Saturday, March 18, 2023

Terence Hill returns to the Western: "Take off Don Matteo's clothes, call me back Trinity"

 


Chronist

by Silvio Prudentino

March 17, 2023

Hill announced it himself in a long interview with the Corriere: Terence Hill is about to return to being "Trinity" again in another western film. A genre that "I didn't want to shoot anymore, I thought it was useless". What convinced him was "a book with the true story of an Italian nun who emigrated at the end of the 1800’s to America from the Ligurian hinterland with her peasant and very poor family".

Beyond the touching story of this woman who alone and "from Cincinnati" has decided "to go to the West", he is asked about the role of Trinity in this true story that will inspire the film. "You see Trinity on her famous "litter" and then she, the nun, surrounded by three menacing cowboys. He realizes that she is in danger and saves her from those three."

This is the story, from which the new film "entitled “Trinity, the Nun and the Gun” is born. Where the gun is Billy the Kid because she really met Billy the Kid in her life." It is not a hoax, Mario Girotti told it in person at the "tender" age of 84, with a great desire to do iy. To the point that "we have already been working on the script for 18 months, among various difficulties as is normal".

Filming will begin in the beloved Abruzzo this summer. "I will also direct the spaghetti western of Trinity that is intertwined with real characters from the West like Billy the Kid. The nun in the film is called Blandina, the real name was Rosa Maria Segale".

Terence Hill, from Western to Western: From the beginning and to the end of his career in the same way, "they hired me to take over when the actor who was to play the cat was injured".

It therefore becomes impossible not to enter into the merits of his films that have opened the doors of success. Before 1967, before he became Terence Hill, Mario Girotti had already taken part in many films. However, when he was in Yugoslavia with the crew of a "German film about the Nibelungen", he approached "a Roman Mario Brega" who said: "You don't know what's happening in Rome, they're shooting a western full of actors, they're all crazy".

He realized that he might risk losing "the western bus" and decided to come to Rome. He met Giuseppe Colizzi who hired him for the film "The Dog, the Cat and the Fox", which later became "God Forgives... I Don't!" He came to replace the interpreter of Cat (Peter Martell) who "had quarreled with his girlfriend and had broken his foot". A story that we know well, but every time the actor fills it in with more details. They looked at him and the producer suggested, "And take him! Don't you see it? He has blue eyes, you put a hat on his head and he's like Franco Nero!"

The anecdote about "Sergio Leone, Roman, disenchanted who cried like a child"

"I am reminded of the days I spent with Sergio Leone, a friend I miss so much. We were shooting “My Name is Nobody”, and we watched in slow motion the scene of the wild bunch of cowboys coming together at full speed. That's when he took me by the hand and we went to a dark area of the set, where I could barely see his face. He broke the silence and said to me with a very serious face on which I noticed that tears were falling: "This is the western". Seeing that Roman Leone, brusque, disenchanted, who could be moved by the impulse of freedom of the cowboys, of the hero of the West, a character greater than life itself, made me understand that there was something supernatural, mystical precisely in that vision of the world. Which from that moment also became mine".

Terence Hill


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