Tony Anthony (actor) - Spaghetti Westerns

Spaghetti Westerns

Anthony was present in Europe when the Sergio Leone Westerns were setting box office records but had not yet been released in America. Anthony contacted Klein, then a major MGM stockholder, about co-financing a spaghetti western he was in, Klein and Anthony both putting up $20,000 US. The film Klein produced was the spaghetti western A Stranger in Town/Un Dollaro tra i Denti, starring Anthony as the titular Stranger, a shotgun-wielding antihero who helps a group of Mexican bandits steal gold from the US Army and Federales, and then steals it right back from them. Released by MGM to compete with the United Artists Clint Eastwood the Man with No Name film series, it became a surprise success, and spawned three sequels in which Anthony reprised his role.

With these movies, Anthony often brought the genre to unusual places. His own persona was not the typical tough spaghetti western hero (e.g. Django, The Man With No Name, Sartana, et. al.); the Stranger was vulnerable and sneaky, with a sardonic sense of humor. Anthony recalled that director Luigi Vanzi constantly described the character to him as "a bad guy but you do good in spite of yourself. You're not Gary Cooper. You're not John Wayne. You're not the 'tall in the saddle' cowboy. You're the street guy. The audience can identify with you because you look like the guy that goes into movie theaters and says 'Well I could be like him'." Anthony himself described the Stranger as "a dirty coal-mining cowboy". The second Stranger film, The Stranger Returns/Un Uomo, un cavallo, una Pistola was a more polished entry that had a golden stagecoach as its MacGuffin and a Stelvio Cipriani score that had several cover versions by various orchestras. Anthony's willingness to experiment with the genre resulted in the third series entry, the self-explanatory A Stranger in Japan/ Lo Straniero di Silenzio/The Silent Stranger with another Cipriani score. Considered by many the first "East-meets-West western", predating Red Sun by three years, its release was delayed for seven years in the US due to a dispute with MGM, and never received a European release at all. Anthony later declared the film his best and lamented the cuts that MGM made to it.

His next film was Blindman, a spaghetti-western variation on the Zatoichi series and, unlike other Zapata Westerns, featured the Federales winning at the end. Anthony played a blind gunslinger hired to escort 50 mail-order brides to their husbands. By that time, Klein had become the manager of the Beatles, and Swimmer had directed many of their music videos and concert films. Both were producers on Blindman, and their presence led to Ringo Starr accepting a supporting role as one of the bandits. Starr would produce Anthony's next film, which Swimmer would direct: a semi-autobiographical road movie called Cometogether. In this film, Anthony plays an American stuntman working on spaghetti westerns in Rome. The film contains behind the scenes-footage of a spaghetti western being shot.

In 1976, long after the heyday of the genre, Anthony starred as the Stranger for a fourth time in Get Mean produced by Ron Schneider. A bizarre film that can barely be considered a western at all, it instead takes place in Spain, where the Stranger has to battle invading Vikings and Moors after escorting a princess there. It failed to find a wide audience.