26th January 2007: Socialist Spaghetti Western double!

A Bullet For The General

Italy 1966 colour

aka El Chuncho, Quién Sabe?

Director Damiano Damiani Writers Salvatore Laurani, Franco Solinas

Cast Gian Maria Volontè (El Chucho), Klaus Kinski (El Santo), Martine Beswick (Adelita), Lou Castel (Bill 'Niño' Tate)

So what the hell is a "spaghetti western", I hear one or two of you ask? Well... the international success of Sergio Leone’s “Dollars” trilogy - A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad And The Ugly - all starring a young Clint Eastwood, opened the floodgates for similar European-made cowboy films, jokingly dubbed the “Spaghetti western”. Cruel and nihilistic, this new brand of cowboy drama has no good guys or bad guys, just characters with varying shades of grey.

A Bullet For The General (1967) reunites the European stars from For A Few Dollars More. Gian Maria Volonte reworks his wild-eyed sociopath character as a Mexican revolutionary; the equally crazed Klaus Kinski is his half-brother Santo, a priest who delivers salvation at the end of a smoking pistol. Baby-faced American (and that’s not a compliment) Lou Castel plays an American agent, and you’ll also see Jamaican beauty, Bond girl and future Hammer starlet Martine Beswick (Slave Girls, Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde) as the cigar-smoking Adalita.

As with many of his Vietnam War-era generation of Italian filmmakers, director Damiano Damiani is renowned for his westerns with a social conscience, with Marxist pronouncements from his characters and thinly veiled references to American imperialism. Even Gian Maria Volonte, who seems to be motivated by gross self-interest and his never-ending quest for “gonz and ammunition”, has a twisted but genuine sense of social justice.

The whole film can be described as operatic, not just with the incredible Ennio Morricone music, whose themes to both For A Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad And The Ugly has become THE iconic western scores, but in the ballet of bloodshed characteristic of the best westerns, and not just of the spaghetti variety. Grim, blackly comical, and in glorious widescreen so you can appreciate the beauty of the cinematography of A Bullet For The General.

Boot Hill

Italy 1969 colour

aka La Collina Degli Stivali, Trinity Rides Again

Director/Writer Giuseppe Colizzi

Cast Terence Hill (Cat Stevens), Woody Strode (Thomas), Bud Spencer (Hutch Bessy), Eduardo Ciannelli (Boone), Victor Buono (Honey Fisher), Lionel Stander (Mami)

Boot Hill from 1969 is directed by Giuseppe Colizzi and set in a Wild West circus. And before you ask “Who are those clowns?” I’ll remind those of you as old as me or older that our two heroes were a staple of growing up on Euro-trash in the Seventies. Terence Hill (real name Mario Girotti) is the blonde one usually referred to as blue eyes, and plays a wily trickster. Bud Spencer (real name Carlo Pedersoli) is the gruff ox, ill-tempered, and taken to bringing his fist down on top of his opponent’s skull.

These two Italian bit players were teamed up by director Giuseppe Colizzi in the 1966 spaghetti western God Forgives...I Don’t. They were such a winning combo that Colizzi paired them up again in the 1967 Ace High with Eli Wallach, and Boot Hill was their third feature. It wasn’t until their fourth film, the comic western They Call Me Trinity in 1970, that their personalities shone through, and started them on a long road through almost twenty features over the next 20 years, to becoming one of Italy’s most dubiously successful exports. Remember Watch Out We’re Mad? Who Finds A Friend Finds A Treasure? I’m For The Hippopotamus? It’s all coming flooding back, isn’t it!!!

Boot Hill is a much more “serious” western, in which Terence Hill playing a grimy cheroot-huffing hombre called “Cat Stevens”, teams up with a circus run by Lionel Stander, an American character actor who always looks either drunk or looking at a bug on the end of his nose, if you knows what I mean. Between them they help the local mining townsfolk defeat a money-grubbing land baron (played by our favourite jolly evil fatman Victor Buono, who was also Batman’s King Tut).

