User Reviews

Produced and directed by Fielder Cook and written by Sidney Carroll, this above average comedy Western stars Henry Fonda and features Joanne Woodward in the title role. The exceptional cast also includes Jason Robards, Paul Ford, Charles Bickford, Burgess Meredith, Kevin McCarthy, Robert Middleton, and John Qualen.

Fonda plays a reformed "on the poker wagon" gambler now homesteader that happens upon the high stakes annual game between Robards, Bickford, McCarthy, Middleton, and Qualen in a remote town. Though his wife (Woodward) and his preteen son Jackie (Gerald Michenaud) try to keep him out of it, Fonda is unable to resist joining the game even though the $1,000 entry fee is a quarter of their life savings intended to be used to buy a 40 acre farm in San Antonio, Texas.

When Fonda has all $4,000 of his family's money in the pot and he's $500 short of being able to call the most recent bet, Woodward bursts into the room where the game is being played (the back room of a hotel/saloon run by James Kenny). While explaining the situation to her, he suffers a heart attack and must be attended to by the beloved but poor local doctor (Meredith).

Because wealthy farmer Robards left his daughter in the middle of her wedding to play poker, and defense attorney McCarthy departed the courthouse just before he was deliver his closing remarks to keep his client from the gallows, the men are impatient to finish their game.

Though she professes to know nothing about poker, Woodward pleads to play on her husband's behalf because of their dire financial situation. Though undertaker Bickford hates women, Middleton is persuaded to bend the rules and allow her to leave the room (with the others save Qualen in tow) to go and see banker Ford about a loan.

Convinced that he's being put on by the others, especially since the only collateral Woodward offers is the hand she shows him, Ford has his clerk (Milton Selzer) throw them out. However, shortly thereafter, Ford arrives at the game to verify that they were joking, only to find that they were not.

Then, after a soliloquy about how conservative his investment philosophy has been, Ford says that he's backing Woodward, based on her hand, calls the $500 and raises the rest of them $5,000, after which each of the others folds. Though they lost, the men feel charmed to have been in the presence of the little lady so devoted to her husband.

But the story doesn't end there, and I won't spoil the denouement which includes a couple of different sequences and a surprise ending.

The film begins with Charles Bickford ,as undertaker Benson Tropp, driving his horses pulling his hearse at breakneck speed along rural roads, until he comes to a town, where he picks up lawyer Otto Habershaw(Kenin McCarthy), then continues until he meets Henry Drummond, who accompanies them on his horse. until they reach Black Creek, where they greet cattle baron Dennis Wilcox(Robert Middleton) and merchant Jesse Buford(John Qualen). These 5 claim to be the wealthiest men in the territory, and they have assembled to play their annual high stakes poker game. Pretty soon, Meredith(Henry Fonda) and his wife Mary(Joanne Woodward), and small son Jackie, arrive in town in their covered wagon. They are ex-professional gamblers, on their way to stake out a homestead near San Antonio. They need a blacksmith to fix a wheel. Meanwhile, Meredith wanders around town, and discovers the poker game. He asks if he can be an observer. At first, he is given a definite no, but eventually Habershaw persuades the others to reluctantly let him in the room, where he observes for a while. Eventually, he requests to take part in the game. Again, initially, the response is "no", but, again, Habershaw, eventually convinces the others to let him play: a decision that he will eventually regret. He takes the place of Buford. However, he is told he needs to put up $1000. to play. He hurries to his room to rob the nest egg, knowing Mary will be shocked. He is not doing very well, with much perspiration on his face. Then, he is told he must anti-up $3500.more to stay in the game, or risk losing his $1000. by default. He rushes to his nest egg and pulls out the last $3000.,still needing $500. more. At this point, he collapses of an apparent heart attack, and is ordered ,by Dr. Scully, to be taken out of the room. Before he leaves, he asks Mary, who has arrived, to play his hand for him. Most object to this flagrant violation of tradition.. But, Habershaw again convinces the most vociferous of them to bend their rules, and allow a woman to play. She pretends she knows nothing about the rules of poker. Eventually, Habershaw, who's taken a shine to her, volunteers to tell her some of the basics of the game. But, she still needs that $500. to play. So, she sets off to talk to banker C.P. Ballinger. The others follow her, with their hands, to make sure she doesn't cheat. She shows Ballinger her hand and proposes that it be collateral for her loan. Ballinger storms at this suggestion and orders them out. But, strangely, he soon visits the gambling den, and announces that Mary's hand is the most convincing collateral he's ever seen! So, he loans her the $500. and considerably more, to raise the stakes. See the movie to find out what happens(if you can't guess). Meanwhile, Meredith's pretense of serious injury is dispensed with, and he appears spendidly healthy, as usual. Ballinger and Dr. Scully had joined with Meredith and Mary to defeat the big shots. We never did see her hand. Was it really as Ballanger described, or was it a bluff? ...........After the poker game is over, Drummond returns to his home, where everybody has been waiting for his return so that the wedding of his daughter can proceed. However, he takes the groom aside, and asks why he wants to marry his plain-looking daughter? He replies that he loves her, but Drummond scoffs at this, and suggests he really wants a share of Drummond's estate. Drummond then makes him exit a window, with the promise that he will not be seen again. I find this a strange afterthought of the main point of the film.

