Cry, Onion

I love Spaghetti Westerns, but am kind of weary of the more comedic ones as most, to be honest, are rubbish. This one stars Franco Nero as a man who travels in a carriage full of onions pulled by a farting horse, eating onions, juggling onions, drinking onion juice, and using them in fights. This film goes beyond stupid and because you've got Enzo Castellari behind the camera, you've got 100% effort. The might is extremely silly and full of slapstick though, so be warned.

I forgot to say that Nero's character is also called Onion, and he's just bought some land to plant onions from a guy who we've just seen being murdered by Romano Puppo and Massimo Vanni and another guy (the three bad guys Nero went up against in Castellari's Street Law). They work for the usual generic big business guy (Martin Balsam) who wants the land to prospect for oil. What's not generic is that Martin has a robotic hand that for some reason is maintained by Hitler!

Sterling Heyden is the local supressed newspaper guy with Emma Cohen as the daughter who falls in love with Nero (he even uses onion talk romantically). He also ends up looking after two young kids named Al Capone and Dutch Schultz. I'm guessing most people will have stopped reading the review by now, because how many do you know like this sort of stuff?

It is fun if you sit back and let the stupidity roll over you. There's a motorcycle gang, loads of stunts, and way too many Benny Hill style chases. Romano Puppo and Massimo Vanni have larger roles than usual as the bad guys. My eight year old kid thought the few minutes of it were funny, before he slipped away to continue playing his Xbox.

Saw CipollaColt in Europe in 76. The title was translated "For a Fistful of ... Onions". Could never forget this flicker! Onions bring a big smile to my face ever since :D . Brilliant Satire about an otherwise SAD, SAD world. Who would have thought it was going to be actual ... globally ... in the 3rd millennium?

Not finding it back home, I thought it was censored - no pun intended - but browsing Franco Nero on Google is mum about "Cry, Onion!" ... I Had to use my broken Italian to find it on EU sites. Today I found it on IMDb - may God Bless you for bringing it home :) Here we sorely need good, healthy, sarcastic satire - it's the most effective gadget of TODAY'S SURVIVAL KIT. And onions. Plenty of non GMO CryOnions ... What else would wake us up and get us to recover from this economic depression and impending decadence, if not a good serving of genuine daily ... LAUGH :D

I found this in a second-hand shop that had a VCR and TV to preview the used tapes. From the bizarre opening shot of the oil field and the director's credit, I knew this was one worth the dollar.

Franco Nero does his best Terrence Hill impression as the character Onion who arrives in town to start an onion farm on a parcel of land he's bought real cheap from a farmer. What he doesn't know is that evil oil magnate Petrus Lamb has bought/stolen all the property around the town due to the vast oil reserves under the town. Lamb has a strange mechanical hand that's serviced by Adolf Hitler! Thru a plot device out of Once Upon A Time in the West, Onion's property is still owned by the orphans of the original farmer who's been killed by Lamb's henchmen. The rest of the movie revolves around the increasingly silly attempts to steal the lease out of Onion's possession.

First of all, the film is very well directed by Enzo Castellari so that already lifts it out of the typical spaghetti western doldrums. The script is very silly with frequent forays into total surrealism. Onion fights with a gun and the many onions that he has hidden in his pants. During a duel he always asks, "Gun or Onion?" The first fight scene with Onion is right out of the first Trinity movie except it mostly done with onions. I suppose it's a parody of sorts, but how do you parody a parody? Martin Balsam is game as the evil Lamb and he seems to be having fun with the mechanical hand he's wearing. I enjoyed the movie for the most part although the overuse of sped-up footage towards the end is a let-down. The English dubbing crew had some fun with this film as they gave Onion a Jimmy Stewart voice and one orphan sounds like Bugs Bunny imitating a gangster. For some reason it works! I wonder what the Italian original sounds like.

Not the greatest but with enough bright spots that I enjoyed the film.

I saw this film for the very first time not too long ago on TV. I thought it was just the typical spaghetti-western, with a lot of gunfights,blood and dead people. Obviously I was wrong.

During the first ten minutes or so it seems a standard European western, but then appears a horse pulling a wagon full of onions where "Onion" (Franco Nero) is hidden. That´s when the fun begins. I´d like to remark from this film the surrealistic details it contains such as the nazi look of the villains, the capacity of our hero "Franco Nero" eating and even drinking! raw onions.

If you have the chance to watch it, just do it. I believe you won´t be disappointed.

It seems as the couple Franco Nero / Enzo G. Castellari always made good films... (Check some of them: "High Crime", "Keoma", and "The shark hunter"). enjoyable films...

I'm sorry for Enzo G. Castellari. This very professional director, very able in stunt scenes and car pursuit, that sometimes in his movies lives for itself, have made this Trinità clone with Franco Nero copying Terence Hill. Is not a bad work 'cause Castellari knows his job but is excessively derivative and I think that in the career of a popular director wasn't a necessary step.