César Ojínaga
I sometimes feel that you guys should include Ojínaga (aka “Cesar Nagan”) as a “category” in the database: this favourite of Iquino and Juan Bosch played distinctive supporting roles (often as sweaty, hollow-eyed badmen) in about fifteen Spaghetti Westerns and was the chief villain in at least one, Manuel Esteba’s Saranda. This, incidentally, was marked by on-set conflicts between the director Manuel Esteba (who was reportedly drunk for much of the filming) and Ojínaga. The director would aggressively criticize the actor’s performance until Dean Reed rose to his defense, causing a tense scene between Reed and Esteba. Onscreen, SW leading men treated him rather differently.
At around the same time, he met another early death in Iquino’s Oeste Nevada Joe, the dispenser of his fate now being George Martin. He later reappeared in the same film, but only vocally, providing the voice of Gaspar “Indio” González. The same function of ensuring that his role was not a long one was later assumed by Richard Harrison in Alberto de Martino’s Centomila dollari per Ringo (where Ojínaga, despite his trade, didn’t utter a word) and Gianni Garko in Carmineo’s Holy Ghost movie (Ojínaga was the captain of the firing squad). Joachim Fuchsberger in José Luis Madrid’s Wer Kennt Johnny R.? gave Ojínaga a good beating, but not to the point of finishing him off. He did die, but after a longer screen life as the deputy in Brass’s Yankee
In the seventies, he was heard as the voice of the chief villain (Alejandro Ulloa) in Abre tu fosa, amigo…llega Sábata and played the comic villain in Iquino’s Los fabulosos de Trinidad. There he also dubbed Ricardo Palacios (who was obviously unavailable); when the two actors meet onscreen, Ojínaga continues acting as Palacios’s voice and somebody else (Francisco Jarque Zurbano) takes over as Ojínaga’s.
Concurrently, he was given a full-length (if not surviving) role in Iquino’s La banda de los tres crisantemos, a gangster film with western trappings, starring Dean Reed, and with Ojínaga as a lecherous mobster (as well as the dubbed voice of a minor character). His last western role may have been in Juan Bosch’s Dallas: it was a brief comic role, as a reverend reading out the office at the funeral of somebody he obviously didn’t like. Ojínaga continued making films until the late seventies: another comic villain in the children’s film Óscar, Kina y el láser, a Republican militia man in the Civil War drama Las largas vacaciones del 36, and a Francoist soldier in the biopic Companys, proceso a Cataluña. After this, he concentrated on his career as a dubber, and was active in this capacity until his death in the early nineties. He was the Spanish voice of Neville Brand in The Man from The Alamo, Martin Balsam in The Carpetbaggers, Luis Induni in Estambul 65, Woody Strode in Spartacus and The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance, Brian Blessed in The Last Valley, Severn Darden in Dirty Little Billy, Richard Kiel in The Longest Yard, Spike Milligan in Yellowbeard. In an episode of Get Smart, he also did the voice of Leo Gordon.
As a physical actor, outside the western, he played various roles as thugs, but he was also seen as a priest in Iquino’s comedy La liga no es cosa de hombres and a roulette croupier in the Bud Spencer vehicle Even Angels Eat Beans. In Juan Xiol’s exploitation film El precio del aborto, he was in more typical form, playing a lecherous gynecologist.
