The couple had good ears for authentic period dialogue and a talent for turning genre conventions on their heads, writing fine scripts for Hud (1963), Hombre (1967), The Reivers (1969) and others, but they fall far short here. The biggest problem with The Spikes Gang is the predictable script and not-quite-convincing dialogue, as well as a lack of conviction on the part of director Richard Fleischer. A shame, really, given its fine cast and the track record of the key people behind the camera.

Farm boys Wil (Gary Grimes), Tod (Charles Martin Smith, billed as "Charlie" in the credits), and Les (Ron Howard), all about 20, come across the half-dead, shot-up body of Harry Spikes (Lee Marvin), a aging bank robber. Rather than turn him in, they instinctively hide him in Wil's barn, nursing him back to health. By the time he's well enough to leave, Spikes has left a strong impression on the boys. Wil even gives him his horse to rude off with.

But Wil's pious father, Abel (Marc Smith), learning of his son's deception, beats him unconscious with his belt. The next day Wil decides to run off and, looking for adventure, Tod and Les join him.

As saddle tramps, however, they nearly starve and encounter hostile strangers wherever they go. Desperate, Wil decides to rob a bank, but the heist turns sour and Tod accidentally shoots dead a state senator, instantly putting a high price on their heads. The boys flee to Mexico but their luck is no better and they soon land in a small town jail. But then Spikes reappears with the offer to join him on a series of bank robberies.

Grimes, Howard, and Smith were all about 20 years old themselves at the time and already fine actors (Howard and Smith were fresh from George Lucas's American Graffiti, Grimes from Summer of ‘42, its sequel and two other Westerns: The Culpepper Cattle Co. and Cahill: U.S. Marshal). They interact well and deliver about the best performances possible given the material. But the dialogue, so authentic in Ravetch/Frank's Hombre and The Reivers, feels period-correct but plays emotionally detached and unnatural, as if the actors and the script never quite coalesced. I wanted very much to like the film, but found myself unable to invest much interest in these characters, even when the story takes a darker and tragic turn in its last third. This is quite the opposite of what audiences experience with Hombre and The Reivers (both recent Blu-ray releases reviewed here), in which the audience absolutely vicariously joins in the adventures of those films' characters, and becomes emotionally invested in what happens to them.

Lee Marvin is likewise fine as the outlaw, a character that the movie audience never really trusts though the boys certainly do, implicitly, and even practically worship. Marvin seems aware of this, straddling his character in both directions, making him a bit too charming and colorful to be entirely believed or trusted, but also appealing in such a way that it's easy to see how these young men might have admired him so.

Oddly, The Spikes Gang was instead criticized mostly for the silliest of reasons: it was shot in Spain. Reviewers claimed the landscapes of U.S. border towns and Mexican villages lacked believability but I doubt regular moviegoers would ever have guessed otherwise.

Genre veterans Arthur Hunnicutt and Noah Beery, Jr. are the only other name actors in the cast. The former is especially good as an old-timer who tries to muscle his way in on a bank job in much the same manner Bruce Bennett's character does in Treasure of the Sierra Madre. It's a memorable little scene but not enough to save the film. Beery is in the picture hardly at all, his appearance limited to the closing minutes.

Richard Fleischer's flaccid direction doesn't help. He seems as out of synch with the material as the writing. After 10 Rillington Place (1971) and Soylent Green (1973), both expertly directed and boasting fine performances, Fleischer's direction grew strangely lazy, though Mr. Majestyk (1974) and Ashanti (1979) are interesting.

Video & Audio

The 1.85:1 widescreen, 1080p high-def transfer of The Spikes Gang has soft and grainy title elements but the rest of the presentation looks great, with impressive detail and a nice, bright image with accurate color. (However, a couple of times the image becomes unsteady for a couple of frames where, presumably, the original camera negative was cut.) The DTS-HD 2.0 mono Master Audio is similarly impressive, though nothing visually or aurally about the film is particularly noteworthy. The disc is region "A" encoded. A trailer is tossed in as an Extra Features.

Parting Thoughts

A huge disappointment given the talent involved, The Spikes Gang has a lot of promise going in, but never quite delivers. Rent It.

Stuart Galbraith IV is the Kyoto-based film historian and publisher-editor of World Cinema Paradise. His new documentary and latest audio commentary, for the British Film Institute's Blu-ray of Rashomon, is now available while his commentary track for Arrow Video's Battles without Honor and Humanity will be released this month.