Ace High
Picture: C+
Sound: C Extras: D Film: C
There are so many Spaghetti Westerns that are not well
known that smaller companies are issuing, that it is nice to see that big
studios like Paramount are making sure any they have in the vaults are also
being issued on DVD. The non-Sergio
Leone films in this cycle have usually been bad and most of them have been
plagued with too much humor. Give or
take a few exceptions, most were cash-ins.
The strange thing about Giuseppe Colizzi’s Ace High (1969) is
that it does manage to keep the humor toned down, but gets the drama and
storyline muddled.
The first two-thirds of the film has the three leads at
conflict with each other until they predictably band together to bust the bank
at a casino, the gambling of which is referred to by the title. The focus begins with Cacopoulos (Eli
Wallach, capitalizing on his Dollars Trilogy work) stealing money from two
brothers, until the back and forth is interfered with by other interests. That eventually leads them to a casino run
by dirtier interests led by Kevin McCarthy and the inevitable showdown. At least they got a good cast, which also
includes Terence Hill, Brock Peters and Bud Spencer.
The anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image is not bad for
its age, but far from how good the restored Once Upon A Time In The West
from the same year and Paramount looked on DVD. Cinematographer Marcello Masciocchi even shot the film in the
same Techniscope format and both were processed and released in three-strip Technicolor
prints. This looks a bit on the brown
side with color that looks flatter than it should throughout, though the source
is actually on the clean side. The
extra grain is from both the small two-perforation 35mm frame of the
cheap-scope-shooting format, but that this is not a dye-transfer source. At the 56 minutes point, there is a good
shot with Wallach though. The Dolby
Digital 2.0 Mono is average, smaller than it should be, has points where the
sound is warped and the original dubbing is one of the oddest bad jobs I have
ever seen on any such film. The music
by Carlo Rustichelli (conducted by Bruno Nicolai) is typical of the genre at
that point, offering none of the cleverness or synergy of the legendary
Leone/Morricone collaborations, but tries hard for the flavor. There are no extras, but the curious will
want to see this once and they will find that once will be enough.
- Nicholas Sheffo
