As money and gold were already a big issue in the first two installments of the Stranger tetralogy, it comes as no surprise that at the beginning of its third part, Lo straniero di silenzio, we find the eponymous yet nameless protagonist way up north in the Klondike region, where, among very few others, Scrooge McDuck made his fortune. The Stranger arrives there a bit early, in 1884, a good decade before the famous gold rush began in 1896. However, the first spoken word in the film isn’t “gold” but “Pussy” – the Stranger’s looking for his faithful mare.
German version, Der Schrecken von Kung Fu (“the horror of kung fu”); American version, The Silent Stranger. The film’s Klondike bears a striking resemblance to the Alps in northern Italy.
He soon finds her in front of a log cabin, where a trio of cutthroats are harassing a young Japanese man. After the Stranger has neutralized the three thugs, the lad hands him a scroll with the request to take it to the Land of the Rising Sun and deliver it to a man named Motori. Reward for doing this: 20,000 dollars. So instead of “Yukon ho!” it’s “Nihon ho!” for our hero, who, once in Japan, promptly stumbles into the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo. The twists and turns of the story are not always entirely comprehensible, but the whole thing is exhilarating, well filmed, and fun. In the end, the Stranger again fails to get rich – despite his hard shell he has such a soft heart.
In his essay “Bounty Hunters, Yakuzas and Rōnins: Intercultural Transformations between the Italian Western and the Japanese Swordfight Film in the 1960s,” Thomas Klein argues that “Lo straniero di silenzio […] can be seen as the first ‘real’ hybrid of Western and samurai film” (p. 160). In “Spaghetti Westerns and Asian Cinema: Perspectives on Global Cultural Flows,” Ivo Ritzer points out how problematic the representation of the Japanese characters in Vanzi’s film actually is. Ritzer writes that “[t]he Italian Westerns featuring Asian villains almost consistently apply racial stereotypes orientalistically discriminating against the ‘Asian’, in order to advance the Caucasian hero. […] Lo straniero di silenzio […] codif[ies] ‘White’ sovereignty at the expense of the ethnic Other” (p. 169).
Next: Finally! Anthony, Baldassarre and Baldi Get Mean.