The Unholy Four (1970)

Inventory

• Leonard Mann
• Woody Strode
• Peter Martell
• Luca Montefiori

Inventory

• One saloon brawl
• $100,000 in gold
• A traveling sideshow
• A church organ
• One graveyard gunfight

Summary

A band of bank robbers create a distraction by setting fire to an asylum for the criminally insane. In the resulting confusion, four inmates escape. Strangely, the townspeople seem much more concerned with recapturing the inmates than the are in catching the bank robbers.

It's easy to see why, when, within a day, the bank robbers are dead, ambushed by their erstwhile allies, while the inmates have eliminated the bounty hunters who had set out after them. Regardless of how crazy they are, it certainly appears that they're competently criminal.

One of the inmates has amnesia, but in the escape, he learns that his name is Chuck Moll. As the four of them drift into a town, they learn that he's the eldest son of one of the two families that run the town. The only question is which family. This would be easily cleared up if at least one of the families had the surname "Moll".

Dialogue

"Five dollars."
"I'll see your five and raise you twenty."
"You raise twenty, I raise a hundred."
(Lays cards down.) "Flush"
"You been cheatin'."
"What was that?"
"You been cheatin'."
"So have you."

Story

The story is good, with a nice collection of twists and turns. The four main characters have the usual one quirk each, with one strong, one good with a knife, one good with a rifle, and one good with a pistol. The dialogue is pretty wooden, but Woody Strode is the only American in the cast, so it's not as though any of the actors were likely to be complaining about it.

Music

The theme for this movie sounds as though it should be playing in a late-sixties comedy involving a young woman finding her way after moving to New York City. It reappears throughout the movie at odd intervals, giving a strangely upbeat lilt to a gunfight.

Acting

Woody Strode is a fine actor who never seemed to get the kind of leading roles that he deserved. In this movie he has about three lines, probably because he didn't speak enough Italian to recognize his cues. Luca Montefiori and Peter Martell are actually pretty good, but Leonard Mann seems to have been given the direction to look confused and took it to heart. There is one brief scene where he doesn't have a puzzled look on his face and he flashes a bit of real charisma that immediately disappears again. I'm afraid that I have to rate the acting as slightly below average.