Any Gun Can Play

George Hilton never really grabs me like Franco Nero or Clint Eastwood, but this is a great outing for him. Basically rippin off the Django/man With No Name and doing a damn good job. The opening sequence of this gem is a classic, and the cat n mouse games that follow are a delight to watch. Fans of the genre will be in heaven.

Three men looking for a hidden loot , they are : A cynic bounty hunter (George Hilton) going after the reward , a Mexican outlaw named Montero (Gilbert Roland) with a band of fanatic hoodlums (Ignacio Spalla, Riccardo Pizzuti, Jose Torres, among others) , besides a greedy bank clerk (Eddie Byrnes) and an insurance agent (Gerard Herter).

This is a cool Spaghetti Western in Leone style . The movie takes parts from ¨For a few dollars more¨ and especially ¨The good , the bad and the ugly¨ . The film is plenty of action , fun , shootouts and results to be a surprise-filled entertainment . The picture contains funny gun-play along with fist-fight very much in the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer territory . The violence isn't crude but it suits light-weight comedy fun , though no silly slapstick like the ¨Trinity and Bambino¨ series . The movie is starred by habitual Spaghetti as George Hilton (Sartana) , Gilbert Roland (Sonora, Goldseekers , Johnny Hamlet), Edd Byrnes (Seven Winchester for a massacre) , besides ordinary secondaries : Pedro Sanchez or Ignacio Spalla, Gerard Herter , Sal Borgese , Jose Torres.. The picture displays crazy characters with twists plots and is quite amusing . In addition , a really catching score musical by Francesco De Massi . Enzo G. Castell in his first film and original Western makes a nice camera work with usual zooms and clever choreography on the showdowns , after he made more Western as ¨Johnny Hamlet¨ , ¨Tedeum¨ , ¨Kill them everybody and came back alone¨, ¨Seven Winchester for a massacre¨ , ¨Cipolla colt¨ and the masterpiece : ¨Keoma¨. Some of them are serious , others are goofy and plenty of slapstick and slapdash . This is a straight-forward story , funny in lots of parts and it will appeal to Spaghetti Western fans.

"Any Gun Can Play" (1967), directed by Enzo G. Castellari, is a very good pastiche of Spaghetti Westerns, especially Leone's. The first half is great, which, apart from the opening which is a direct nod to "For a Few Dollars More", with Monco, Colonel Douglas Mortimer and El Indio lookalikes walking into a ghost-town and then promptly killed by a Bounty Hunter called "The Stranger", is entirely serious, with great gunfights (especially the train-robbing scene), fast and furious action and nice performances from Gilbert Roland, George Hilton and (who manages well, considering that he is badly miscast) Edd Byrnes. But then, when the film reaches the half-way mark, there is a jokey fist-fight between Hilton and Byrnes. It isn't very funny, and is the weakest part of the film, but it throws everything you have seen previously in a new light. You realise that in fact the whole thing is a spoof of Spaghetti Western conventions, and in retrospect, the first half is so well done that you completely miss this spoof undercurrent. What now follows is a more obvious parody, with even some acrobatic jumping around from Brynes that predates all those seventies Circus Westerns. The ending, a complete send-up of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" climax, is very well done, as in other hands it could have been very silly. So, a pretty fun Spaghetti Western, that doesn't take itself too seriously. I would recommend it to anyone who likes Spaghetti Westerns.

There's a great use for Any Gun Can Play.

As I age I get weirder and quirkier. I have begun to embrace my second-half-of-middle-age strangeness, but I have trouble embracing a grumpy prostate. A few days ago I was hurting and the Flomax and Ibuprofen hadn't been metabolized yet. I needed to take my mind off my owies so I popped in Any Gun Can Play, a second half of a Digiview twin spin.

Ya know, I never thought I'd say this, but a cheapjack spaghetti-western knockoff, filled with bad acting, worse dubbing, and Edd Byrnes' Mount Rushmore hair is damned near the perfect way for a middle-aged man to stop fretting about his prostate.

And I timed it perfectly--the drugs kicked in right about the "third reel."

I watched this today after not having seen it since it was released in 1968. It was a lot of fun, but admittedly it is not the equal of the Sergio Leone works, or even those of Sergio Corbucci - although both are spoofed here.

In the opening scene we see a trio that has two resembling Eastwood and Van Cleef's characters in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and another who is clearly based on Franco Nero's Django. Clertainly Castellari is letting us know early in the film that he's going to have some fun at the expense of what had preceded him in the spaghetti western canon. George Hilton's bounty killer dispatches these three and we're informed that his next target is Monetero, played by veteran Gilbert Roland, then in his early 60s and still the epitome of machismo elegance. At this point he had been in the business for 40 years, and with the slightest of gestures, blows away his younger cast mates.

Monetero and his gang rob a gold shipment from a train loaded with the cavalry as well as Edd Byrnes playing a bank employee. Kookie, Kookie, lend me some money. His gang gets away with the loot, but the money gets away from Monetero. The bank man is after Monetero for the gold shipment, Hilton's character ("They call me the Stranger" - a nod to Tony Anthony's films?) is after him for the reward, and the rest of the film play out a series of crosses and double-crosses, all with a fair dose of humor.

The film even anticipates some of the later spaghetti westerns - particularly Gianfranco Parolini's "Sabata" films which also relied heavily on circus-styled gymnastics. Byrnes' character Clayton gets into some Faibanksian-styled gymnastics fights with both Hilton and later about six members of Monetero's gang, and then later both Byrnes and Hilton take on many of the same gang in a bathhouse.

None of this is to be taken any more seriously than Terence Hill's antics in MY NAME IS NOBODY, it's probably just that this early in the game, it wasn't obvious that it was a spoof as the sub-genre was barely around for four years. A scene where Hilton and an insurance man spot each other through binoculars tips its hat to a similar scene in FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, and the overall tale of three men and the search for hidden gold is obviously based on THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY.

But the best homage comes at the end, a face-off among the three main characters that satirizes the similar scene in the latter film. Only the music fails to make the point here, whereas in other scenes the score is appropriate - as long as one keeps in mind that this is just an affectionate spoof, and on its own, it is an appealing film. The leads are more than capable - although the looping is often flat, and the production design quite attractive. Even at 105 minutes, the film moves quickly and never runs out of steam.