Thursday, December 5, 2013

A Bullet for Pretty Boy (1970)

Directors: Larry Buchanan, Maury Dexter

Writers: Tony Huston, Larry Buchanan, Henry Rosenbaum

Composer: Harley Hatcher

Starring: Fabian, Jocelyn Lane, Astrid Warner, Adam Roarke, Michael Haynes, Robert Glenn, Annabelle Weenick, Camilla Carr, Jeff Alexander, Desmond Dhooge, Bill Thurman, Hugh Feagin

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Defacing Public Property Is Against The Law... but so is Bank Robbing, Murder and the kind of Women Charlie Floyd loved.

Plot: The movie tells the biography of the gangster Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd who started his career young aged when he saw his father die and seeked out revenge by killing his murderer during a fight.



My rating: 5.5/10

Will I watch it again? No.

 
There's a song that gets used repeatedly throughout the picture with lyrics like, "Got nowhere to go but I'm going.  Got nowhere to stay but I'm stayin'.  Sounds like he's got nothing to sing but he's a-singin' it anyway.  Alright, I'm must being silly but the somewhat catchy folk/country tune gets old and fast.  That's about how you can sum up this picture.  It's OK but it never achieves anything more than average (at best) drive-in fare.  The performances are OK, the low budget shows but it's not horrendous.  I mean, if I had access to a bunch of old cars and Tommy guns I could find a dozen sleepy towns that haven't changed much in 80 years and make my own Depression-era gangster picture.  It probably wouldn't be better than this but it's do-able, especially so in 1970 just a couple three years after the fantastic BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967) which proved so popular that it spawned dozens upon dozens of copycat films trying to cash in on the Depression-era gangster picture fad.  It's pretty tame so you're not going to get much in the way of 'sploitation but you could do far worse.  Say, there's a winning endorsement if I ever saw one!  Put that on a poster!



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