MacKenna's Gold

1969

Julie Newmar film clips. Samples below.

Scoop's notes:

This is an old-fashioned Hollywood Western, starrin' that ornery rootin'-tootin sidewinder, Omar Sharif, who established his place alongside young DiCaprio and Nimoy as one of the all-time least likely members of a Western cast.

It features cameos from just about every character actor in history: Lee J. Cobb, Raymond Massey, Edward G Robinson, Eli Wallach, The Penguin, Kojak, Lurch, etc.

I learned many valuable historical and cultural lessons from this movie:

• Apaches were some seriously tall indians. Julie Newmar is about six feet tall, and Ted Cassidy (Lurch) is something like six feet eight.
• The frontier women were never too busy to have their make-up perfect and their hair washed and under control, even under torture or after weeks of riding in the desert without water.
• The Apaches always kept their vests and loincloths perfectly ironed and tailored.
• A man can scale about 1000 feet of sheer canyon wall in about two or three minutes, without a rope or piton, wearing high-heeled cowboy boots, while shooting his gun with one of his hands.

The plot: various buccaroos seek a hidden canyon where the walls are lined with gold. It is said that the Apache gods guard the canyon. According to legend, the entrance to said canyon can only be seen when the moon is in the seventh house, and the shadow of .... well, you get the idea.

When they get in the canyon, the gold seekers all start killing each other in order to get 100% of the gold, even though there are only about a half-dozen survivors and as many horses to carry the gold away, yet there is roughly enough gold to pave Russia - possibly more gold than actually exists in all the known world. And that's just the stuff you can pick up without digging any mines! So you'd think that sharing it might have been somewhat more sensible.

Anyway, when there are only three of the fortune hunters left, the aforementioned ancient Apache gods finally enter the fray, and cause the canyon to collapse, as pictured with miniatures that are obviously miniatures, many of which appear to be liquid rather than solid! Omar Sharif never did get any gold, but he did manage to bid and make a grand slam without a trump fit, and therefore gained plenty of master points. No question about it, he absolutely schooled the other desperadoes in their nightly bridge games.

I suppose the most memorable element of this movie, except for Jose Feliciano singing the haunting yet hummable "Vulture Song," was the famous Julie Newmar skinny dip, and that's what we came to see, isn't it? And it is Julie Newmar, after all, who didn't get naked in public that often, and who truly did have a stupefyin' body.

The movie itself is kinda sorta watchable if you ignore all the unrealistic Hollywood bullshit, keep the FF handy, and get ready for a few laughs at the expense of Omar Sharif and some of the other performers.