Spaghetti Westerns (13 page)

This is a well-made, cleverly plotted movie. Director Morrow elicits maximum tension from the hero’s incarceration in the moonlit, hellish prison, where inmates howl at the moon like werewolves and the warders goad them on. The central theme – both narratively and visually – is that the West is a card game that you always lose. In the snow, after the stage robbery (where an innocent bystander catches a stray bullet), Sledge and his partner Mallory shelter in a saloon. Mallory becomes involved in a poker game and is killed after he wins the pot. Later, after the prison break, the gang hole up in some ruins in the desert. A card game ensues and one of the gang is killed by the old man for cheating (refilling his gold sack with sand). Sledge, disgusted, resolves to clean the old man out. In a superbly shot montage, Sledge deals cards in slow motion, flicking them, spinning into the air, as he wins the game. This ‘West as poker’ theme is even echoed in Gianni Ferrio’s excellent title song ‘Other Men’s Gold’ (‘Beware my friend, of the curse that follows other men’s gold’) and in the eccentric score. After succeeding in the heist and winning at cards, Sledge still loses the game… and the gold.

It’s with the finale that the film gels and veers into really interesting territory, as it examines the relationship between greed, religion and love, and how they’re bound together by violence. Sledge arrives in Siego as a black-shrouded, candle-bearing religious procession makes its way through town. While the participants are away at the ritual, the town is deserted, a silent battleground for Sledge and his ex-comrades. One manages to put a knife through Sledge’s forearm, rendering it useless, so he binds a crucifix to his arm as a makeshift splint. His girlfriend is raped and murdered in a church and he manages to kill his former partners, even though he hasn’t learnt the gold’s hiding place. The final image is particularly powerful. As Sledge leaves town he passes a sea of holy candles and prayer lanterns, and then rides alone into the desert.

Though some of the Americans seem a little lost in Almeria and the script is sometimes overly clichéd, this is a good, solid Western. The opening and planning scenes are exciting, the heist suspenseful, and the dénouement brutally ironic. What more do you want?

Good-for-nothing layabout gunslinger Trinity arrives in town and discovers his horse-thieving half-brother Bambino masquerading as the sheriff. The town is run by a corrupt rancher, Major Harrison, who is intent on ridding a fertile valley of the Mormons who’ve settled there – he wants to use the land to graze his horse herd. To get rid of them, the Major recruits a vicious but moronic Mexican bandit and his hopeless gang. Bambino makes Trinity his deputy and the two decide to help the Mormons out, but the more Trinity interferes in the Major’s plans, the more determined the rancher is to shift the Mormons. Trinity falls for two of the Mormon women (polygamy is permitted in Mormon circles) and thinks about settling down, but the Major forces a confrontation. Lacking any weapons, Trinity and Bambino improvise and tutor the Mormon pacifists how to brawl – rustler Bambino has his eyes on the Major’s horse herd. In the massed fistfight that follows, the brothers and the Mormons teach the Major a much-needed lesson. But Trinity lets the Mormons have the Major’s horses, thereby ruining the rustling scheme and Bambino leaves in disgust, soon to be followed by Trinity, when he realises that he isn’t cut out for a life of hard toil and prayer.

They Call Me Trinity
is an outstanding comedy Western and the best of the comedy Spaghettis that swamped Europe in the final, highly successful phase of the Italian Western boom. Funny from start to finish and entertainingly action-packed along the way, this made Hill and Spencer superstars as Europe’s answer to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Early in his career, Hardy was nicknamed ‘Baby’ Hardy, which perhaps influenced Barboni when he chose the name Bambino for Spencer’s bear-like, bearded man-mountain – great in a fistfight but not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Hill, as Trinity (or ‘the right hand of the Devil’ as he’s referred to throughout, with Bambino as ‘the left’) is the most appealing, easygoing gunslinger in Spaghettis. Caked in a layer of dust, he wears his gun belt slung so low he can barely reach it and travels around on a horse-drawn travois. He’s certainly quick on the draw and the speeded-up action gives a surreal edge to the comedy set pieces. Unlike later comedy Spaghettis, Barboni doesn’t overdo these effects, the extended mass brawl finale being the only exception. Moreover, many of the
Trinity
derivatives lost their effectiveness when they opted for absolutely no fatalities (in this film there are some casualties) in a bid to reach a younger audience.

