Hey, look what’s finally on TV! Johnny Cool (1963)

Henry Silva had a long film career playing mostly Indians or ethic types when he wasn’t in a role supporting any combination of Rat Pack members, including The Manchurian Candidate with Frank Sinatra or as one of the second-tier members of Ocean’s Eleven, along with professional sourpusses Richard Conte, Norman Fell and Joey Bishop.

With Silva in a rare lead role, a Rat Pack breeze blows through Johnny Cool. Sinatra musical accomplices Sammy Cahn and Billy May wrote the swinging soundtrack. Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop have cameos and the film’s executive producer is Peter Lawford. (Lawford gets an “in name only” cameo, billed on a Desert Inn marquee that Silva drives past).

Silva plays a Sicilian Robin Hood-styled folk hero named Giordano, who gets shanghaied by an American mafioso in exile into knocking off a bunch of competing mob bosses. Now an assassin renamed Johnny Cool, his reptilian features and cold-blooded march across America finding creative ways to cross off the names on his hit list – including machine gunning a gangland boss in his office from a window-washer scaffold and throwing a suitcase bomb into a pool – is making the Mob nervous. As one FBI agent on his trail says, “Everybody remembers him, but nobody knows him.”

Sammy, Liz and Henry

What really makes Johnny Cool cool is the strong supporting cast of recognizable faces. Jim Backus is a corrupt construction company owner (who twice sneaks out a Mr. Magoo laugh off camera). Telly Savalas plays a competing mob boss. A couple of curious casting choices play casino operators. John McGiver’s stern high school principal look and patrician delivery makes his veiled threat of forcing sexual favors from a woman who can’t pay her casino bill even creepier. As McGiver’s partner, political satirist Mort Sahl isn’t much of an actor (and seems to need a shave as well). All four get violently knocked off by Johnny Cool.

John McGiver and Mort Sahl

Sammy Davis Jr. plays a bystander in a backroom craps game with the unlikely name of “Educated.” Elizabeth Montgomery is a bored divorcee inexplicably drawn to dangerous Johnny and in a party scene we get a glimpse of what might happen if Samantha Stevens got out of control at one of those suburban cocktail soirees – dancing the twist with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other; then waking up the next morning hungover, with disheveled hair and wrapped in a blanket, presumably either topless or naked. When she and Johnny rendezvous at one point in a Las Vegas hotel room, she gets to cry out, “I need you! I need you right now!” Hubba hubba.

(Montgomery and Johnny Cool director William Asher met on the set. Within a year they divorced their spouses and were married to each other. Asher, who also directed several beach party movies, later became executive producer on Bewitched).

As an actor better known for his looks than his acting, Silva comes off a little stiff at times, as do most of the mob characters, whose dialogue is awkwardly formal. But the many guest stars (which also includes  Joey Bishop, Elisha Cook Jr. and Richard Anderson) give the film the spirit of a more-violent Burke's Law episode. A fun movie and always worth catching the rate times it airs on TV.

Hey, look what’s on TV! Johnny Cool plays on TCM every couple of years or so; another cable channel occasionally shows a version edited for commercials.