disgusting, overrated, pointless

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Given the title Guns, Girls And Gangsters I was ready to trash even with what I thought was an interesting cast. But this independent film from United Artists turned out to be a lot better than I thought it would be given budget constraints.Gerald Mohr is newly released from prison and he's got the germ of an idea for an armored car heist on the highway from Las Vegas to Los Angeles near the California/Nevada state line. It takes some split second timing and someone, namely him, who has to make a very accurate rifle shot.It also depends on Mamie Van Doren checking into and occupying a room at a motel with a gas station and auto repair shop within feet of the spot picked by Mohr. Mamie being Mamie has a lot of men interested in here, but they keep some distance because her husband Lee Van Cleef was Mohr's cellmate in the penitentiary is a most jealous type with a hair trigger. In fact the whole idea for the heist came from Van Cleef while he and Mohr were together in prison.As in these films things that you can't plan for usually are what upsets the apple cart. In this case a jealous Van Cleef busts out of the joint with only three months left on his sentence.Due to the nature of the plot Van Cleef only appears in the second half of the film. But when he comes on, he dominates. This is definitely one of his best early films.The whole cast is outstanding. Mamie Van Doren always gives us something to look forward to. But Lee Van Cleef just totally steals Guns, Girls, And Gangsters.Don't dismiss this one because of the exploitive title. This one is a real find.

"Eat, drink, be merry, and play the slot machines, everybody, because tomorrow, they could set off another bomb at Frenchman's Flats and blow Las Vegas off into a state where they don't allow gambling!" So quips that brilliant songstress, Miss Van Doren, after singing a fairly decent (if tacky) "Anything Your Heart Desires" as a Vegas showgirl that Elizabeth Hurley would envy. After getting a message from her jailbird husband's ex-cell-mate (Gerald Mohr), Van Doren emotes in a way that was absolutely no threat to Monroe, Mansfield, Dors (Diana) or half the other blonde bombshells who invaded the cinema in the 1950's. Mohr's message is a simple slap which is so phony looking on film that it looks like it had the impact of a kiss. The script has such fabulously bad "B" movie lines such as "Take it easy baby, No fuss, no muss" and "I hope they feed you to the fish!", spoken so dramatically that you'd think that the actors believed that they were quoting Shakespeare.While this really isn't a full musical (2 Vegas numbers) and only has minor elements of film noir, it is definitely one of those deliciously bad "B" movies that sometimes gets classified as noir but is one of the type that true noir aficionados argue over. With the already campy name of "Vi Victor", Mansfield seems to grin every time she has to spout one of those deliciously bad lines. Perhaps she was thinking of the oh, so dramatic narration over the action, the narrator sounding like the newscaster from "Gilligan's Island". If you took a sip of a drink every time that "Vi Victor" was mentioned by the narrator, you'd be drunk after 2 or 3 reels! The film also adds in a holiday spirit with such lines as "Drunk all year, and Santa Claus on Christmas!" as it plays Christmas carols in the background.This is a plot line that's been utilized over and over again, the robbery of an armored car truck, and this one surrounds casino money, a plot device also used, and certainly much better. "Vi Victor" is used as a lookout, and it all seems to be going well until "Vi Victor's" jailbird husband (Lee Van Cleef no less!) escapes from prison (on New Year's Eve no less!) and threatens to louse up the whole scheme! I have to categorize this as one of those films that so bad that it's good, the films that drive-ins clamored for and probably never had a sit-down theater showing outside the second run or theaters desperate for a booking. "Make plenty of room. I take deep breaths!", Mansfield shouts to her drunken audience as she breaks into her second number, "Meet Me Half Way". It's just too bad that she lacks the sensuality of Monroe and Mansfield (and certainly their natural ability to be funny), and in her efforts to be sexy just comes up an empty bottle of peroxide.And remember, "There can't be a tomorrow for those who only live for today!" Truer words were never more badly acted.

With a title like "Guns, Girls, and Gangsters", the movie could be headed in only one direction— the local drive-in. Add top-heavy van Doren to the head of the marquee, and you've got a real teenage winner. So what if the result comes off like a 3rd-rate rip-off of Kubrick's classic The Killing of two years before, replete with time-ticking narration. True, there's some imagination that went into the details of the armored car heist here; too bad, however, that the imagination didn't carry over to the lame climax. It's like they were running out of film and had to wrap right away.The movie does have two of B-movies' more underrated tough guys—Mohr and van Cleef. Between them they charge the 80-minutes with some needed authority. Too bad van Cleef makes a late arrival, because their rivalry sets off sparks and could easily have replaced the awkward van Doren's screen time, which is also taken up by two of the most forgettable songs on record. A better script and more imaginative direction minus van Doren could have turned this uneven exercise into a no-nonsense Plunder Road (1958) type, which was also a cheap, but very well executed heist film.(In passing—I wonder if someone in Sinatra's so-called Rat Pack caught this obscure production since the premise looks a lot like Sinatra's Ocean's Eleven {1960}.)

Chuck Wheeler (Gerald Mohr) gets out of prison and heads to Las Vegas to enact an elaborate heist where he plans to steal an armored car carrying over $2 million in post-New Year's gambling money. He enlists the aide of local gangster Joe Darren (Grant Richards) and his lounge singer fiancé Vi (Mamie Van Doren), who just happens to be the wife of Wheeler's old cell mate. They plan everything out and it looks like it will go smoothly until Vi's ex-husband, Mike (Lee Van Cleef), breaks out of jail. This is a quick moving B-picture and director Edward L. Cahn never lets it lag through its 70 minutes. Van Doren isn't as much of a bad girl as in the previous feature I saw, VICE RAID. Here she is more of a good girl caught in a bad situation. To show how good she is, Van Doren gets two musical numbers in this one. Surprisingly, they don't play up her curves as much as VICE, but the swelling horn section is still abused plenty on the soundtrack. The supporting cast is all good and it is funny to know that even when he was young, Van Cleef still looked old.