Review “Ace High”

Cinema Retro

By Fred Blosser

March 22, 2024

When I was in college, my friend Bill Davis and I spent nearly half a day one Saturday from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. at a local movie theatre for a ten-hour marathon.  The lineup included Sergio Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” “For a Few Dollars More,” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” capped with Clint Eastwood’s American Western, “Hang ‘Em High,” an attempt to replicate the Italian filmmaker’s violent, gritty style. It was the equivalent of binge-watching in those long-ago days, before home video and streaming services made it easy to access older films. To revisit favourite movies in that Neolithic age, you had to hope they would return for second- or third runs on the big screen, or wait until they resurfaced on TV in visually degraded, ad-infested prints. The fact that the Leone movies were still pulling in healthy ticket sales on rerun, four years after their initial U.S. release, attests to their popularity. Aside from special events like the periodic return of “Ben-Hur” or “The Ten Commandments,” the only other pictures with the same level of second-run durability at the time were the first five James Bond features with Sean Connery.

The initial success and ongoing appeal of the Leone trilogy prompted Hollywood to import other Spaghetti Westerns in hopes of matching (or at least approaching) the same level of commercial success. The era ran from 1968 to the mid-1970s, surviving even the U.S. box-office disaster of Leone’s fourth Western, “Once Upon a Time in the West.” The operatic epic starring Charles Bronson, Henry Fonda, and Jason Robards was lamely marketed here as a conventional Western, baffling fans of John Wayne and “Gunsmoke.” Adding insult to injury, it suffered wholesale cuts that rendered entire sections of the story incoherent. On smaller investments, more modest imitations in the mode of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” fared better. One such picture was Giuseppe Colizzi’s Western, I quattro dell'Ave Maria, a tremendous hit in Europe. The Italian title cryptically translates to “The Four of the Hail Mary,” which sounds more like a farce about comedic nuns than a Western. Paramount Pictures (the same studio that, ironically, mishandled “Once Upon a Time in the West”) wisely retitled the production “Ace High” for U.S. release.

In Colizzi’s film, bounty hunters Cat Stevens (Terence Hill) and Hutch Bessy (Bud Spencer) ride into El Paso with $300,000 in stolen money recovered from train robber Bill San Antonio. They intend to turn in the money and claim a hefty reward. The Bill San Antonio back story referred to Colizzi’s previous Western with Hill and Spencer, “God Forgives . . . I Don’t!” (1967; U.S. release, 1969), but you needn’t have seen the predecessor to get up to speed. Cat and Hutch discover that the bank president in El Paso was Bill San Antonio’s partner, not his victim, and instead of settling for the reward, they demand the entire $300,000, else they’ll expose the banker’s secret. In turn, the banker approaches an outlaw, Cacopoulos (Eli Wallach), who sits in jail waiting to be hanged the next morning. He offers to free Caco (as the scruffy felon is called) if he’ll kill Cat and Hutch.

This being a Spaghetti Western, a genre that reveres double-crosses like no other, thanks to the template set by Leone, Caco correctly guesses that the banker plans to do away with him too, as soon as the bounty hunters are out of the way. Grabbing the $300,000, he flees town on his own quest for vengeance. The money will finance his long-delayed pursuit of two former friends, Paco and Drake, who left him to take the fall for a heist years before. Cat and Hutch follow after him to reclaim the $300,000. Caco finds Paco south of the Border, presiding over the summary execution of rebellious peons, and Drake (Kevin McCarthy, in hardly more than a brief guest appearance) as the owner of a lavish gambling house on the Mississippi. Drake is still a crook who swindles his rich patrons with a rigged roulette wheel. Along the way, Caco and the bounty hunters befriend a Black high-wire artist, Thomas (Brock Peters), whose talent is pivotal for the bounty hunters’ scheme to break into the impregnable casino to take control of the wheel and clean Drake out. Italian viewers probably realized that Caco, Cat, Hutch, and Thomas were “the four of the Hail Mary” in Colizzi’s original title, planning their break-in as Caco fingers his rosary. Following Sergio Leone’s lead, the Italian Westerns loved to tweak Catholic piety.

Colizzi also dutifully copies other elements of the Leone playbook, especially those featured in “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Alliances are made to be broken, greed and expediency always overrule loyalty, and the sins of thieves and hired killers are dwarfed by the inherent corruption and callousness of society as a whole. But Colizzi’s cynicism seems superficial compared with Leone’s, and his violence toned down. In the Leone movies, showdowns are “hideous fantasies of sudden death,” to quote the late film critic Bosley Crowther, in which the losers literally line up in groups to be gunned down. When my friend Bill and I watched the Leone marathon all those years ago, we counted a hundred casualties even before we were well into the third feature, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” In one gunfight in “Ace High,” Hutch, Cat, and Thomas simply shoot the hats off their opponents’ heads, the kind of slapstick more likely to appear in a comedy Western with Bob Hope or Don Knotts. The final shootout with Drake and his henchman is a parody of Leone’s showdowns, which invariably were choreographed to Ennio Morricone’s dramatic music. [Actually it was Carlo Rustichelli] Caco has dreamed for years that his reckoning with his traitorous partner would be accompanied by “slow, sweet” music, and so Cat and Hutch order Drake’s house orchestra to play a waltz as the “Four of the Hail Mary” square off against Drake and his henchmen. On one hand it’s a clever idea for viewers who recognise the joke, but on the other, it trivialises the revenge motif in a way Leone never would have.

In another connective thread with “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” Eli Wallach’s scruffy character is virtually a clone of his bandit “Tuco” from the Leone epic, even to a nearly identical name. But Leone shrewdly counter-balanced Wallach’s manic performance with Eastwood’s laconic presence and Lee Van Cleef’s steely menace. In “Ace High,” Colizzi already has two mismatched characters who play off each other—Terence Hill’s terse, handsome Cat and Bud Spencer’s burly, grouchy Hutch. Wallach is mostly left to his own Actors Studio devices of grins, tics, and swagger, which is good for fans who couldn’t get enough Tuco but not so good for others who just want the story to move on. Tied up by villagers who intend to torture him to learn the location of his stolen $300,000, Caco relates a long, soporific account of his childhood. The scene serves a dramatic purpose, since Caco is trying to lull a drowsy guard to sleep, but it goes on and on. You’re likely to nod off before the sentry does.

“Ace High” is available in a fine Blu-ray edition from Kino Lorber Studio Classics, offering Colizzi’s film at the correct 2.35:1 ratio in a rich Technicolor transfer. Films like this always looked good on the big screen, but most casual fans probably remember them instead from lousy, pan-and-scan TV prints in the old days. The Blu-ray includes the original trailer, plus trailers for several other Spaghetti Westerns released by KL. The company’s go-to expert on the genre, Alex Cox, contributes a new audio commentary. Cox has always been forthright in his dour opinion of directors like Giuseppe Colizzi, Gianfranco (Frank Kramer) Parolini, and Giuliano (Anthony Ascott) Carnimeo, who turned the Italian Western in the direction of burlesque in the late 1960s, and away from the gritty style of Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, and Sergio Sollima. But his comments on “Ace High” are even-handed, informative, and entertaining.

 

(Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)