They call me Trinity Review

From The Spaghetti Western Database
Revision as of 11:40, 30 September 2012 by Tiratore Scelto (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search


They call me Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità)

33ah35s-1-.jpg
THEY CALL ME TRINITY (1970)
Cast:
  • Terence Hill
  • Bud Spencer
  • Farley Granger
  • Steffen Zacharias
  • Luciano Rossi
  • Gisela Hahn
  • Remo Capitani
  • Elena Pedemonte

Director:

  • Enzo Barboni

View Database page

The king is dead, long live the king! When all thought the spaghetti western was dead, this film changed everything. They call me Trinity made a star out of Terence Hill, a blue-eyed, good-looking matinee idol, and Bud Spencer, a former swimming champion, who had represented his country at the Olympics. The film did for the comedy western what A Fistful of Dollars had done for the die hard spaghettis : it created a subgenre of its own, spawning an entire army of false sequels, loose sequels, pale imitations, lame imitations and some nice sequels and colorful imitations as well.

Review Trinity1 02.jpg


The story of They call me Trinity is surprisingly traditional: it's a about two men coming to the aid of a defenseless group of people who are threatened by a corrupt land owner and his henchman. Viewers who know anything about westerns, will know that it's a story that has been told numerous times before, and also that it's more American than Italian in nature. What made this movie look so fresh, was the presentation of the two Trinity brothers as all but ideal American heroes: they're unwashed and unshaved, they have very bad table manners, they're lazy, unreliable, and most of all they're crooks, small-time crooks maybe, but crooks, with no wish to repent. In other words: They call me Trinity combined a typical American western story with two typical Italian western heroes, suffused it with a comical sauce and created a winning new western dish, in Italy called fagioli westerns (fagioli = beans)

Review Trinity1 01.jpg
Review Trinity1 03.jpg


In this first movie we're introduced to Trinity (Hill), a good-for-nothing, lazy and ever-smiling gunslinger who accidently discovers that his fat, grumpy, horse-thieving brother Bambino (Spencer) has become sheriff of a small western town. Bambino has of course taken the place of the real sheriff because he wants to steal the horses of rancher Harrison. To keep his smiling brother happy, Bambino makes him deputy, a particularly stupid decision. This guy Harrison tries to chase a group of Mormons who have settled in the valley, but they get help from Trinity and Bambino. The good-for-nothing, but good-looking Trinity has his eyes on two pretty Mormon girls, who have told him that their religion permits polygamy. Trinity is so fast with his guns and fists, and Bambino so strong, that all plans of the corrupt Harrison are frustrated. Eventually it comes to the settlement of all accounts in a massive fistfight between the two warring factions.


Hill & Spencer had made a trilogy with another director, Giuseppe Colizzi, and were already minor stars at home. They had discovered that audiences loved the contrast between the blue-eyed Casanova and the grumpy fatso, so this was emphasized. The film has some excellent jokes: Hill shooting three opponents behind his back without looking over his shoulder, the Mexican bandit leader who can't knock out Spencer and is knocked out himself all the time, the Mormons who discover in the bible that there's also a time to … yes, brothers: fight! Those fights are among the most elaborated ever filmed, and were the result of the years of experience of the Italian stuntmen with barroom brawls in more serious spaghetti westerns. Virtually every stuntman available was present in the movie.


People all over the world loved the movie. In Italy it was only beaten at the box-office that year by Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, according to Barboni only because the tickets for that movie cost more than for his own movie. It was also successful in America (especially in theatres in the Mid-West and California), were it engrossed some 8 million $, quite impressive for what basically was an European B-movie (it had only cost some 300.000 $!) It created a comedy western craze in Italy and some other European countries. In Germany the soundtrack of some of the previous collaborations - as well as several other people’s westerns (!) - was made more facetious to make them at least sound like comedy westerns (the so-called Klamauk versions).

The spaghetti western was dead - Long live the fagioli western!


--By Scherpschutter

Page Design by dicfish

Cookies help us deliver our services. By using our services, you agree to our use of cookies.