A nameless gunman (Tony Anthony) tries to safe an Asian man from three thugs. His help comes a little too late, and the dying man begs him to bring a small scroll to Japan. His master there will pay well.
So the Stranger and his horse "Pussy" get on the next boat to Japan. Having hardly even arrived, the gunman stumbles into the battle between two shady characters and their small private armies, both very interested in his scroll, and a festival of double-crosses, triple-crosses and quite a few fights. That's what happens when you don't speak the language.
There's a book waiting to be written on the connection between the Spaghetti Western and the Chambara and about the way these genres influenced each other. One of the chapters of this imaginary book would have to be about The Silent Stranger and would hopefully explain how this Italian-Japanese co-production came to life.
The Silent Stranger is one of the better movies that try to combine the Spaghetti Western and one or the other form of Asian action cinema. Thanks to the involvement of actual Japanese money, we have Japanese characters played by Japanese actors speaking actual Japanese - a cornucopia of authenticity. The biggest difference between this and many other Italian/Japanese cross-over films is that it's set in Japan, though, affording director Luigi Vanzi to have a lot of fun with a hero who basically doesn't have a clue what the things going on around him mean.
Tony Anthony's Stranger is obviously based on a certain character from some Leone films, but he looks and acts more like Clint Eastwood's goofier brother. A man who's not as clever as he thinks himself, he mostly gets by on a certain charm and a softer heart than other Italian Western heroes can afford. Anthony's muggy way of playing the role seems a little too over the top at first, but soon his slightly dopey grin turns out to be the ideal embodiment of what the film is trying to do.
While there are certainly enough dead bodies and moments of brutality here, the film mostly tries to be (and even is!) good fun. It certainly lacks the depth of a film by Leone or Corbucci, but it makes up for this through charm and playfulness.
I very much liked the way Vanzi plays out the disorientation that comes with Anthony's inability to communicate, perfectly shown in a scene where he uses a drawing to discern if he is actually paid in the right kind of coin, all the while trying to keep from looking as clueless as he really is.
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