Man of the East

A young English gentleman comes west to inherit a ranch. His name is Sir Thomas and he cannot ride, shoot or throw a punch. Three old friends of his father decide to make a man of him. What follows is the story of three rough men trying to teach and one dandy trying to learn. The subject is not the West but a personality being rebuilt by other people. Everything Thomas learns is an imitation, and the best thing about the film is that he wins in the end by his own method. The form belongs to the Italian comedy western: long fist fights, exaggerated sound effects, next to no deaths. After the success of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, the genre had established its own rules. Enzo Barboni directs, the same filmmaker who set the mould with the Trinity films. This is one of the pictures Hill carried without Spencer, and the entire comic load is on him. That the film circulated under different titles in different countries was common for Italian productions of the period. Terence Hill leads, with Gregory Walcott and Yanti Somer in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies Italian comedy westerns. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a real western; there is deliberately no sense of danger and everything resolves into a joke.