"The Fastest Gun in the West Joins with the Most Brutal Hands in the East!"
Lo Lieh and Lee Van Cleef...anyone else salivating out there?

By the late 70's the blaxploitation film had fallen by the wayside and soon Fred Williamson would be the last man carrying the torch for the black action hero. Similarly, Bruce Lee's death brought about the death of the original Martial Arts Movies wave (at least in the U.S. It would be years before Jackie Chan's Kung Fu antics which would win over most of the world would finally break back into the States.)

Back in the day, though, those two trends affected more than just trends in the movies. Luke Cage (aka. Power Man) would emerge as the first superhero to bring the tenets of the black action hero to the Marvel Universe. Likewise, Daniel Rand (aka. Iron Fist) would be an iconic presence as a martial arts hero in the comics world who would likely only be surpassed in popularity by Shang Chi, the Master of Kung Fu. As their film counterparts had done before them, their popularity waned with the changing of the trend. Iron Fist's series had already been cancelled, and Luke Cage was on his way out. In an attempt to save them them both, an experiment was tried to put the two unlikely heroes together in the same book.

Interestingly, it paid off. The combined effort, Power Man and Iron Fist ran for nearly ten more years which was twice as long as Luke Cage's solo title.

Combining world's like that wasn't a novel idea in the realm of mid- to low-budget filmmaking, (I just wanted to bring up Cage and the Fist.) but neither was it ever as succesful. As the market began to dry, particularly in the U.S., as the three biggest exploitation genres died off, they tried any number of cross-overs to keep the magic alive. Many of the results not only did little favor for either of the genres they combined, but they became some of the most memorable if only for their sheer outlandishness. Movies like Black Samurai, Take a Hard Ride, My Name is Shanghai Joe, and today's review piece....none other than:

The Stranger and the Gunfighter (1974, d. Antonio Margheriti)

The Story: While breaking into a series of vaults, thief Dakota (Lee Van Cleef) accidentally kills wealthy Chinese businessman Wang only to find himself freed from the gallows by Wang's nephew, Ho Kiang (Lo Lieh) who's been forced by a warlord to search for his uncle's treasure, but the clues that they need to follow are tatooed on the backsides of Wang's four former mistresses.

The Review: As usual with many of my reviews, I want you to take a moment to go back and read that last paragraph one more time. Then I want you to look me in the eye and with a straight face tell me that that doesn't sound like a helluva lot of fun.

Ok, ok. Yes, it's very similar, and a whole lot less slick than Shanghai Noon and/or Knights, but it also hit the screens 25 years earlier. Not too mention the fact that it is a lot of fun one way or the other. It's kind of like a cover song, there's always something to the original.

Granted, there are some stupid sound effects to get past each time Ho does any aerial acrobatics. So the sooner you can get over those, the faster you get back to having fun with this one.

Of course you have to keep in mind that I'm praising this film when I tend to hate the more comedic spaghettis. I can't stand the Terence Hill Trinity stuff which everyone else seems to love. And I know I've mentioned here that George Hilton's smiley-face hokey performances take away from what I prefer to be a grim affair. Something about this works though, and I think a lot of that has to do with both the leads playing it straight.

All too true that despite being co-produced with Hong Kong's legendary Shaw Brothers, this movie once again goes through the tired device of the all-knowing vaguely mystical Chinese hero. His different approach always gets him out of bad situations. His logic defeats bad guys in both fights and banter. He whips out the abacus and the acupuncture needles. And in the end, he always teaches our white hero a little something. In all, he's a stereotypical character. Maybe it's Lo Lieh's air of nice-guyness, his almost child-like lack of pretension, or just the general back-and-forth between his character and Van Cleef's that somehow just pulls it off.

Speaking of which, this is perhaps the most passive role I've seen for Van Cleef who is usually proactively shooting someone in these westerns. In this one, Cleef's Dakota is definitely the sidekick as he provides Ho with assistance whether that be in the form of directions or little cultural nuances. Basically, he's either following Ho along on his search, watching him whoop some cowboy @$ while he sits back and has a laugh or a drink. Sure, he occasionally shoots someone, but that's because he's a good sidekick. Naturally, Lee's such a familiar old hand in these movies that he's hard not to like (even when he plays the world's most evil scumbags, there's still some familiar charm to him [see The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly]).

Considering this is the same director who would later make Yor: The Hunter from the Future and Cannibal Apocalypse, Italian exploitation maestro Margheriti keeps this to being a remarkably straight forward affair. The only real excess which also happens to be really cool, in a strange gothic way, is the villain Hobitt's (?!?) mode of transportation: a giant horsedrawn church on wheels. I would have included the super strong Native American in those excesses if not for the natural comic book tendencies of this movie in the first place. Margheriti does a fine job of pacing out the violence and the jokes along a steady narrative. In places, he also proved to be one of the better non-Asian directors at catching martial arts action. If not for that damned sound effect when Ho jumps around.

Is it a great spaghetti western? No.

Is it a great kung fu flick? No.

Is it a fun movie with a goofy premise that you just don't see anymore? Yes.

It's something that strikes me about these crazy Italian flicks like this one. It's their infinite watchability. They're rarely great movies, but they're so easy to relax with and enjoy. You can see why this stuff played so well on UHF channels on TV for years. That may not seem like much of a statement, but when you think about all the pretentious crap that plays in our theaters today, it is something. In the past couple of years there's been quite a few decent movies that have breezed by that I may have even liked, but I can't chill watch them again when I have nothing else to do. This one I could probably pop on any old time.

So like I said: If this one ever hits the video stores or you catch it on cable one day, kick your feet up, grab a snack, and just let this one play out. Your bound to have a pretty decent time that'll be more satisfying than the $9 crap you could be suffering through at the theater.

Cheers.