These firey Latino filmmakers are all about extremes - of love and hate, sex and violence, God and the Devil - and the eccentric Colizzi loves to cut between childlike whimsy and brutal violence. Like all good Spaghetti Westerns, Boot Hill combines a lumpen left wing cabaret with claustrophobic visuals - like Sergio Leone, he’s fond of his closeups - with the added novelty of a multi-racial circus backdrop. Bud's almost a supporting player to black actor Woody Strode AND his team of Italian circus midgets, but thankfully the dumb ox still gets to throw his weight around. Even if you’re not a Terence Hill and Bud Spencer fan, hopefully we here at Schlock Treatment will convert you with this serving of spaghetti with oats, Boot Hill.

14th December 2007: Trinity double #2

14th December 2007: TRINITY double #2!

Trinity Is Still My Name (1971)

If there was ever a western that begged a sequel, it was They Call Me Trinity: a perfect blend of knockabout comedy and Italian western satire, featuring the blonde-haired, blue-eyed trickster Terence Hill and the sheer brute force of a bearded and deadpan Bud Spencer. Trinity Is Still My Name was released barely a year later in 1971, and by then director Enzo Barboni (here listed as “E.B. Clutcher”) had worked out which elements to amplify, and as such Trinity Is Still My Name is a series of comic set-pieces very loosely strung together with a plot.

Terence Hill as the iconic Trinity emerges from the desert, on the same stretcher tied behind his horse and the same pair of soiled long-johns from the first film. He heads to the family homestead and meets up with his reluctant brother Bambino (Spencer) and the rest of their crusty family: Mom’s a hooker with a heart of gold, Dad, who’s constantly issuing sage advice from his death bed, wants his sons to be more successful career criminals. He forces Bambino to take Trinity under his wing – first thing Bambino does is make Trinity to get rid of his stretcher, so instead Trinity rigs up a recliner on the back of his saddle. They head into San Jose and, in perhaps the film’s most perfectly timed comic scene, swindle a mountain of cash from a local card shark. Leaving a swanky restaurant (another deliriously perfect scene) in their new $50 suits, they’re mistaken as federal agents, and when local slimeball Parker hands them $2000 each to “look the other way”, they certainly don’t correct him. Meanwhile every horse thief, cattle rustler and gunslinger is heading into town, and it seems they’re up to no good at the local Catholic mission, where the locals are beaten up by, quote, “drunken monks”.

It’s grubby and low-brow, and as intoxicating as the cloudy brown whisky everyone’s constantly guzzling. In between slapping and the cracking of skulls there’s eating, eating, and more eating, and remember, someone had to do the sound effects on top of this. Then there’s the running gags: the constant reappearance of Bud’s brain-dead victim from the start of the film, and watching their new $50 suits slowly disintegrate through the mud and the blood and the beer (apologies to Johnny Cash). Plus there’s the farting baby in the wagon full of settlers (and cute daughter played by Finnish beauty Yanti Somer); the Trinity boys attempt to rob them, and instead hand over most of their money over and over again. “Strangest pair of outlaws I’ve ever seen,” says the father, and he’s right. They’re also the most memorable pair of opposites in spaghetti westerns since Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef, and ultimately, with over 20 films together, even more successful.

With Trinity Is Still My Name the template’s set in concrete for all future Trinity pairings: Watch Out We’re Mad, I’m For The Hippopotamus, Who Finds A Friend Finds A Treasure… these broad Italian comedies defined a generation of kids my age who grew up in the backseat of a Seventies drive-in or glued to the family’s Betamax machine. I saw this film when I was a kid – now, over 25 years later, I wet myself as much as I remember. Maybe it’s a case of “you had to be there”, but then classic comedy is timeless, and there’s something enduring and endearing about the unlikely duo of Hill and Spencer. I hope you enjoy as much as I do the 1971 Trinity Is Still My Name.

It Can Be Done…Amigo (1972)

These days it’s almost impossible to think of Bud Spencer, if you think of him at all, without him being tied with a Siamese umbilical cord to Terence Hill. The truth is, Bud spent more time on screen without Hill as with him, and in the amiable spaghetti western romp It Can Be Done…Amigo from 1972, proves he can hold up his own (admittedly hefty) end without Angel Eyes.

Bud plays Horse thief Hiram Coburn aka Cobra, a rambling horsethief who just manages to stay one step away from the hangman’s noose – and there’s a few with his name on it. In hot pursuit of Cobra is Sonny Bronston (Jack Palance), a slimy pimp with a wagon load of itinerant prostitutes known in the trade as “Sonny’s Girls”, including his own sister Mary (Dany Saval), who he’s determined to marry off to Cobra and make an honest woman out of her – before shooting him.