This film is perhaps to long but it kind of is a Western with a theme that would be used later on and much more effectively in "The Sting". While this movie has a great cast with Joanne Woodward, Henry Fonda, and Jason Robards particularly effective, the script could have been so much better if it had been developed more with the characters. It does have poker in mind, and the bluff in particular as themes.

What the film does not do is develop the story line better. In The Sting, all of the characters are carefully developed and even though you have it all in front of you what is going down, there is enough else going on that you still enjoy the actual deception and get a feeling for the characters. This film has some great characters and even though the story tries to hide what is going on, it sort of tips it's hand.

Robards here plays a pretty good heavy, but it is never explained why he is one of 4 guys who all get played by Fonda in the game. What is really not making much sense is how all the players at the table all have a good enough hand to stay in until the end. Poker just does not work that way. It is hard to swallow all of them staying in for huge money. The poker game in The Sting makes more sense with 2 players surviving for the big pot, and everyone else dropping out.

Even though the viewer is not told a lot about the minor characters in the cast until after the game, it becomes too easy to suspect there are other motivations for everyone before the big bluff happens. This story was first done as a television production and then was expanded here into a movie. While the results are good, they are not perfect. Some great support here from Burgess Meredith and Charles Bickford among others.

I feel this is an actors school sort of film. There are some great lessons for method acting from a great cast, but the film falls just a little short of being a great one. Think if the director had been better about how they paced the film, which at times it seems to stop in its tracks or winds up a bit slow, it would have been better.

Just the title alone tells us the audience that something nefarious is underway. A father, mother and their ten year old son stroll into this small mid-western town on a broken wheel so Mary (Joanne Woodward) is directed by her husband Meredith (Henry Fonda) to go find the blacksmith and have the damaged wheel repaired. Mary is worried that her husband Meredith will be tempted to get into the annual big stakes poker game that the wealthiest men in the county are participating in so she directs her ten year old son Jackie (Jean-Michel Michenaud) to stay glued to his daddy's side and not let him get involved in this high stakes poker game with the families life savings.

You see where this is going now? Okay so Meredith cannot resist going up to his hotel room and grabbing enough of his families cash to get involved in this once in a lifetime high stakes poker game. Meanwhile their son Jackie is left holding his fathers poker hand with instructions not to let any of the other players sneak a peek at his so-called winning hand. I thought son Jackie's emotional pleas for his father to listen to his mom and not get involved in the poker game were over the top and in poker terms a "real tell" what was really going on.

