Hello!

We’ve got some good video clips from an Internet Archive link found by Michael McQuarrie: Super-8 home movies of the filming of a Tony Anthony Spaghetti western from 1975, taken by his girlfriend Diane Dobronte.

“Spaghetti Western 1975”
The action at first looks like two separate movies, one a Clint Eastwood imitation — and then a costume battle movie in historial Spain. Fortunately, I had Italo western source Lee Broughton to tell me what was going on. He wrote from the middle of a heat wave in England:

Hi Glenn, Yes, this is Ferdinando Baldi’s Get Mean from 1975. It starts with Anthony’s ‘Stranger’ in the West. He takes on a mission to escort a princess (Diana Lorys) back to her homeland in Spain. Then there’s some kind of a flip through a time warp, and he winds up in an earlier era, in conflict with barbarians, etc, as seen in the Super-8 battle footage. The main face seen at 1:44, 3:04, 5:04 is I believe actor David Dreyer.

The IMDB blurb reads, “A wisecracking gunfighter is hurled through time and space as he escorts a Spanish Princess back to her homeland while contending with barbarians, Moors, evil spirits, a raging bull, and a maniacal Shakespeare-quoting hunchback.”

 

The fort was known as Fuerte el Condor. It was built for John Guillermin’s Lee Van Cleef / Jim Brown Euro-Western El Condor (1970) and appeared in several films after that. The IMDB lists ’em:

Fuerte El Condor in Film.
The Western town at the end is now known as Mini Hollywood. It is of course the town of El Paso that Carlo Simi designed and built for For a Few Dollars More. The well-remembered El Paso bank building comes into view at one point. Great footage! — Lee

And this once again allows me to plug Lee’s book The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film.

 

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And … since we’re  halfway through 2024  it’s time to trot out a pile of package covers and review links to favored discs we’ve reviewed in the first half of the year. Jeez, life is passing fast, isn’t it?

There are a lot of them — a great many really good movies and impressive restorations have showed up here at CineSavant, and as always we’re eager to promote them. I’m much obliged to reviewers Charlie Largent and Lee Broughton, for their high quality contributions to the review roster.

They’re in the order they were covered, starting with the first of January. Each image is a link. I’d be ready to see any of these shows again, no hesitation …

See you in July.

 

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson

 

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Tuesday June 25, 2024