Four Reasons to Watch This Potboiler SPOILERS

SPOILERS

1. Dean Martin playing, pretty much for the only time in his career, the villain of the piece. (His "Airport" pilot could be pretty arrogant, but was never evil.) I wonder how the approach was made to him by the studio to play this evil heavy who executes innocent men and beats women. I wonder why he said "yes."

Rumor has it that Dino loved to sit in his house watching nothing but Westerns, and this translated into his MAKING a lot of Westerns once "Rio Bravo" hit big in 1959. From the sixties on: "Sergeants Three" and "Four For Texas" with Frank, "Sons of Katie Elder" with Wayne (again); Five Card Stud with Mitchum. Bandolero (as Jimmy Stewart's BROTHER.) "something big," and "Showdown" (with Rock Hudson, and "the end" for Martin: he walked off the movie and was forced back into it by Universal; even HE didn't like this Western.)

But with this one, Dino went for the Crooked and Controlling Town Boss part ("I cleaned up this town, and stayed to collect my profit"), and played it powerful and mean. Care was taken to "anti-heroize" him: Dino's the villain and he's gonna go down, but before that happens, he beats the hell out of everybody and demonstates a certain sense of honor and practicality (he gives good guy George Peppard the chance to get out of town by 9:00 a.m. for killing a henchman; "If you're here at a minute past 9, I'll hang you.")

Dean Martin was always a deceptively good actor who didn't care too much abot his movies. Playing a villain here, he has to care a bit more than usual (he's got to SELL that villainy),and he's not half bad as a bad guy.

2. George Peppard as the hero. George Peppard was one of those guys who got to be a leading man for a very short while, in the sixties. He landed a classic of sorts in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", and a camp sex blockbuster in "The Carpetbaggers," and a "prestige roadshow attraction" in "The Blue Max," but...it just wasn't going to last long for poor George. Still, for awhile he had the "equipment": blond hair, blue eyes, a soft and pleasant voice. And in "Rough Night at Jericho," for just about the last time in his career, Peppard has enough star power to almost match the iconic Dino. A lenghty shirtless scene reveals, however: the muscular age of Schwarzenegger was not yet in fashion. George looks downright "soft and muscle-free." Came the 70's, Peppard did "Banacek" (a fine little mystery series about an insurance investigator who finds things that vanished) and some TV movies, and then had an up/down bit of 80's luck: fired from the John Forsyhte role on "Dynasty," Peppard recouped with "The A Team."

3. The fight to the death between Slim Pickens and Peppard. "Dr. Strangelove" was behind him, "Blazing Saddles" not yet before him, but in this one, Slim Pickens adds onto his trademark yokel-with-brains twangin' drawl and plays a BIG, heavyset sonofabitch of a henchman. After Pickens manhandles (aging) heorine Jean Simmons in a particlarly brutal way, Peppard fights him in an even MORE brutal fashion, and the resultant mano-y-mano is the most savage bit and grisly bit of business since Paul Newman and a fake farmer's wife vs. the middle-aged German guy in "Torn Curtain" the year before. Whips, chains, branding irons, wooden posts, bare hands to the throat and knuckled fists to the face...what a fight!

Leading to a nice exchange when Peppard rides Pickens' body inside a stagecoach (unseen; too bloody in 1967) to show Martin:

Peppard: I figure a man starts choking a woman, he's already on his way to hell. I was just there to oblige him...its the same as you would do.
Martin: The thing is, you're you, and I'm me. Different privileges.

Whereupon Martin gives Peppard his 9:00 am hanging threat and a response as to what Peppard can do with Pickens's body:

Martin: You killed him. You can bury him.

4. The father-sonnish relationship between John McIntire as an aged lawman-gunfighter and Peppard as his charge. McIntire was just about perfected as "the compleat Western character guy" by 1967. He was a handsome man with craggy features, a full beard, and eyebrows that could raise to the sky on a moment's notice, with a hickory-smocked crackling Westerner voice. McIntire had played the craggy sheriff in Hitchcock's "Psycho" and replaced Ward Bond (sudden heart attack) on "Wagon Train" and brought plenty of history with him to "Rough Night," memorably shot-gunning a baddie from his high perch over a saloon in a moment that was classic school talk for kids who saw"ABC Monday Night at the Movies" the night before.

"Rough Night In Jericho" isn't a great Western. It's a Universal backlot job (with likely four location days on the desert) and fairly predictable if violent stuff (the spaghetti Western was already influential; "The Wild Bunch" was coming). Still, guys like Dean Martin, George Peppard, Slim Pickens and John McIntire were great to look at AND listen to, and the movie is never less than entertaining, something that Dino would happily watch on TV in his private den at home.

The final stalk and shoot around the desert hills between Martin and Peppard goes on and on and on and on...its the most old-fashioned and unentertaining part of the film, but at least Martin gets a good final dying line which evidently applied to his extensive real-life real estate investments:

"Never take less than 51 percent."