As the suspense of this single poker hand continues Mary arrives back at the hotel only to discover her worst fears have been realized and Meredith has dipped into their life savings to play poker after promising her he would not. As great an actor that Henry Fonda is, his fake heart attack leading to Mary's need to take over his potential winning poker hand was expected based on the film's title alone.

It is an okay time waster but an Alfred Hitchcock suspense, or Agatha Christie murder mystery it is not. I give it an average 6 out of 10 rating only because of the great cast of first rate actors starring in this film.

All the town is excited as four wealthy gamblers arrive to play high stakes poker. Two of them are cattleman Henry Drummond (Jason Robards) and lawyer Otto Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy). Settler Meredith (Henry Fonda), his wife Mary (Joanne Woodward), and their young son Jackie are passing through on the way to San Antonio. He's a recovering gambler drawn to the game. He promises only to watch but once inside, he gets drawn into the game.

I love the premise and the execution except for two points. First, I'd get rid of the wedding or put that part up front as a comedic bit. Robards getting frustrated with the wedding fiasco and running out to play the game could be a fun opening. After the game, it's more filler than effective drama. The audience is waiting for the family's reunion to close the movie. Second is the flash of the hand inside the bank. I'm assuming that it's meant to be blurry to suggest to the film audience but it's clear enough to know what it is. It's better not to know or even guess at the hand. That would have been a great reveal if the film doesn't flash the hand. I understand what the filmmaker is trying to do but I think he's wrong. It's an opinion but I think I'm right. It's a great contained film.

What a cast of characters in A Big Hand for the Little Lady: Henry Drummond, a rich and irascible rancher who put his daughter's wedding on hold just as the vows were starting; Otto Habershaw, a slick, handsome and morally questionable lawyer. Habershaw left a client probably to hang when he ran from the courthouse and jumped on his horse just as he was supposed to sum up for the defense; Benson Tropp, wealthiest undertaker in the region, who has no use for women unless he's burying them; Dennis Wilcox, another wealthy rancher, a big, loud man who enjoys joking at other's expense; and Jesse Buford, small, aging and just as wealthy. He, Wilcox and all the others are sticklers for the rules. High stakes poker rules, that is.

And what a cast: Jason Robards (Drummond), Kevin McCarthy (Habershaw), Charles Bickford (Tropp), Robert Middleton (Wilcox) and John Qualen (Buford). Plus Burgess Meredith as Doc Joseph Scully, a man getting old who is tired of saving people and getting produce as payment, and Paul Ford as C. P. Ballinger, a banker who knows the value of collateral.

The five are poker players, and for each of the last 17 years nothing, absolutely nothing, has stood in the way of their annual game. They hold it in the back room of a saloon and hotel in Laredo. It's become a legend in the territory for the money they've lost and won They're just starting the first hand when into town comes a hard-luck family on a wagon with a busted wheel, on their way to start again on 40 acres near San Antonio. Meredith (Henry Fonda) is a nice man trying to do his best. He's also a fool for cards, a man who has lost so much of his family's hard-earned money that his wife, Mary (Joanne Woodward) made him solemnly promise that he'd never touch cards again. Mary wants to believe him. Their 12-year-old son is about to get a lesson of a lifetime.

It's not long, while Mary takes the wagon to the blacksmith, that Meredith has begged for a chance just to watch the game. He can't help licking his lips. His son can't help begging his pa not to. Soon Meredith has taken the family's $4,000 stake, all the money they have in the world, to get in the game. You know the rest...he wagers and he loses.

Wait. He wagers, alright. He has the best hand he's ever been dealt in his life...but he's about to be out-raised. He begs for a loan so he can stay in the game...and has a heart attack. It's up to Mary, back from the blacksmith and who has never played a game of poker in her life, to convince the five hard-bitten players that it's only fair that she be allowed to play her husband's hand. The five bicker a bit but reluctantly agree, and are stunned when Mary takes the hand and marches to the bank, with them following, to convince C. P. Ballinger to use the hand as collateral for a loan on her bet.

