Bud Spencer

  • Lo chiamavano Trinità… [They call me Trinity] (1970)

    Lo chiamavano Trinità… [They call me Trinity] (1970)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (YouTube Streaming, August 2020) Ah-ha! If you’re looking for the film that really ignited the career of the Bud Spencer/Terence Hill duo, look further than They Call Me Trinity. The success of God Forgives… I Don’t immediately led to a bigger-budgeted follow-up, more closely tailored to their specific skills than anything else. Accordingly, it made money, got good reviews and left a lasting legacy: Not only a (worse) sequel, but an affirmation that the Spencer/Hill duo was good for box office success—indeed, I can find a few reviews simply calling the duo, “The Trinity Brothers.” It’s easy to see why the film was a success: taking the spaghetti western formula but ensuring that it was accessible to all ages, this is a film that plays to packed houses with a blend of action and comedy. Spencer is easy to like—the teddy-bear act is a lot of fun, while Hill has the Cary Grantesque quality of being uncommonly good-looking while also being willing to plunge into whatever’s needed to get a laugh. Combined with writer-director Enzo Barboni’s intention to tone down the violence of the spaghetti western in order to make it even more broadly accessible, well, this is a film that the whole family will enjoy. Call Me Trinity is also, perhaps, the best of their collaboration—the one to highlight when introducing the duo to new audiences.

  • Non c’è due senza quattro [Double Trouble] (1984)

    Non c’è due senza quattro [Double Trouble] (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) By 1984, the long on-screen partnership between Bud Spencer and Terence Hill was almost over, but both of them were comfortable enough in their on-screen personas that their movies became little more than excuses for comic set-pieces. In Double Trouble’s case, the narrative goes back to the favourite comic trope of doubles—Spencer/Hill playing both rich wimpy characters, and rough-and-tumble doubles hired as decoys due to assassination attempts. It all takes place in Rio de Janeiro for international flavour. The excuse for a plot is enough for the string of gags—both actors are clearly having fun with the highfalutin dialogue and demeanour of the rich guys they’re supposed to replace, and a lot of the film’s comedy has to do with class differences. It’s certainly nothing sophisticated, but the brawls are fun, and fans of the duo get exactly what they’re expecting. While Double Trouble is not their best (although, really, what is their best?), it’s amusing enough to be worth their names on the marquee.

  • Nati con la camicia [Go for It] (1983)

    Nati con la camicia [Go for It] (1983)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) Since Bud Spencer and Terence Hill comedies were a staple of French-Canadian TV when I was a kid, I must have seen Go for It as a boy—and not knowing that this would be one of the last screen appearances for the duo. It is, at least, one of the bigger-budgeted of their films: enough for the Italian production crew to shoot it in Sunny Miami (although there are mountains at some point… in Florida), and for the plot (in which two not-so-respectable men are mistaken for secret agents) to string along a series of large-scale physical gags. Conceptually, some of the stuff is funny—but it’s not quite executed well enough to be even remotely plausible. (A trailer-tractor sequence, in particular, is even more inept than the rest.) As a spy film parody of sorts, Go for It takes a while to get going and it doesn’t end on much of a high note. Fortunately, Spencer and Hill have charm and a good comic rapport… but it’s not enough to overcome an air of facility and over-familiarity with the proceedings. Go for it ends up being a thoroughly mixed bag: funny in spots, implausible most of the time, and a bit cheap for the rest of it.

  • Uno sceriffo extraterrestre… poco extra e molto terrestre [The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid] (1979)

    Uno sceriffo extraterrestre… poco extra e molto terrestre [The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid] (1979)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) Days after watching its sequel, here is The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid to make it all make sense. No, that’s not true—Bud Spencer family movies are not exactly mazes of deceptive plotting, and so this is pretty much getting in 95 minutes what was summarized in the first moments of the sequel. It’s not much more than a cute kids’ adventure featuring Spencer acting as a teddy-bear sheriff protector to an alien incarnated as a likable boy. There’s nothing deep or challenging here, but it can be watched readily enough thanks to Spencer’s fuzzy-bear charm. The numerous comic stunts and silly fights find their intended public. Don’t go looking for Science Fiction in this comedy film chasing Close Encounters of the Third Kind box office numbers. Things are made slightly weirder thanks to the comical use of an alien gadget—and also for having the very Italian Spencer play an American sheriff in Georgia. This being said, the budget for The Sheriff and the Satellite Kid is visibly low, so don’t expect a polished presentation even by 1979 standards. At least it thrives on a rough kind of authenticity.

  • Chissà perché… capitano tutte a me [Everything Happens to Me] (1980)

    Chissà perché… capitano tutte a me [Everything Happens to Me] (1980)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, July 2020) Bud Spencer comedies could get a bit out there, and Everything Happens to Me is at the outer end of what he could get away with: It’s a silly kid’s comedy in which Spencer shares screentime with a young boy playing an extraterrestrial. If the beginning feels unusually rich in plot and efficient in characterization, it’s because it’s a sequel to another movie. Spencer is his usual charismatic teddy-bear self in acting as a protector to the boy and getting into comic action scrapes throughout the film’s herky-jerky plot. It’s all clearly meant to be a succession of set-pieces at the expense of believability—and the low-budget production values don’t help at all. It does get less fun, as the film moves away from broad real-world comedy to more science-fictional content, which cannot be sustained by the budget or the tone of the film. Still, Everything Happens to Me can be fun if your expectations are low, although the film does rely on Spencer’s considerable likability.

  • Banana Joe (1982)

    Banana Joe (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, August 2019) I’m hardly the first one to remark that cultural cross-pollination is weird, especially when looking at how translation allows works to go from one cultural sphere to another. There’s no real reason why a French-Canadian middle-aged man such as myself would be a fan of Italian comedian Bud Spencer, except for a few economic decisions taken in the mid-1970s. For some reason, many Spencer movies (especially those he shot alongside frequent screen partner Terence Hill) were translated in French and become big hits in French Canada, which ensured that they were mainstays of French-Canadian television as well … which explains how I saw a lot of Spencer/Hill movies in the 1980s. It also explains why those very same movies regularly show up even today on Cable TV channels dedicated to older films. So here we are, nearly thirty years later, with me humming the insanely catchy theme song of Banana Joe as I revisit the film. Spencer was a gentle bear of a comedian, and his larger-than-life appearance also translated in an oversized presence in his films. Banana Joe has him (sans Hill) play a friendly, simple-minded banana farmer forced to get out of his comfortable semirural life to seek a permit in the big city. The usual amount of fish-out-of-water hijinks happen, with the protagonist’s innate goodness overpowering the inhumanity and meanness of so-called civilization. (If you want to write a paper exploring the link between this and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, go ahead—it’s not going to hurt anyone.)  Spencer not only plays the lead, but also co-wrote the script, meaning that it clearly plays to his strengths. The result is not surprising in the slightest, but it does have a comforting feel-good quality that’s hard to dislike—although it probably helps if you have a decades-long sympathy for the roles that Spencer played in dozens of formative films. I really cannot reliably tell you if you’re going to enjoy Banana Joe … but it was a great throwback as far as I’m concerned.