Boot Hill / La collina degli stivali (Giuseppe Colizzi, 1969)

[Trinity]

There’s a chapter dedicated to ‘Ace High’ and ‘Boot Hill’ in Lee Broughton’s book The Euro-Western. He details how the two Thomas characters boldly break the Hollywood Western’s “rules” regarding the representation of African Americans out West. It’s argued that the presence of rope artists, street fairs, circuses, clowns, etc, generate a “carnivalesque” space in these films and the carnival has traditionally been theorised to be a space that promotes egalitarianism and the kind of racial equality seen in Colizzi’s Westerns. But Broughton also links the assertive and rebellious nature of Brock Peters and Woody Strode’s characters (and the racial slurs that they are subjected to by the films’ villains) to the escalating racial tensions that existed between Southern and Northern Italians and the political unrest that was being experienced in Italy (and beyond) during the late 1960s. Another chapter in the book looks at the equally striking and atypical female African American characters that appear in ‘Lola Colt’ and ‘The Great Silence’.