Boot Hill

Despite not caring much for APPALOOSA – or maybe because of it – I was still in the mood for a Western, and this one was close at hand. I remember really liking the Trinity movies starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer (whose real names, respectively, are Mario Girotti and Carlo Pedersoli ), and although they’re not playing Trinity and Bambino, they’re both in this one, along with another old favorite from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE and ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, Woody Strode.

BOOT HILL starts out in a fairly intriguing fashion. A traveling circus has stopped in a small Western town, and at the same time a mysterious stranger (Hill) arrives being pursued by gunmen. After he’s wounded in a shootout with his pursuers, the stranger hides in one of the circus wagons and leaves town with them the next day. Hired killers are still after him, though, and his presence draws down trouble on the circus performers, who wind up siding with him in his battle against an evil mine owner played by Victor Buono. The plot is revealed gradually, with a number of shootouts along the way leading up to a big final showdown.

There’s nothing here you haven’t seen many times before. BOOT HILL was written and directed by Giuseppe Colizzi. The script is pretty good, the direction less so. There are a lot of Sergio Leone style close-ups, but without the sweeping vistas that Leone also provides for the viewer. The action scenes are also hard to follow at times. And there are ’way too many grubby, bearded hombres who look too much alike, which often led me to think, “Wait a minute. Who’s that guy again?”

Despite these flaws, BOOT HILL is reasonably entertaining. Terence Hill always makes a good hero. Twenty years ago when I was writing the ABILENE series for Book Creations Inc. and Pocket Books, there was some discussion about adapting the books into a syndicated TV show that would have starred Terence Hill as Marshal Luke Travis. Nothing ever came of it, of course, but it would have been interesting. Bud Spencer isn’t given much to do in BOOT HILL, but he’s a good sidekick anyway. And the script has enough oddball bits to make it interesting.

BOOT HILL is available on several cheap compilations of public-domain Westerns, and I’ve also seen it as a single DVD for a buck at Dollar Tree, Wal-Mart, and places like that. It’s not a great movie by any means, but if you’ve got an extra dollar and an hour and a half to kill, there are worse ways to spend your time and money.