Y después le llamaron el magnífico

The Man from the East. My husband and I along with another couple saw this movie when it was originally released at the theater in the 1970's. We have never forgotten it. We all thought it was extremely hilarious! We have been trying to find in on video for the last 10 years because we thought it was one of Terence Hill's best, and we are big fans of his. We hope it will be released soon on video.

This Western comedy deals with the young man, Sir Thomas (Terence Hill), he's a dandy from East who goes to the West following the last wish his deceased father . His mentors are a threesome sympathetic crooks , Bull , Holly Joe and Monkey (Gregory Walcott , Harry Carey Jr, Barto). The cocky Thomas carries a bicycle and wearing elegant clothes . The veteran friends teach him the West manners and training him for shooting . Thomas Moore must fight against a nasty enemy named Morton (Ricardo Pizzuti ) who is jealous his girlfriend (Yanti Somer) , daughter of a land baron (Enzo Fiermonte) falling in love for the ingenious young.

The film contains action-Western , brawls , shootouts , fist-play , humor with tongue-in-cheek and results to be pretty bemusing . It's an entertaining film with enjoyable comedy in the wake of Trinity and Bambino , in fact , is unofficially regarded as the third part of the Trinità Trilogy . Agreeable main cast with a likable Terence Hill (though I miss Bud Spencer) as a naive East young man and Yanti Somer (Trinity is still my name) as a gorgeous girl looking for the dreamt prince riding on a white horse . Furthermore , Harry Carey Jr , as a nice preacher , he's an usual secondary of John Ford films , Gregory Walcott as a tough illiterate and , of course , Ricardo Pizzuti , Hill's habitual antagonist and whom receives the knocks and kicks . Adequate cinematography by Giordani and jolly musical score including songs by the usual Guido and Maurizio De Angelis . This is a French-Italian co-production , mostly produced by Alberto Grimaldi (PEA Productions) , famous producer of ¨Dollars trilogy¨ by Sergio Leone. The motion picture was well directed by Enzo Barboni or E. B. Clucher . He was a notorious cameraman , including classical Spaghetti Western (Django , Goobye Texas , Hellbenders) , but with the hit of ¨Trinity is my name¨ left it and turned to film-making, and directed the following ¨Trinity is still my name¨ and the third outing ¨Trinity and Bambino, the legend lives on¨, plus other Hill and Spencer vehicles .

This is, except perhaps for Peckinpah's "Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid", my favorite movie at all. It's biggest quality is its completeness in almost every respect. Completeness in its themes, in its means, and a glorious cast.

It's a film most of all about friendship (I most often think of the scene where monkey, usually the most 'rude' of the protagonists, eagerly grasps the last letter of their dead friend, and then, realizing he can't read at all, is forced to pass the letter to Holy Joe, but in fact the friendship theme is present in the whole movie), about the antagonism of freedom and civilization, about the need and the struggle to find and defend your own position towards everything surrounding you (the 'star' to follow), about how dreams and reality can influence each other (remember the scene of Candida experiencing the man of her dreams riding towards her in a gracious slow motion, while Terence Hill in fact cusses his half-dead horse), about technological progress, it's consequences, and about almost every other theme that has ever been dealt with in 80 years of western history.

The movie's means are comedy, satire, drama, buddy movie, a really great musical score by Guido & Maurizio de Angelis, and all style elements of the classical western.

The cast is superb, creating at least half a dozen unique characters you can root on; unfortunately with one exception: Yanti Somer's lousy performance as Candida.

Another wonderful thing about this movie, is that it doesn't condemn any of its characters; everyone has his place in the film's world and gets his respect by script, direction and cast: the protagonists as well as the whores, the 'villains', the bounty hunters and the jailers. By the way: This quality also characterizes most films by Sam Peckinpah.

Pretty good Terrence Hill movie. I watched it on the Starz premium network; but there, it is titled "Man from the East"; and the dialog is all in English. I could not find that title on IMDB so I matched the DVD cover art to this movie.

I must admit, this was not the worst Terence Hill film I've ever seen but certainly one of his worst ones. The jokes are not too frequent and there is too much made of the romance. For me the highlights of his career are still the movies he made with Bud Spencer. Some of those are really hilarious. On his own I find Terence Hill not to be too entertaining. His best solo works is Renegade.

6 out of 10

P.s.: I watched the german dubbed version (as I always do) for these films are hard to come by, plus I find the voices and the dialogues much better in German than I do in Italian