Flesh and the Spur (1957)

Whether it was Joseph E. Levine offering to buy the promotional materials for The Beast with a Million Eyes (1955), with every intention of burning the finished film, which, at the time, didn't even have the sock-puppet monster yet at its initial screening, with a plan to just start over from scratch, to several critics and other exhibitors bemoaning a wish that their posters had sprocket holes so they could be hooked up to the projector instead of the a actual films they represented, the boys at American International Pictures learned early that a good poster campaign and press-kit could go a long, long way toward box-office success.

This would especially make sense since most of their features were financed by pre-selling them to their exhibitors based on those materials alone. Like, say, Flesh and the Spur (1957), a simple but overall effective western, which appeared to feature more of the same old bait-and-switch shenanigans.

But! Thanks to their desperate efforts to salvage The Beast with a Million Eyes, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, both the head brass and the brass balls behind AIP, had learned a valuable lesson: you have to at least give the audience a reasonable facsimile of what those promotional materials promised.

On film, we have John Agar's Matt Random searching for the man who killed his brother, with the only clue to the killer's identity being a discarded gun found at the scene of the crime.

Along the way he hooks up with another desperado (Connors), an Indian maid (English), and the drunken comedy relief (Hatton). And though heavy on the telling and not showing, as most of these old AIP flicks were, I still dug it quite a bit, especially one spectacular barroom brawl, where those spurs were put to deadly use.

Garnering his nickname on the basketball court, Mike "Touch" Connors had already starred in several flicks for AIP -- Day the World Ended (1955), Swamp Diamonds (1956) -- before using some family connections to raise the scratch to shoot his own western.

Turning to low-budget wunderkind Alex Gordon and fast-shooting Eddie L. Cahn to maximize those Armenian dollars for him, Connors, through Gordon, then struck a deal with American International to distribute Flesh and the Spur.

Nicholson (left), Arkoff (right).

And as the story goes from there, Connors' first meeting with the AIP brass included a look at Al Kallis' provocative poster art, which focused on the flesh of the ravaged female lead, Marla English, being staked out on an anthill, with her breasts about (.)this(.) close to being exposed for all to see, menaced by the giant, prickly spur of one of the two desperate desperadoes slowly encircling her.

When a confused Connors mentioned there was no such scene in Chuck Griffith's script, one can almost picture Nicholson and Arkoff in their mind’s eye, as they knowingly cocked their heads a bit, turned toward each other, and smiled impishly; then we see one of them patting their poor new executive producer on the head while the other said simply, "Now there is.”

Thus, despite some reluctant ants and an impatient starlet lashed to an impromptu stake, the scene was shoe-horned into the climax, where Cahn and Gordon actually did the poster one better, having the hostiles strip the captive completely bare (mostly implied) before leaving the victim to her ghastly fate until the eventual rescue by our hero. Hooray!

And so, if nothing else, at least as late as 1957, we can take some comfort that American International was at least trying to be somewhat genuine and earnest with their promised product of RAW VIOLENCE and (NOT QUITE) NAKED FURY!

Originally posted on April 7, 2011, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.

Flesh and the Spur (1957) Hy Productions :: American International / EP: Mike Connors, Charles J. Lyons Jr. / P: Alex Gordon / D: Edward L. Cahn / W: Charles B. Griffith, Mark Hanna, Lou Rusoff / C: Frederick E. West / E: Robert S. Eisen / M: Ronald Stein / S: John Agar, Marla English, Mike Connors, Joyce Meadows, Raymond Hatton