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.

Leonard Maltin gave this film a dreaded BOMB rating in his 1995 Movie and Video Guide. What film was he looking at? Kid Vengeance or God's Gun are bombs. This film is a delight. It is fantastic. It is literate. It is well mounted. It is beautiful photographed, making a brilliant use of colors. Right from the opening scene the film grabs your attention and tips you off that this film is a well-done satire of the whole Spaghetti Western genre. The film is played for laughs from the beginning to the end with homages to Douglas Fairbanks, 77 Sunset Strip, and the famous showdown in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Edd Byrnes, George Hilton, and Gilbert Roland work brilliantly together to make the satire work. It is too bad Mr. Maltin rated this film so poorly as it is undeserved. One can only guess as to his reason. I suspect that he missed the point of the movie entirely and was expecting something more serious than this film is meant to be. Kudos belong to everyone involved in this project. This film is a little gem waiting to be discovered by people who care about literate movies and appreciate satire.

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.