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Rory rides again – in Spain
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I found Finger on the Trigger on YouTube and happily sat down to watch it but my suspicions were immediately aroused when in the very opening scene we heard over-loud clip-clops dubbed onto the soundtrack and background music of electric guitar. Yup, it’s a spaghetti western. My heart sank. Also known as Blue Lightning, Le chemin de l’or, Il sentiero dell’oro and, what came up on the screen of the print I saw, and closer to the English title, El dedo en el gatillo. Call it what you will, it’s a pulp Eurowestern.

This review will therefore be short. I don’t do spaghettis as a rule. As a lifelong lover of true Westerns I find the spaghetti kind generally disrespectful of the genre, and dreadfully badly written, directed, acted, dubbed and produced, with the worst music ever. They’re OK otherwise, I guess.
Still, it is Rory, so we owe him at least one watch of the movie. It’s a story set just after Appomattox (so they all have 1870s and 80s clothes and guns, obviously) in which two troops of ex-soldiers, or soon to be ex-soldiers, Union and Confederate (the latter in very unconvincing gray uniforms) are after some Confederate gold. Rory is the bluecoat captain. But both parties are riven: members of each group want to keep the gold for themselves, whereas their captains and a few loyal men want it to go to their respective governments, in Washington DC and in exile in Mexico respectively. That’s basically the plot.

All in all this movie is a low-grade Eurowestern with little to recommend it. You might want to watch it, once, for the curiosity value. And Rory.
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One Response
Re Sidney Pink. A nice man. Louis and Jeff Hunter did a picture for him, The Christmas Kid (1967) and it was believed that if Pink had been able to get the voices right, he would have had a nice picture. He did not get them right. The attorney representing Sidney and Westinghouse Broadcasting on this was Arnold Kopelson, who produced many big time pictures, was a wonderful guy, and as you no doubt recall, won the Academy Award for Platoon. And obviously I was involved in the negotiations for Hayward.