A Stranger in Town (1967)

You won't be disappointed!

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Tony Anthony (which you may know as the titular character of 'Blindman') probably is the most feminine of all SW anti-heroes, and still one of the coolest. He's just so damn relaxed that the coolness comes naturally, there's little of that typical affectation on his part. He is a slouch, stoic but not stilted, he's wearing a pink shirt, has bleached blond hair and there's no sign of any homophobic tendencies (when he shoots a baddie who falls into his lap he doesn't react with either irony or macho behaviour to ensure us how masculine he is). After he got beat up badly he rescues a woman who later wordlessly rides on a horse with him on the back of the horse and her in front, him holding on to her hips to not fall off, but not in any sexual way. In the sequel, 'The Stranger Returns', he's even carrying around a parasol for much of the running time. I find it funny that its movie poster even asks the question: "Is he interested in women?"Despite all that he's a real badass who most of the time is unquestionably more skilled and smarter than any of his enemies. There's no doubt he'll prevail in the end and we still care, we'd even care if he hadn't been beaten up (see sequel), which is a scene that most SWs have to make us care about our anti-hero because most viewers tend not to care about characters who have the upper hand all of the time. It's worth to note that Tony Anthony more than most stars of a movie not only shapes his own character but apparently the films as a whole as a producer and writer. Ever since this film he always starred in the movies he played in, that guy wouldn't play second fiddle to anyone.Dialogue in the film is EXTREMELY sparse, although it doesn't have more action than your average SW. After the first 15 minutes there is a section in the film that is the most essential to the plot and it has the most dialogue. Cut away that 10-minute section and the complete dialogue adds up to maybe 20 lines. The main music theme rocks melancholically and is catchy, arguably it's a bit overused, but this never bothers me in a film if the tune is good. The additional score arrangements are also effective but the film doesn't shy away from silent sections either. Certainly there's nothing special about the film (except that it WORKS), it's just a lot of cool fun. Every bit as good as the surprisingly enjoyable sequel.

There are few films that can demonstrate in a nutshell what spaghetti westerns are about. The particular strength of "Un dollaro tra i denti" is that everything that isn't required was stripped off. Here you get the basic ingredients straight in your face: a mysterious stranger (Tony Anthony) arrives in a town. He is not a hero - his only motivation is money, and he offers the villain (Frank Wolff) a deal. After the deal isn't kept, i.e. the money isn't shared, the stranger will have his revenge. Nobody talks very much, the first minutes are without any dialogue at all. The musical theme is returning again and again, supplying the feeling that whatever is going to happen will be inevitable. Doomed to die with his boots on, Wolff may fire as many bullets with his machine-gun on Anthony as he likes, there's no escape...

Personally, I enjoyed all three of the Anthony (Stranger) movies...I I took them as satire of the Eastwood trilogy...Eastwood smokes cheroots, Anthony rolls cigarettes that unravel in his mouth...Eastwood wears a poncho, Anthony a ratty serape...Eastwoods kills with his six gun, bad guys take Anthony's six gun so he kills with a shotgun...Eastwood is direct, Anthony is sneaky...the list could go on and on...the Anthony trilogy is to the Eastwood trilogy as the James Coborn (Our Man Flint) were to the Sean Connery (James Bond) movies...high quality the Stranger movies were not, campy fun they were...how can you not like a ratty little scoundrel like the stranger, who's always losing his pistol and getting beat up, who looks like a skid row derelict, but somehow, manages to kill all the bad guys in the most inventive of ways...what's not to like...

Making no apologies in borrowing from the Man With No Name mystique, Stranger in Town has wormy Tony Anthony as the poncho clad, nameless drifter. Anthony's Stranger is the Man With No Name equivalent of Frank Stallone in Rocky instead of Sylvester. He is greasy instead of grizzled (literally, he looks like they dunked him in a batch of olive oil before every take.), and doesn't possess the enigmatic presence and deadliness to fully pull off the role. He lacks the confident squint of Eastwood, the cold eyes of Franco Nero, and the reptilian stare of Van Cleef. The Strangers saunters into a town overrun by bandits waiting to steal a cache of gold. He convinces their stock villain bandit leader to let him help them by impersonating officers and easily getting the gold handed over. The plan is successful and there is the subsequent double cross by the bandits, the Stranger narrowly escapes and follows the bandits to their hideout- this is something they clearly see, and he makes clearly known, yet they don't kill him? Basically he gets captured again, beaten up, narrowly escapes (again), and then backtracks to the abandoned town for the big showdown (making it pretty obvious the low budget, only two real locations, both abandoned towns). The ending is pretty weak and sloppily executed, so his `outwitting' of the bandits throughout the town doesn't really come off very cool or smart.One thing is for certain, they didn't have to pay the voice dubbers or dialogue writers very much, because for a solid twenty-five mins of the film (when he arrives at the bandit hideout) there are only a handful of sentences spoken for the duration, and it becomes agonizingly dull, and the soundtrack theme so annoying you want to strangle the composer.A Spaghetti Western curiosity in that it was successful enough to spawn two (better) sequels. I'd say Stranger in Town is for completists only.