The Stranger and the Gunfighter

The Stranger and the Gunfighter (El Karate, El Colt y El Impostor) (1974)

Runtime: 96 minutes (at least that's the version commonly available)

Directed by: Antonio Margheriti

Starring: Lee Van Cleef, Lo Lieh, Patty Shepard, Femi Benussi, Karen Yeh

From: Several companies, including Shaw Brothers, believe it or not

Here's a movie I've known about for a few years now; it has several different titles but this is the most popular one. It's a curious film all around and I explain it below in the Letterboxd review I copied and paste here. I'll return tomorrow night.

Recently I realized that it had been a few months since I had seen a Shaw Brothers film. I decided to watch something that wasn't their hallmark (period martial arts films) and I plan on watching a few of the other genres they dabbled in, such as horror or in this case, spaghetti Western (yes). It depends on what I can find. Technically, they were one of five companies (representing four countries in total) who made this and I presume their contributions didn't go too far beyond providing Lo Lieh and Karen Yeh and allowed for a small part of the movie to be filmed in Hong Kong but to me it still counts.

I've known of this movie for a few years and it sounds like something right in my wheelhouse so I am not sure why I have put watching it off. I mean, look at the elements involved:

* The two leads are the incredible duo of Lee Van Cleef and Lo Lieh
* It's a kung fu spaghetti Western. And yes, Shanghai Noon wasn't the first by any means to do a martial arts Western
* The director is Antonio Margheriti
* Ladies such as Femi Benussi and Patty Shepard are involved
*The plot-no kidding-is the hunt for pieces of a treasure map... which happened to be tattooed on the asses of four different women!

I had high expectations for it. They were perhaps too high but this story set in California (but mostly filmed in Spain) is quite wacky, not to mention pretty odd. The man who tattooed the map on those posteriors... he's a short homely middle-aged bald dude named Wang. There's comedy throughout. It's more about that and the silliness of what the heroes have to do rather than the action scenes and there isn't too much kung fu until the ending so if you're expecting that...

There's also such things as a preacher who murders people, a seemingly indestructible Native American, and Van Cleef SINGING. He also spends the last part of the movie shirtless so if you want to see a man in his late 40's nude from the waist up... It's wacky but it's not too over the top. Maybe it should have been but I still enjoyed this oddity for what it was.