Busting out of jail for the umpteenth time, Cobra stumbles on a wagon ambushed by bandits, and a dying lawyer who asks Cobra to take escort his nephew Chip to claim his inheritance. Sensing an easy score, Bud takes the young lad to Westland, where he holds the deeds to a dilapidated ranch on the outskirts of town. Ah, Westland – a forgotten dustbowl where even the railroad companies neglected to put a line OUT of town. The entire townsfolk want the property – the reverend-turned-sheriff, his army of enterprising goons, even the local dirt salesman (don’t ask) - but the kid refuses to sell, as his uncle told him it holds the key to untold riches. Cobra suspects they’re sitting on a mountain of gold… or is it something else?

Like many of Bud’s solo outings he plays an unwitting foil to a smarmy kid. This one’s sneaky and quickwitted – he definitely has lawyer’s blood in his veins – but isn’t nearly as annoying as most Italian screen brats, and the developing father-son dynamic is quite touching (but not in a bad way, mind you). The grinning skull-like features of veteran bad guy Jack Palace are always a welcome sight in a spaghetti western, and he did a few; Bud may be Cobra, but Jack as Sonny is lower than snake poo, as the old saying goes, and twice as twisted, and as for his sister… What a nightmare, deluded as hell and with a hair-trigger temper to boot. Subtle the characters ain’t, but they’re memorable and well-drawn, and of course the film rests squarely on Bud’s broad shoulders, whose gruff “ox with a heart of gold” routine never wears thin. And when the spectacles go on, watch out! He’s mad!

It’s a footnote in the Trinity filmography but a worthy one, likeable AND instantly forgettable at the same time. Directed by journeyman Maurizio Lucidi from a story by exploitation stalwart Ernesto Gastaldi, it makes full use of the glorious wilderness around Almeria in Spain, and I’m sure Sergio Leone has filmed at that train station before! Say farewell, so long and hasta la plasta to the Trinity boys for a while at least as Schlock Treatment says: It Can Be Done…Amigo.

19th October 2007: Trinity double

19th October 2007: TRINITY double!They Call Me Trinity

There have been many western parodies over the years – Blazing Saddles to name the obvious – but there’s none more iconic and with more reverberative effect on European pop culture, than the 1970 They Call Me Trinity.

It stars Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, who were destined to become two of Italy’s most popular comedians. As generic cogs in Italy’s B-film factory, they had been paired before in a semi-successful trio of spaghetti westerns in the Sixties. It would take Enzo Barboni aka “”EB Clucher”, a former cameraman on several of Hill and Spencer’s solo outings in his first film as writer and director, to achieve the perfect balance of silliness and knock-around action for the duo. And as soon as the character of Trinity emerges from the desert carried behind a horse in his soiled and tattered long-johns and covered in filth, wolfs down a pan of beans and then shoots two gringos without raising an eyebrow, you can tell Terence Hill’s true screen persona has finally emerged from behind the grime.

Trinity joins up with his half-brother Bambino, an anti-social ox and career criminal who’s unwittingly become the new sheriff of a town more or less run by Major Harriman, a not-so-fine Southern gentleman played with sherry-swilling smarminess to perfection by American expatriate Farley Granger. The Major hires a motley gang of gunslingers and Mexican banditos to run a herd of Mormons out of the nearby valley so he can graze his cattle on their land. Bambino, on the other hand, wants the Major’s cattle, and Trinity, ever the ladies man (note the plural), has his eye on one or both of the Mormon leader’s daughters. As always, their sociopathic self-interest is mistaken by all and sundry as philanthropy, and once they teach the peace-loving Mormons how to “slap the other cheek”, they score another win for the Me Generation of the 1870s.

They Call Me Trinity has all the trappings of a traditional spaghetti oater, but its perfect timing with the then-novel comedy angle and inherent chemistry of Hill and Spencer made it a huge worldwide hit, setting the template and making the on-screen couple more than bankable in an increasingly silly series of comedy vehicles over the next fifteen years. Bud Spencer aka Carlo Pedersoli is Hill’s perfect foil, alternating between gruff, surly, deadpan and ludicrously ambitious. Hill plays the blue-eyed wily trickster and seeming innocent to the hilt, congenitally lazy but with lightning hands and a master acrobat, and all the time with a huge grin that charms and disarms all in its path, including his sociopath half-brother. As childishly simple as it sounds, it works, and as with all truly successful comedy duos, the formula continues to work after almost forty years.

