Three Westerns with Tony Anthony

            
The Silent Stranger (1968) - 6.0




This is the third in a series of Spaghetti Westerns starring Tony Anthony as the Stranger. The first was A Stranger in Town followed by The Return of the Stranger then this one and finally Get Mean in 1975. The origins of the series are a bit odd. Anthony who is American was in Italy acting in a film when suddenly the Spaghetti Western hit it big and he decided to make one as well. He got the financial backing of Allan Klein of all people. Klein was a legend in the music business having founded ABKCO and later he represented both The Stones and the Beatles at the same time. He ended up being accused by both of ripping them off. In other words a typical agent. Klein was able to get MGM to produce the films and apparently they cut out 30 minutes of this one. For that I thank them. At 90 minutes it starts to wear out its welcome. The first three were directed by Luigi Vanzi though credited as Vance Lewis on the MGM print. He doesn't have a lot of other credits and neither does Anthony.






Basically they take A Fistful of Dollars (or Yojimbo if you prefer) and plop it down in Japan where two rivals in a small dirt poor town are fighting each other for the hand of a Princess and a scroll. Into this walks the Stranger straight out of the American West who tries to play the two groups off against each other. It begins with him in the Yukon where he comes across a Japanese man who is dying from a gun shot wound. He tells the Stranger that if he delivers this scroll to Motori he will be rewarded with $20,000. Having no idea really where Japan is he sets off and gets there months later along with his trusty horse. He gets into nothing but trouble. First captured off the boat - somehow everyone seems to know what he is carrying - he is hauled out to the provinces by a Samurai who has a remarkable resemblance to Kôji Yakusho.






When he gets out to this piss-poor village he soon realizes that there are two factions in play and he sees dollar signs - or in this case gold ryo. Very unsuccessfully for the most part. He keeps getting the crap beaten out of him, a knife through his hand and finally crucified. Why one of them just doesn't kill him is a mystery. Because he keeps coming back to cause them more aggravation. It gets tedious after a while though the final fight makes up for it. Anthony in truth is not the most charismatic nor handsome actor around. He has a slight squint, rarely wins a fight, is a little sneaky and immoral - but he is a survivor. It is all over this Woman-Child Princess who gave me the creeps.




I don't think this ranks very high in the world of Spaghetti Westerns but it was different enough to be interesting. Merging genres from West and East was a novel idea at the time. He researched this film by watching loads of Samurai films. Maybe Yojimbo? He is an anti-hero who can't really kick ass unless he has a gun in his hand. Somehow he ends up on the right side of the moral gray area but more by chance than choice. It seems that MGM delayed the release for seven years for legal reasons. Wherever Klein was there was always litigation. Here is a quote I came across on a website (Spaghetti Western Database) from Anthony regarding that.




"I got back to New York with The Silent Stranger, we screened the picture, everybody loved it and at the same time in the background there was a tremendous fight going on for the power of the MGM. New management got control of the stock, Bob O´Brien was on his way out, Klein ended up in lawsuits with everybody, because they said hands off of Allen Klein, because Allen Klein was supporting Bob O´Brien, so there you are, Tony Antony and the Stranger caught in the middle of a power struggle with the studio. And that´s why The Silent Stranger was shelved for seven years. And then people tried to buy it and another regime came in, and they re-edited it and ruined the picture, took out all the humor, made me come to Hollywood and put that stupid narration over, which was just awful - and that picture was completely wasted. That finished the relationship with MGM. So, I was a victim of power play...“


Get Mean (1975) - 4.0




This is the fourth and last film of The Stranger (Tony Anthony) in the Italian Western series. Cinema should be grateful for that. What a shambolic mess this is. Just dreadful film making on every level - in particular a script that must have been written during an all night drinking contest. Some viewers are so confused that they seem to think The Stranger did a bit of time traveling - I didn't see any evidence of that - just an idiotic notion of bringing in Vikings, Huns, the Spanish and the Moors in the same moment in history. There was no time when that could have happened. I think the script may have been dependent on what costumes they could find as discards from other films. Oh, here are some helmets with horns in them  - Vikings!  Cool. It is directed by Ferdinando Baldi who had a couple Spaghetti Westerns that seem to have some fans - even one with Tony Anthony in which he apparently is a gunslinger Zatoichi titled Blindman. You would never know by this that Baldi had ever directed before. As it comes in at exactly 90 minutes I suspect that there were severe cuts that made the film nearly incomprehensible.






