Heaven with a Gun (1969)

best movie i've ever seen.

An Exercise In Nonsense

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's looks like a deja vu on Ford's way,like in "The Sheepman" he has to handling this matter again,this turn he is a sort of gunfighter and pastor.trying to make peace among them,the old stars like Ford and Jones appears newcomers as David Carradine & Barbara Hershey promissing actors to next generation,meanwhile we has the fine John Anderson as angry rancher and Noah Beery Jr. who seem to be enough mind to realise such killing,apart that the saloon's girls garnish the picture with some rare nude scene in werstern in this period...the time is changing!!Resume:First watch: 1981 / How many: 3 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7

Solid acting (Noah Beery Jr, John Anderson, Glenn Ford, Barbara Hershey, and David Carradine) is compromised by formulaic direction and a script that zig-zags, forgets, remembers, and improvises, but the action occasionally rises, and the preacher-gunman conflict keeps things on track just enough to keep one watching till the end.From the distance of 2010, 60s cultural interest is raised by the film's brief, gratuitous, and confusing nudity, as well as Barbara Hershey's hippie depiction of a half-Hopi girl, but the biggest surprise may be that this otherwise predictable western was produced as late as 1969. Except for those 60s flashes, I could imagine my parents and their siblings enjoying something similar in 1955, while I would have wished for a hero less earnest and boring than Ford.Among the film's skewed lines, the oddest may be that the sheep-herder side of the range war is first identified with American Indians but is then shifted to a polygamous Mormon. I'd like to go back to 1969 and be 18 again, but no wonder I felt confused.

... I thought as I waited for 6AM to come so I could record a documentary on Bette Davis that is not on DVD yet. Having a bad habit of falling asleep in the middle of a movie in the wee hours, I dared not change the channel at 4AM lest I fall asleep and wind up recording "Fox and Friends" instead of the documentary for which I had set my DVR timer.Thus began the 100 minute or so ordeal of watching this film. It would almost be worth buying the DVD - if it existed with commentary - to see how a film with such excellent actors and acting could so misfire in the plot department. You get down to the seventh bill before you even get to Noah Beery Jr. with the players in the upper bills including the excellent Glenn Ford, David Carradine, Carolyn Jones, and John Anderson, all turning in solid performances while spouting gibberish - endless gibberish - with literally no action. Meanwhile Barbara Hershey seems to be doing a screen test for a bit part in "Billy Jack" and somehow wandered on to the wrong set. It is supposed to be the time-honored western tale of cattlemen versus sheepherders, but everyone just stands around, talking. The hippie spirit of "Easy Rider" got injected into this one, but "Born to be Wild" just sounds silly on horseback.

Slightly better than formulaic script never really explores the moral tension inherent in the central character: a gunslingin' preacher played by Glen Ford with his usual professionalism. The moral/spiritual dilemma is pretty well ignored until Carolyn Jones directly confronts Ford and compels him to make a choice: gunslinger or preacher.The acting is always good. I like Glen Ford and Carolyn Jones. This is actually one of David Carradine's better performances. He is a very good sadistic old-west punk. Barbara Hershey is easy to look at. I guess she turns in a fair performance as a half-breed speaking stereotypical pidgin English.The most interesting scene is the gunfight in the saloon between a nasty hired gun and Ford while they are SEATED opposite one another at a poker table. The movie earned more originality points for that twist than for the paradoxical plot revolving around the gunslingin' preacher character.