Synopsis
There Was a Crooked Man... (1970) is Joseph L. Mankiewicz's cynical Western, free to watch online on iFILM. Smooth-talking crook Paris Pitman hides half a million in stolen loot inside a rattlesnake nest, then gets shipped off to a remote Arizona prison for a ten-year stretch.
Behind bars, Pitman (Kirk Douglas) runs his own con: recruiting cellmates, hatching plots and dangling a share of the hidden fortune in front of anyone who'll help him break out. In his way stands the new warden, Woodward Lopeman (Henry Fonda), a reformer who genuinely believes convicts can be rehabilitated. The whole film lives inside that duel between the charming reptile and the upright idealist.
The script came from David Newman and Robert Benton, the same pair who wrote Bonnie and Clyde. Alongside Douglas and Fonda you get Warren Oates, Burgess Meredith and Hume Cronyn. The result is a mean, funny anti-Western with an ending almost nobody calls in advance. Stream There Was a Crooked Man... online on iFILM.
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