Amigo!... Mon colt a deux mots à te dire

Coming too late in the Italian Western cycle to get a significant American release, this tiresome Bud Spencer vehicle tries to be picaresque, as the big lug wanders around having borin on-adventures. A cute young boy is thrown in for sentimental value.

In a parallel world where Hollywood big-screen Westerns had not gone out of style, it could have been perhaps a homegrown vehicle for Dan Blocker to provide old-0fashioned family entertainment following his meteoric success starring on tv in "Bonanza". But as ersatz cornball entertainment it comes up as zero.

Despite having a great cameraman Aldo Tonti, who shot epics like "Barabbas" and classics like Fellini's "Nights of Cabiria", it's a mess, with annoying, inappropriate music and even some dubbed dialog that echoes.

This is a funny spoof about several Spaghetti clichés with relentless comedy and parodying usual Western events that sometimes becomes stale . This is a good entertaining juvenile for Bud Spencer fans , as he's delightful in a fraternal story . It packs action, fist-play, sniping, slapdash , humor with tongue-and-cheek and is quite amusing . It deals with Coburn (Bud Spencer or Carlo Perdesoli) an insouciant , bumbling drifter who breaks out from prison and attempts to right wrongs . He embarks on his getaway and he gets stuck a ten years old little boy (Renato) . The boy's uncle dies, leaving a house , useless land to the child but is actually plenty of petroleum that is coveted by a priest-sheriff-judge (Francisco Rabal) and his hoodlums (Salvatore Borghese , Riccardo Pizzuti) . Hiram Coburn oblivious to risks and hopeless odds endure mishaps adventures and he join forces with the child to rout nasty gunmen . Meanwhile, the gunfighter Sonny Bronston (Jack Palance) going out the chase of Coburn to marry his sister (Dany Saval) and the baddies want to take the rich lands.

This release has some cool and several hilarious moments , though the Terence Hill-Bud Spencer duo films are much better , such as ¨They call me trinity¨, ¨Trinity is still my name¨ and ¨Truoblemakers¨ . Good for laughs as well as lots of shootouts and fist-play . The film isn't always good , sometimes is fresh and diverting and on a couple of memorable occasions , it's frankly delicious . The flick belong to the sub-genre that Bud Spencer played in which he has as partners some sympathetic children , as ¨Supersheriff¨, ¨Banana Joe¨, ¨Flatfoot¨ and ¨Aladdin¨. The film displays a wide plethora of secondary actors usually seen in Spaghetti genre as Sal Borghese , Luciano Pigozzi or Alan Collins , Robert Camardiel as an old drunk and Ricardo Pizzuti , the latter usual in Hill-Spencer flicks . The movie displays innumerable jokes , laughter , and slapstick , though relies heavily about the continuous relationship between the tired gunslinger and the orphaned boy . Enjoyable but silly screenplay Ernesto Gastaldi and Rafael Azcona . Catching musical score with noisy songs by Luis Enrique Bacalov who subsequently would win Oscar for ¨The postman¨ . This motion picture was professionally directed by Maurizio Luzidi . Although Maurizio couldn't be deemed an "A"-list director, his movies had a professionalism and a verve that many of those made by his fellow B directors lacked . He was a fine editor and also filmed detective thrillers , Giallo , comedy and even a horror film or two . He directed two Western more as ¨La grand Rapina del West¨ with George Hilton and Jack Betts and ¨Pecos¨ with Robert Woods , and even made films with international cast as ¨Sweet people¨ with Roger Moore and Stacy Keach and ¨The last chance¨ with Elli Wallach and Ursula Andress . His greatest conquest was the edition of ¨Don Quijote¨ by Orson Welles . Rating : 5,5 . Acceptable , passable but average . It is a middling Western story in which gibing the Spaghetti genre , plenty of fights and shoot'em up . As the director Mauricio Lucidi is uninspired and the ending is pretty predictable .

I like spaghetti westerns, and I also like Bud Spencer movies. So I thought I would like this spaghetti western starring Bud Spencer (as well as Jack Palance.) Unfortunately, I have to report that even if you like spaghetti westerns and/or Bud Spencer, chances are you'll find this movie a bore like I did. The movie has very little story, and it moves at an unbelievably slow crawl. The comedy is mostly lame, though Bud's instant charisma lifts the humor from level zero, even though Bud seems to be doing this movie in his sleep. Jack Palance gnashes his teeth so much that he seems to be in pain doing this movie. And the director often shoots the actors so that the tops of their heads are cut off at the top of the screen! (The pan-and-scan presentation of the movie makes things even worse.) Not recommended.

Hiram Coburn is not the typical spaghetti western protagonist. He doesn't use a gun, instead opting to pound his opponents silly with his fists, and although he is as powerful as an ox, he is mellow and laid back to an annoying degree. He takes some getting used to, but by the end of the film I found myself liking this character. Jack Palance plays Sonny, an eccentric gunslinger (what Palance does best). He is very entertaining, and I would have liked to have seen more of him in the film. The weirdest thing about him is that his accent keeps changing. Sometimes he sounds like he is from the southeastern US, other times he sounds Mexican, and other times he sounds like he's from Chicago or something. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but it sure is odd, and odd is a good thing in a spaghetti western.

The music score by Bacalov is excellent. It reminds me of some of Morricone's work, which is pretty much the best compliment one could give.

The story is great, and just about the most original one I've ever seen in a spaghetti western. The movie is a comedy, but not to the extent that it becomes completely unbelievable. I may have given this movie a higher rating if I saw it in a more complete, widescreen version. The version I saw, which I assume is the most commonly available, is approximately 98 minutes long if I remember correctly, and it feels like it's been edited somewhat to shorten its length.

All in all, this one's a must-have if you are a spaghetti western nut like me.

Bud Spencer teams up with a kid in this rather charming, but cheap, Italian comedy Western. Jack Palance provides back up as a cigar chomping, riled brother of a chick Spencer slept with, hoping to marry Spencer off and then kill him (to save face). They all end up in a town run by Sheriff/Judge/Reverend Francisco Rabal, who wants the property that the kid's inherited. But why? That's up to Spencer and the kid to find out, but needless to say the kid's sitting on a fortune.

This mostly harmless western has Spencer as the reluctant hero, protecting a kid he doesn't want to protect and getting into many punch ups. Palance turns up periodically to save Spencer (he wants to kill him himself) and for some reason he's got an accent that turns from Southern to Mexican for no reason whatsoever. Everything's played pretty light (no one gets killed, save for the kid's uncle who has a heart attack).

As with all Italian comedies, the laughs are played very broad (verging on slapstick), and there's unintentional and intentional laughs. There's also a touching moment when the kid starts showing Spencer a bit of affection and you can see Spencer's torn between his duties in looking after the kid and his own need to get out of town. The film also benefits from having one of the least annoying kids in Italian cinema (If you've seen House by the Cemetery or Sweet House of Horrors, you'll know that's no understatement).

The abrupt ending seems to endorse wife-beating, however, so I'm not sure what that was about! Did give me a laugh, though…The print I viewed was awful - drained of colour, pan and scanned, with a weird echo for the first 30 minutes.