When we were the right hand of the Devil

Terence Hill will resurrect his character Trinity and awaken nostalgia for spaghetti westerns.

Clarin

By Horacio Convertini

July 18, 2024

I read a piece of news that activates nostalgia in me: Terence Hill is alive and at 85 years old he plans to return to the cinema with a new film of Trinity, that friendly gunslinger who was "the Devil's right hand".

Born in Venice as Mario Girotti, Hill was one of the great stars of the so-called spaghetti western, a variant with which the Italians revitalized, in the sixties, a genre that was languishing in the United States.

Tall, blond and blue-eyed, he gave cowboy films an unprecedented tone of comedy. He teamed up with the wide Bud Spencer (Carlo Pedersoli), a former Olympic swimmer who represented bad mood and brute strength. The couple's first film, "They Call Me Trinity" (1970), was a sensation. The kids of that time loved to see this dusty version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza that solved wrongs with gunshots and pineapples in a Far West invented in the plains of Almeria, Spain.

The spaghetti western arose out of necessity. Epic films of gladiators and Greek myths, which Italians filmed like sausages with Hollywood money, began to lose popularity. Dollars, which do not know about love but about interest, stopped coming. And the producers activated the radar of desperation.

They noticed that westerns filmed in the Alps with a local cast worked in Germany and they looked that way. The Roman Sergio Leone, who had been assistant director (uncredited) to Vittorio de Sica in "Bicycle Thieves" and who had just made his directorial debut in 1960 with "The Colossus of Rhodes", threw himself into the monstrosity.

Leone adapted (that is to say) a film by the Japanese Akira Kurosawa ("Yojimbo"), which in turn was inspired by a canonical novel of the American noir genre ("Red Harvest", by Dashiell Hammett). He called Gian Maria Volonté, an Italian actor who played Shakespeare in the theater, for the role of the villain, and for the role of the hero, Clint Eastwood, an American actor who looked like James Dean and who starred in the TV series "Rawhide". He riveted the exotic alchemy with the music of his friend Ennio Morricone.

The film, which was shot in the mountains of Madrid, was called "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964) and was more than a success: Leone consecrated a subgenre, an aesthetic, a narrative and a way of musicalizing and even recreating the bullets.

But let's go back to Terence Hill. His film that I remember the most is not from the Trinity saga. It was called "My Name Is Nobody" (1973) and he played a young man who was going for the fame of a gunslinger already short-sighted and eager for retirement, the great Henry Fonda.

Written by Leone, directed by one of his disciples (Tonino Valerii) and with Morricone's invincible soundtrack, one left the cinema whistling the music of the final duel and taking the coin out of the bus as if it were a Colt. That Trinity returns takes me back to those years: when in the cobblestone streets of Buenos Aires we dreamed of being the Devil's right hand.