A Pistol for Ringo

With Giuliano Gemma's tragic passing, it seems appropriate to spotlight his best-known role. Gemma played the amiable gunslinger Ringo twice, in arguably the first big post-Fistful of Dollars Spaghetti Westerns. Like Sergio Corbucci's Django, the Ringo films inspired myriad "sequels" borrowing the title but nothing else.

A Pistol for Ringo (1965) credited Gemma as "Montgomery Wood," in a genre still shy of Italian stars. (Remember Fistful costars "Johnny Wells" and "Benny Reeves"?) It marked his first film with director Duccio Tessari, who remained Gemma's collaborator in both Westerns and other genres. Ringo is watchable but uninspired, awkwardly mixing wild action and plot twists.

It's Christmas in a Texas border town. Mexican bandit Sancho (Fernando Sancho) brings in the Yuletide with a bank robbery, bloodily foiled by Sheriff Ben (George Martin). Sancho and his gang hole up in a local ranch, taking Major Clyde (Antonio Casas), his daughter Ruby (Hally Hammond) and assorted others hostage. Unable to reduce the bandits by siege, Ben reluctantly releases gunslinger Ringo (Giuliano Gemma) from jail to defeat Sancho. Ringo's happy to oblige, but his help comes at a price.

A Pistol for Ringo ranks among the most Americanized Spaghettis. Despite the Tabernas locations familiar from one 100 Spaghettis, some darker content like graphic violence and a near-rape, Ringo largely lacks the genre's comic strip stylization. Between its clean-cut hero, goofy comedy and Maurizio Graf's phonetic warbling on the soundtrack, it resembles nothing less than a '30s Republic serial. Even Ennio Morricone's instrumental music seems more laid back than usual.

Ringo starts with a bang, its opening half hour saturated with action. But it dags in the middle sections, settling into a static siege format. Tessari co-wrote Fistful and tries to recapture that film's myriad double crosses, but Ringo's treachery is so brazen (he openly boasts of his true intentions halfway through!) that Sancho seems moronic for not catching on. The hostages (save the leads) are faceless bullet fodder and Tessari wastes time on awkward comic relief: Clyde's courtship of bandita (Nieves Navarro) is particularly grating. Ringo rejuvenates with a tense finale, Tessari staging some creative moments (a cowbell features in the final showdown) that redeem much.

Giuliano Gemma seems awkwardly cast. The movie positions Ringo as mercenary like Fistful's Joe or Django, unscrupulously selling himself to both sides. But Gemma's too clean-cut and mellow to sell this angle: a guy introduced hopscotching with kids isn't a convincing cutthroat. This isn't to knock Gemma, who's appealing throughout, but that's part of the problem: a character so nasty on paper shouldn't be so likeable in practice.

Fernando Sancho, the paunchy but formidable heavy, became a stock Spaghetti villain. He's quite effective, even if his dubbing voice resembles a Spanish Cookie Monster. Nieves Navarro (The Big Gundown) makes a stunning femme fatale. Tessari's wife Lorella De Luca, credited as Hally Hammond, plays Ruby; Antonio Casas and George Martin play less interesting characters.


A Pistol for Ringo is a mediocre Spaghetti. Tessari presents some exciting action, but the movie just feels too tame. His sequel, The Return of Ringo (1965), proves much darker and better-realized.