We last saw the Stranger ready to leave Japan in The Silent Stranger (1968) after having nearly killed everyone in a feud between two gangs. We come across him again at the beginning of this film being dragged by his horse into an abandoned rickety town that must have been a set for many other Italian westerns. Here he is offered $50,000 to escort a Spanish Princess back home to regain the throne. Before doing so they are attacked by Vikings. Don't ask. They get to Spain and witness a large scale battle between the Moors who had been driven out of Spain 400 years previously and a Barbarian tribe that had existed in Spain 800 years previously. Give the film credit for having a large group of extras and a couple rented castles.






With their repeating rifles (again indicating this was not time traveling) The Barbarians come out on top and take the Princess prisoner and hang the Stranger by the feet. He of course escapes as he always does to be captured again and again - to be beaten or barbecued. Other weird shit happens like him having hallucinations about ghosts and then an encounter with a bull. At one point he gets blackened by something and freaks out that he has turned black. There is a treasure involved. Appearing also is Lloyd Battista who had a Gatling gun in the previous film and an array of rotating cannons here - he is also guilty of helping write the script. Anthony's brother David Dreyer plays the effete gentleman. I had been thinking of watching the first two films in the series but not until I am down to that and Hallmark films. But Blindman does sound sort of interesting. This is quite bad though and coming some seven years after the third Stranger film was made makes me believe they got the gang together to make this to coincide with the long delayed release of The Silent Stranger.




Blindman (1971) - 7.5



If you can believe in a blind Japanese swordsman, who can kill men by the dozens, then swallowing a blind gunman should not be so difficult. Of course, guns and swords are two very different weapons - one has to be used up close while the other can be used fifty feet away fairly accurately. Hard for a blindman to compete at 50 feet, but the film does it in a way that doesn't totally strain credibility - ok it does - but they don't over do it. This is Tony Anthony taking a break from his The Stranger Western series to make this salute to Zatoichi. You have to expect that of those many Samurai films he watched for The Silent Stranger, a few of them were Zatoichi films. This one is ludicrous and trashy but great fun - so much better than Anthony's collaboration with the same director Ferdinando Baldi in their later Get Mean. It just reeks of Spaghetti Westerns with Morricone like music from Stelvio Cipriani, who has hundreds of composer credits, every one looking grizzled and in need of a bath, so much dust that you can almost taste it in your mouth, a rundown town full of poor peasants and a tyrant who runs and terrorizes everything with a band of mangy men with no morals.  And copious nudity. So it has everything.




Anthony seems to take pride in making his characters everymen - he isn't handsome. witty, gets the hell beat out of him in every film, doesn't show much common sense but he is one stubborn bastard who won't back down and somehow comes out on top. In this one he is blind - no back story on that - and has a contract to transport fifty women to be married - mail order brides -  and every one of them a knockout. But the women have been stolen by Domingo (Lloyd Batista who was in the last two Stranger films) and are being held in Mexico. So he tracks him down to this raggedy-ass town and politely asks him to hand the women back to him. That doesn't go over well.




But that was just the opening bid. After pretending to be pushed around so he could tell where all the men laughing at him were he guns them all down. These were men of Domingo's brother, Candy. Played by Ringo Starr. This was partially produced by Allen Klein, agent of the Beatles - so he got Ringo a gig - and Ringo is terrific - all grungy and vicious. Things escalate as they always do - the blindman gets tortured - has dynamite tied to his penis - that sort of thing - and the last 30 minutes is a topnotch set piece.