4 For Texas

From Viennale

With OCEAN’S ELEVEN (1960), Aldrich’s mentor Lewis Milestone had launched the Rat Pack film craze, and Aldrich jumped on the bandwagon with this Western comedy. Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin play cowboys who foil a stagecoach robbery only to try to steal the loot from one another. Soon they find themselves back in the sights of the bandit (Charles Bronson)… Although conceived as a Western satire, the genre stays just a backdrop in 4 FOR TEXAS: with its crude mix of child-friendly slapstick (including a guest appearance by the Three Stooges), sex comedy (with European star actresses Ursula Andress and Anita Ekberg) and Rat Pack inside jokes, the film failed to find an audience and is a rare example of an Aldrich film without any deeper meaning. Instead, it ofers light￾hearted entertainment featuring the largest cast of Aldrich regulars in his entire career—and is screening in a rare Technicolor print. The experience of making the film was soured for Aldrich because Sinatra didn’t share his work ethic and only showed up intermittently: “I thought 4 FOR TEXAS could be a ‘fun’ picture, a kind of high-style comedy. Mr. Sinatra and I didn’t get along […] You can’t do this sort of thing with your left hand, you have to work very hard at it.” (Christoph Huber)