Carambola! (1974)

You'll excuse me while I allow myself a moment of ecstasy - Spurs have just, somehow, managed to qualify for the knock out stages of the Champions League.  Ahhh, it feels good!  But, to business.  I mentioned in passing yesterday that, over the weekend, I'd been able to catch up with another of those fake Terrance Hill/Bud Spencer films starring Antonio Cantafora and Paul L Smith.  These film have long fascinated me and I've now managed to catch up with four of the five they made (over a period of less than three years).   I first became aware of the existence of Cantafora and Smith in their capacity as Hill/Spencer impersonators, when I found myself watching what I at first assumed to be a genuine Hill and Spencer comedy spaghetti western on Movies4Men.  I'd missed the opening titles and simply assumed from the style of the film and the presence a big bearded bad tempered guy and a slimmer blonde guy, both performing slapstick orientated athletic stunts and fight sequences, that it was the real deal.  But then it dawned on me that the big guy wasn't Bud Spencer - he wasn't quite big enough and looked to be lighter on his feet - and the other guy most definitely wasn't Terrance Hill.  Indeed, he only bore a passing resemblance to Hill.  But I stuck with the film, which provided some undemanding late night entertainment, and later did some research into it.

The movie's title was Carambola and was the first to pair these two actors.  It was a clear attempt to cash in on the popularity of the earlier Terrance Hill and Bud Spencer hit My Name is Trinity.  Which is where its problems as a film lie: Trinity was essentially a parody of the spaghetti western genre, playing most of its tropes for laughs, which leaves Carambola being, in essence, a parody of a parody.  But it must have been popular (demand for genuine Hill and Spencer movies was high in Europe at the time, so audiences were apparently even willing to accept imitations), as it quickly spawned a sequel (the only one of the Cantafora/Smith movies I haven't seen), and they went on to make three similar films for other producers: We Are No Angels, a semi-western with what looks like a reasonably big budget and featuring some recognisable American supporting actors, and a pair of movies for PAC, Kid Stuff (aka Convoy Buddies) and its sequel The Diamond Peddlers, which imitate Hill and Spencer's contemporary set comedies.  But to get back to the point, I do intend talking about the latter two movies here at length sometime in the near future but, as an appetiser of sorts, here's a trailer for Carambola that I've found, (It's not in English and Cantafora, as he often was during this period, is billed as 'Micheal Colby'):


It gives a pretty good impression of what the complete movie is like: lots of cartoonish violence and a pair of 'heroes' with an adversarial relationship.  The plot, as I recall, involves ex-soldier and carambola champion turned outlaw Cantafora involving his sometime partner in crime Smith with a mission for the army to find out who is smuggling arms across the border to Mexican rebels.  Their investigations seem to require the destruction of large amounts of property.  While the leads don't have the same kind of on screen chemistry as the real Hill and Spencer, they were both highly accomplished performers in their own right and deliver professional and reasonably enjoyable performances.  Smith is notably meaner and more menacing than the equivalent characters played by Bud Spencer, while Cantafora, although lacking Terrance Hill's natural charisma, delivers a slightly harder edged character than those played by Hill, bringing a smooth cunning to his character.  All in all, not as good as the real thing, but a fascinating and audacious attempt to imitate it.