They Call Me Trinity (1970)

Enzo Barboni's They Call Me Trinity arrives from 1970 with a lean cultural inventory. Terence Hill plays the title gunslinger, a man of unnaturally fast hands and limited ambition. Bud Spencer plays his brother Bambino, a horse thief currently impersonating a sheriff while he waits for his gang to leave prison. Together they defend a settlement of pacifist Mormons from Major Harriman, a land baron who wants their valley for grazing. The film was shot in Abruzzo, became one of the most successful Italian exports of its era, and later lent its theme song to Quentin Tarantino. What it did not do was carry any of the progressive freight we now routinely inspect for. There is nothing here to inspect.

The cast is uniformly white European. The two Mormon sisters exist to be courted and then abandoned once Trinity learns that Mormon life requires labor, prayer, and discipline. They possess no interiority worth the runtime. Mexican bandits and Mormon settlers function as genre furniture, their identities unexamined and unremarked. No character is queer. No character is neurodivergent. No body is celebrated, no ecosystem is defended, no history is reframed. The land dispute concerns unbranded horses and grazing rights, which is to say it concerns property, and the film resolves it with a cattle brand and a punchline. Major Harriman is a wealthy man who sends bullies to harass farmers. That is the whole of his villainy. It is the oldest shape in the Western, not a critique of capital.

The comedy is physical. Beans are eaten in a single take after a day of fasting. Men fall off horses. Nobody lectures anybody about anything, which in this house counts as a virtue. The film is pleasant, weightless, and ideologically inert. We grade it accordingly, with one grudging nod toward the land baron, and then we move on.