Le Mors aux dents

So said the agreeable Henry Fonda to just about every suggestion Glenn Ford or other cast members made to him.

This the first of a series of very agreeable entertaining comic westerns that Burt Kennedy directed and/or wrote starring some of Hollywood's great but aging male stars. I think for the first and only time both Ford and Fonda play a pair of losers. They seem to forever be in financial bondage to their off-and-on employer Chill Wills. Wills just out-slickers Ford and Fonda just goes along with that line that must have been repeated about 8 times in The Rounders.

But their biggest problem comes from a white-faced roan horse that Wills has talked the gullible Ford into taking. The horse named "Old Fooler" has a streak of cunning malevolence that provides most of the laughs in this comedy. If there was a special award given to animals for performances Old Fooler should have won it in 1965. In fact that horse created his own acting genre, the animal anti-hero.

Burt Kennedy gave us a lot of good laughs starting in the mid60s with his films and this is one of the funniest.