movie consists of fillers in the form of fistfights, gunfights, sneaking around, staring contests, spitting on the ground, and loping across the country on horses. Darn near fifty per cent would be a good estimate.
Nobody talks fast in these movies, either.
But I was very, very good and waited a REALLY long time to use the fast-forward button. Good thing, too, or I would have missed the highlight of the film, to wit: the good guys are loping their horses across a river; one falls off his horse into the water; he thrashes around screaming that he can't swim.
This was terribly funny because one of the other guys jumped in, swam to the bank with him, and got him out with the help of another fellow who threw them a rope... instead of doing what anybody would have done in real life, which would be to holler, "STAND UP, idiot!"
Of course, that's not very nice... I guess you can't expect a cowboy who can't stay on his horse to be able to find the bottom of a sluggish waist-high river.
"And what about Jürgen?" you cry.
Jürgen's role in Trigger Fast was King Lear compared to Guns of Honor. I'd estimate six minutes' worth of screen time, and half of that was Jürgen looking steely-eyed and firing a gun. This is the first entry in the Floating Outfit film series (based on novels by J.T. Edson, in case you want to add his name to your "never read a book by..." list), and it took them another year to work up the nerve to put him on a horse, so you don't even get that. He's not a rancher yet in this one; he's a sergeant with the second pack of ex-Confederate soldiers. You don't even find out what the character's name is. And because the most interesting thing he did in this movie was to scratch an itch with a hunting knife, I was quickly reduced to daydreaming, resulting in the following observations:
Jürgen uses a pistol left-handed.
The only hat that suits him is a navy captain's hat.
The reason they cast him in this role despite the German accent is because there aren't that many 50-year-old men whose stomachs and rear ends look as good as his in longjohns and those historically-accurate clingy trousers that ex-Confederate soldiers used to wear down in Mexico.
With the right movie, it IS possible for a viewer to be glad to see Martin Sheen show up with that bad southern drawl.
Boris the Snoogy German Shepherd is definitely an incorrigible scene-stealer, but they still ought to give him more lines.
Among oodles of candidates, the gold prize for the worst bit of dialog in Guns of Honor goes to: "There are a hundred places he could cross the Rio - and I know only half of them."