Je vais... je tire... et je reviens

Edd "Kookie" Burns, one of TV's greatest teen idols leads this spaghetti western which was also known as For a Few Bullets More.

This was somewhat a parody of the Eastwood/Van Cleef westerns as everybody looked just too damn pretty. Their clothes always looked clean, their teeth looked as if they just cam from the dentist and had a whitening, and Edd Byrnes reminded me of Randolph Scott - his hair looked perfectly in place after a big fight.

There was a lot of shooting, but mostly a lot of brawls.

George Hilton, a spaghetti western favorite played the bounty hunter (The Stranger) and played it mostly for laughs, even though he did some fancy Clint Eastwood shooting.

Golden Globe nominee Gilbert Roland (Cheyenne Autumn, The Bad and the Beautiful), with over 140 movies to his credit, played the outlaw leader.

It had the elements of a good spaghetti western, but was funny also.

Leonard Maltin gave this film a dreaded BOMB rating in his 1995 Movie and Video Guide. What film was he looking at? Kid Vengeance or God's Gun are bombs. This film is a delight. It is fantastic. It is literate. It is well mounted. It is beautiful photographed, making a brilliant use of colors. Right from the opening scene the film grabs your attention and tips you off that this film is a well-done satire of the whole Spaghetti Western genre. The film is played for laughs from the beginning to the end with homages to Douglas Fairbanks, 77 Sunset Strip, and the famous showdown in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Edd Byrnes, George Hilton, and Gilbert Roland work brilliantly together to make the satire work. It is too bad Mr. Maltin rated this film so poorly as it is undeserved. One can only guess as to his reason. I suspect that he missed the point of the movie entirely and was expecting something more serious than this film is meant to be. Kudos belong to everyone involved in this project. This film is a little gem waiting to be discovered by people who care about literate movies and appreciate satire.

Bounty killer George Hilton, smooth Mexican bandit Gilbert Roland (who's great), and bank representative Edd Byrnes each try to outwit one-another while searching for a large amount of gold from one of Roland's train robberies that was hidden by a treacherous member of his gang.

Though not the greatest that the genre has to offer, It's still breezy enough with a lot of light-hearted, action-filled fun and a satisfying finale.

Any Gun Can Play is mainly remembered for it's opening gag where George Hilton easily guns down three outlaws resembling Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Django.

The next year, Hilton and Roland were reunited alongside Van Heflin and Klaus Kinski in the highly recommended The Ruthless Four.

Three men looking for a hidden loot , they are : A cynic bounty hunter (George Hilton) going after the reward , a Mexican outlaw named Montero (Gilbert Roland) with a band of fanatic hoodlums (Ignacio Spalla, Riccardo Pizzuti, Jose Torres, among others) , besides a greedy bank clerk (Eddie Byrnes) and an insurance agent (Gerard Herter).

This is a cool Spaghetti Western in Leone style . The movie takes parts from ¨For a few dollars more¨ and especially ¨The good , the bad and the ugly¨ . The film is plenty of action , fun , shootouts and results to be a surprise-filled entertainment . The picture contains funny gun-play along with fist-fight very much in the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer territory . The violence isn't crude but it suits light-weight comedy fun , though no silly slapstick like the ¨Trinity and Bambino¨ series . The movie is starred by habitual Spaghetti as George Hilton (Sartana) , Gilbert Roland (Sonora, Goldseekers , Johnny Hamlet), Edd Byrnes (Seven Winchester for a massacre) , besides ordinary secondaries : Pedro Sanchez or Ignacio Spalla, Gerard Herter , Sal Borgese , Jose Torres.. The picture displays crazy characters with twists plots and is quite amusing . In addition , a really catching score musical by Francesco De Massi . Enzo G. Castell in his first film and original Western makes a nice camera work with usual zooms and clever choreography on the showdowns , after he made more Western as ¨Johnny Hamlet¨ , ¨Tedeum¨ , ¨Kill them everybody and came back alone¨, ¨Seven Winchester for a massacre¨ , ¨Cipolla colt¨ and the masterpiece : ¨Keoma¨. Some of them are serious , others are goofy and plenty of slapstick and slapdash . This is a straight-forward story , funny in lots of parts and it will appeal to Spaghetti Western fans.

"Any Gun Can Play" (1967), directed by Enzo G. Castellari, is a very good pastiche of Spaghetti Westerns, especially Leone's. The first half is great, which, apart from the opening which is a direct nod to "For a Few Dollars More", with Monco, Colonel Douglas Mortimer and El Indio lookalikes walking into a ghost-town and then promptly killed by a Bounty Hunter called "The Stranger", is entirely serious, with great gunfights (especially the train-robbing scene), fast and furious action and nice performances from Gilbert Roland, George Hilton and (who manages well, considering that he is badly miscast) Edd Byrnes. But then, when the film reaches the half-way mark, there is a jokey fist-fight between Hilton and Byrnes. It isn't very funny, and is the weakest part of the film, but it throws everything you have seen previously in a new light. You realise that in fact the whole thing is a spoof of Spaghetti Western conventions, and in retrospect, the first half is so well done that you completely miss this spoof undercurrent. What now follows is a more obvious parody, with even some acrobatic jumping around from Brynes that predates all those seventies Circus Westerns. The ending, a complete send-up of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" climax, is very well done, as in other hands it could have been very silly. So, a pretty fun Spaghetti Western, that doesn't take itself too seriously. I would recommend it to anyone who likes Spaghetti Westerns.