They made a staggering seventeen films together, but despite the ”Trinity” retitlings of just about every Hill and Spencer film made together or apart, there are only two Trinity films: the 1971 sequel Trinity Is Still My Name, coming soon to Schlock Treatment, and this, the quintessential spaghetti western comedy They Call Me Trinity.

My Name Is Nobody

When I was a young lad, my father told me the one about the two bulls sitting on the top of a hill looking down on a paddock full of heifers. The young bulls says, “Why don’t we run down and schtoink one of the cows?” “Well son,” says the old bull, “we can always walk down and schtoink them all.”

Which seems appropriate when introducing My Name Is Nobody, an eccentric spaghetti western full of fables, parables and comic one-liners. The film is signed by Tonino Valerii, who started as Leone’s assistant on A Fistful Of Dollars (1964) and For A Few Dollars More (1965) before helming his own well-crafted and critically acclaimed westerns The Price Of Power, Day Of Anger and A Reason To Live, A Reason To Die. But it’s Leone’s assured hand – as producer, co-writer and uncredited co-director – which is detected in every scene, in the complicated camera trickery, obsession with detail, and ultimately in the film’s heart and soul. My Name Is Nobody is about the myth of the West, told as more of a Greek fable than the tableaux-driven but still mythos-drenched Once Upon A Time In The West.

On first viewing My Name Is Nobody doesn’t come close to Leone’s best work – it’s by no means perfect, and at times seems like a schizophrenic crowd-pleaser which can’t decide if it’s a Leone western or a Trinity comedy. But even the great Western directors took time off their po-faced epics to show their more gentle, humourous side. Sam Peckinpah followed up The Wild Bunch with The Ballad Of Cable Hogue, and Leone here pays tribute to Peckinpah in a number of ways: casting his long-time collaborator RG Armstrong in an uncredited cameo as “Honest John”, and including Sam’s name on a wooden cross in the gunslinger’s cemetery. It’s just one layer in a complex film that’s referential, reverential and self-effacing, and all within the same frame.

The film is set in 1899, Leone’s arbitrary turning point between the “Old” West and the “New” (and we’re talking cultural contructs here, not history). The “Old” is of course represented by Henry Fonda, a true icon of the western genre and a glaringly obvious link to Leone’s previous masterwork Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), in which he played the blackest villain of his career. In Nobody… he’s Jack Beauregard, a jaded, time-worn gunfighter who’s decided to throw in his reputation as the Fastest Gun in the West while he still has two moving arms to throw with. The “New” represented by Terence Hill is a cocky newcomer, showy to the point of show pony, a “Nobody” who desperately wants to be a “Somebody”, and who idolizes Jack to the point of rattling off his bona-fides like facts off a baseball card. “Nobody” wants Jack to retire too, but in a pine box after his final blaze of glory, and either plans to be a witness or protagonist in the event via an increasingly complicated series of set-pieces he stage-manages to inflate Jack’s reputation further It culminates with Jack’s showdown with a 150-strong gang of mean cutthroats known as “The Wild Bunch” (another nod to Peckinpah), which provokes Jack and Nobody’s relationship of master and apprentice, or possibly father and son, to its logical conclusion.

Terence Hill’s star was at its peak in 1973 – in Europe at least – and My Name Is Nobody buys completely into the newly yet firmly-established Trinity schtick, from its title to poster art, to Nobody’s lazy jester posturings and lighting fast slap-and-draw antics stolen directly from They Call Me Trinity. It’s a stark contrast to the West as imagined by Leone and Leone’s major influence John Ford before him, and yet somehow the combination works, even in Ennio Morricone’s almost jangle-pop score, which should be annoying as hell, and is instead weirdly memorable.

“There wuz never any good old days” a grizzled Henry Fonda pronounces, and you know he doesn’t mean it. There’s a real nostalgia for the “old” in what would be both Henry Fonda’s AND Sergio Leone’s farewell to the western genre. We are proud to present the schizophrenic western comedy My Name Is Nobody.