Barboni had long wanted to make a comedy Western and had been touting the
Trinity
script for years. He started as a cinematographer and worked extensively for Corbucci and others, photographing both the good and the bad of the genre, including
Django
,
Texas Addio, The Hellbenders, Rita of the West, Django Get a Coffin Ready
and
The Five Man Army
. He began directing in 1969 with the awful Western
Chuck Mool
(also called
The Unholy Four
) and adopted the pseudonym EB Clucher, a name he stuck with throughout his career.
They Call Me Trinity
was his breakthrough and was just what the Spaghetti Western needed, because the genre had died on its feet. Though these movies are generally referred to as ‘slapstick’ Spaghettis, this first entry is more concerned with parodying Westerns (especially Leone’s movies,
The Magnificent
Seven
and Rio
Bravo
) and concentrating on clever verbal humour, rather than the outright fists-fests that later entries became. Much of the humour is pretty unsophisticated – especially the belching and disgusting eating habits that also became signatures of these Spaghetti comedies, though
Trinity
is reasonably restrained in this respect. Barboni’s referential humour is noticeable in the film’s opening sequence. Trinity arrives at a stagecoach station by travois – like Laurel and Hardy arrive in Brushwood Gulch at the beginning of
Way Out West
(1937) – and encounters two bounty hunters. They ask his name and the hero answers, ‘They call me Trinity.’ ‘They say you’ve got the fastest gun around,’ ventures one bounty hunter. ‘Is that what they say?’ smiles Trinity. ‘Gees.’ Trinity’s lazy, self-effacing manner endeared him to audiences and handsome, blue-eyed Hill’s performance is his best. Equally so, the film wouldn’t have worked without surly Spencer who plays every scene as though he’s been woken up in the middle of his nap and lets out a bored sigh before beating the hell out of the Major’s men. Both Hill and Spencer display superb comic timing. At one point, Bambino receives a letter from the sheriff he ambushed (and stole the star from), asking for his help. ‘Now he wants me to give him a hand to find me,’ deadpans Bambino. When the duo visits the Mormon camp for the first time, one of the brethren hollers, ‘Welcome brothers.’ Bambino turns to Trinity and asks, ‘Who told him we were brothers?’ The humour is a little rougher and much cleverer than later, more juvenile Hill and Spencer entries. They perform an impromptu operation on a Mexican prisoner, Trinity sticking his finger in the wound to plug up the hole. Because of their zeal with the anaesthetic (a bottle of whiskey), the Mexican becomes an alcoholic. And when Trinity is appointed deputy and sets about teaching the Major a lesson, his efforts aren’t appreciated by his brother – ‘One store destroyed, three heads split like overripe melons, one man wounded and one castrated. All in two hours, just two hours I left you alone.’

The villain, dapper Major Harrison, is portrayed by Farley Granger – better known for his performances in Hitchcock’s
Rope
(1948) and
Strangers on a Train
(1951). Granger plays the Major as a genteel Southern ‘genulmun’, but it’s the supporting cast that add much to the movie. Zacharias plays the Sheriff’s housekeeper, Jonathan Swift, who constantly bemoans Bambino’s ineffectual peacekeeping. Every time something happens in town, the lawman is somewhere else – ‘I’ve never met such an unlucky sheriff.’ And his description of the real sheriff on Bambino’s trail is wittily understated: ‘Moustache, star on his chest, crutches. A typical crippled sheriff, looking for the fellows that made him that way.’ The Mexican bandit gang hired by the Major are a comic version of Leone’s renegades, with their evil laughter stretched to extremes and a bizarre code of honour. Their payment for getting rid of the Mormons is to receive a share of the Major’s horses, but the bandits would prefer it if they were allowed to ‘steal’ the steeds – to work for pay is too embarrassing. And nothing in Barboni’s West is sacred, as the numerous gags at the Mormons’ expense, the parodic title song and imaginative whistled score (by Franco Micalizzi) attest.

