Today's entry is a lil something about Italy. But it's not about Maserati, Armani, pasta or soccer.
You're probably too young to recognize the clip below. It's a trailer of an old film. Even I was too young to watch it in a theatre.
Before there was Antonio Banderas' Desperado, the western spaghetti I grew up with were those movies starred in by Terence Hill and Bud Spencer as a tandem. Their comedy was like Gibson and Glover in Lethal Weapon.
Terence and Bud spoke Italian because they are. But the movies shown in Manila were already dubbed so that fuorilegge means bandit or that imbroglione means cheater.
Germany loved the Hill-Spencer tandem as well. Their viewers had their own dub. The clip below will be heard in Deutsch.
There are things in their movies that need no translation. Whisky will always be whisky, as it is with poker, pistol and the saloon mama dressed in moulin rouge outfit who'd soon be seen as a paid backscrubber of a sweaty and grimey cowboy who's rode off to the sunset so many times that he needed to get his hardened ass off the saddle and into a hot tub.
Terence Hill's face will remind you of Robert Conrad, the original actor who played Jim in Wild Wild West. By then, I was young enough to be allowed to watch it on TV per Sunday afternoon before mom and dad would take us all to Church.
They made other movies that didn't require them to wear cowboy suits. Of the 18 films they did together, there must have been about 3 classic spag.
Had I actually been to a cinema to watch them? The answer is no. I was not riped enough to tag along with my brothers. But I was lucky to catch a few films shown on TV.
I remember their names on movie billboards in EDSA. Their movie posters were also on the movie page of the Bulletin Today (renamed Manila Bulletin). I knew this because the movies were on the same section as the fun page.
The clip below is in its original format so much so that when Bud Spencer orders, "Take off your belts," you'd hear it as,"Tolga le vostre cinghie" .
In cowboy films, Terence is known for his slap-you-before-I-draw. It's literally pulling up a fast one on an enemy, an act that Jun Aristorenas and FPJ adopted in their own spag films.
Terence slaps. Bud pounds. Nothing much to their acting, really. And there is indeed more to Italian films than this old pair like Ennio Moricone, Monica Belluci and Anna Falchi.
They're classic italian brutes, a perfect shadow of the Roman ruins circa 70s.
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kids should know that...
Italy is a destination for immigrants from all over the world. At the end of 2006, foreigners comprised 5% of the population or 2,938,922 persons. The most recent wave of migration has been from surrounding European nations, particularly Eastern Europe, replacing North Africans as a major source of migrants. Around 500,000 Romanians are officially registered as living in Italy, but unofficial estimates put the actual number at double that figure or perhaps even more. (
wikipedia)