Does the movie have a more satisfactory ending than a dead Henry Fonda clutching his heart, a tearful Joanne Woodward seeing these committed poker players take every cent her family has? Oh, yes, indeed. No one dies, and there is one of the most satisfying endings, with a twist and a sting, you'll ever hope to see.

What makes this movie so engaging - after all, it's basically 1 hour and 35 minutes of a poker game - is that twist at the end and the skill and charm of the actors. As good as Fonda and the others are, the movie really sits up when Woodward, Robards and McCarthy are doing their stuff. Woodward is so skilled an actress that I sometimes think we take her for granted. That would be an unwise action in this movie. Robards, who was probably America's greatest stage actor in the last 60 years and one of it's best screen actors, turns Henry Drummond into a fine mixture of frustration and selfishness. Robards can make us smile in sympathy over even an unlikeable character like Drummond. See just how good an actor Robards was with his performances in Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten (Broadway Theatre Archive) and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh (Broadway Theatre Archive). Kevin McCarthy, a fine actor with great charm, could play weak, strong, sleaze or integrity with equal believability. Here, he's all charm and quite willing to make a move on Mary, but he holds back, surprising even himself. I don't want to short-change Fonda. As Meredith, he's stuck for most of the movie playing a weak man in the grip of poker fever, and henpecked as well. He captures our sympathy even while we pity the poor man.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady is something of a one-joke movie, but it's a first-class, clever joke with a great cast.

It must have been tough, writing and directing a full-length feature that swivels on an event that only takes half an hour.

Henry Fonda, his wife Joanne Woodward, and their young son are stranded for a few hours in a Western town where a high-stakes poker game is going on. Fonda, a poker addict, is drawn into the game and loses the $4K his family had been saving for their new farm. He winds up holding what he considers a winning hand -- we don't know what it is -- and when he's informed that he must put up an additional several hundred, which he doesn't have, he drops on the floor, still holding his cards.

Woodward is forced to take his place but asks that the nature of the game be explained to her. She listens attentively while another player, Kevin McCarthy, explains to her, "We are all holding cards. Some cards are better than others. We all think we have the best hand. And we have all bet four thousand dollars that we have the best hand." Well, of course Woodward's stash has already been gambled away by Fonda, but she crosses the street to borrow money from the owner of the local bank, offering as collateral the hand of cards she is holding. The filthy rich bankers gawks and lends her enough to raise the pot and drive everyone else out of the game.

That's not the end. Legal ethics prevent me from revealing more of the plot. I think I can go so far as to say, "Don't worry." The laying on of hands by the bank is the pivotal event. The notorious skinflint who owns the bank would never lend money unless he was certain of getting it back. However, the story must be made tensile to fill the time slot.

So we get an opening scene of a boisterous saloon, clamorous cowboys, rollicking tunes, riotous laughter at remarks and wisecracks that aren't in themselves funny. Okay, the film needs some juice, but this is like transfusing blood into a patient whose life is hardly worth the expense of saving. There are anti-climactic scenes that drag on much too long after the point has been made, or are themselves entirely irrelevant.

Nice cast, though. Fonda may be too old for the part of a naive guy setting out to make his fortune on a small farm but Woodward is just fine. I can't help wondering if Fonda and John Qualen swapped stories about working for John Ford in "The Grapes of Wrath." I imagine Fonda approaching Qualen with outstretched hand and saying, "Why, MULEY!" Charles Bickford as a player is stiff but has a magnificent exit. Jason Robards' part is unsympathetic but he has one of the more expressive faces on the screen. And he's a good actor with considerable range. Catch him in "All The President's Men," as the hard-nosed Ben Bradlee.

It's much too long for the simple story it has to tell and it's so loud and forceful that it leaves your eardrums in a grievous state. Worth seeing but not seeking out.