Easily the best of the comic Spaghettis, this film is the funniest (and most overlooked) comedy Western prior to Mel Brooks’s
Blazing Saddles
(1973). Though Hill and Spencer’s finest hour and three quarters, it also sounded the death knell for Spaghetti Westerns. Judging by the quality of most seventies Spaghettis, it was a fair swap.

A blind gunslinger is hired to escort 50 mail-order brides to a mining camp in Texas. When he arrives to pick up his charges, he finds that the women have been kidnapped by a Mexican bandit, Domingo, his brother Candy and their gang of cut-throats, to be employed as whores for the Mexican Army in a bordello run by the bandits’ sister Sweet Mama. After much double-crossing, the Blindman, with the aid of a Mexican General, manages to recover the brides, but the General steals them, leaving the Blindman no choice but to set off in pursuit.

It should be said from the off that this is a particularly exploitative and misogynistic film, especially in the amount of nudity included (which is unusual for Spaghettis) and the violence inflicted on the 50 women. That said, the film was massively popular worldwide on its original release – everywhere except Britain and the States.
Blindman
is one of a series of Spaghettis that featured physically impaired heroes. In
Deaf Smith & Johnny Ears
(1972), Anthony Quinn played a deaf-mute gunslinger and
The Big Silence
’
s
hero is also a mute. Many Spaghetti heroes end up incapacitated by the final duel, but
Blindman
approaches its subject as an outlandish parody – the idea of a blind shootist surviving one gunfight, let alone an entire film, is ridiculous from the off.

After the
Stranger
films, Anthony wrote and starred in this movie, which is his best. Though it is a highly imaginative and darkly humorous tale of revenge, with much quasi-religious rhetoric, the film is best remembered for the performance by Beatles ex-drummer, Ringo Starr. The film was produced by Allen Klein (who from 1969 was their manager), who also made a cameo appearance in the film along with erstwhile Beatles assistant Mal Evans. Starr’s performance is one of many film roles in the seventies (after The Beatles split up) and he acquits himself very well as a vicious bandit called Candy. In one of the strangest scenes in the film, he is killed, but his brother still wants him to go through with his wedding to a Mexican girl, so the ceremony goes ahead, with the girl in full wedding regalia and Candy in an open-topped coffin.

But it is Anthony as the philosophical blind stranger who really makes an impact. Dressed in a battered patchwork duster (with one sleeve missing) and an outsized floppy sombrero, he uses his Winchester as a makeshift white cane. When he faces his enemies, he aims for the sounds they make (cocked guns, coughing, laughing) in an idea borrowed from Corbucci’s
Minnesota Clay
(1965). When the Blindman captures Candy, he drapes the bandit in cowbells, so he can’t make a move without making a sound. The Blindman is led around by his horse (christened Boss), who is as helpful and watchful as any sidekick – he even comes to his master’s whistle. But the Blindman is treated very badly throughout – no quarter is given by his adversaries to the fact that he’s blind. He is badly beaten, is served a snake in a salad (a really suspenseful moment) and in the end is duped by the Mexican General, who gags the mail-order brides and makes off with them. Earlier, the General evens up the final gunfight by burning bandit Domingo’s eyes out with a cigar. Anthony himself suffered terribly during filming. He wore blue contact lenses for the role, but the sand and dust in Almeria kept getting under the lenses and made filming hell.

Even though the brides are treated badly throughout the movie, they are an excellent aspect of the story. In one action sequence the women (all in white dresses) make a bid for freedom en masse, loaded onto two carts, but the bandits catch up with them (the wagons get stuck in the sand) and the women make a bolt for it on foot, with brutal results. The final gundown in the graveyard, which parodies
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,
is also effective and much of the film’s success is down to composer Stelvio Cipriani, who contributes his best Western score – an evocative blend of chants, shrieks, sitars and guitars that recalls Morricone’s scores for
The Big Silence, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and the sci-fi movie Danger: Diabolik
(1968).