Man From Nowhere (1966)

ARIZONA COLT is a fine-looking spaghetti western made during the big boom of the genre and at a time when the films had the budgets to make them look good. This does look very good and I was more than happy with Amazon Prime's print which is of a far better quality than most of the spaghetti westerns they show. This film features Giuliano Gemma as a delightfully amoral gunslinger who rescues a group of prisoners only to fall out with them over their subsequent plans.Gemma is a guy who's only in the game for the money and the women and I liked the edge to his character here. He was one of the genre's most familiar faces and there's little to dislike about him overall in this film. Fernando Sancho does another larger than life villain and is loud and boisterous which fits his character nicely. The story was written by the reliable Ernesto Gastaldi and directed by genre director Michele Lupo, who made interesting titles like GOLIATH AND THE SINS OF BABYLON, BUDDY GOES WEST, and THE WEEKEND MURDERS over his varied career.The main problem with ARIZONA COLT is the running time, which at two hours is just too long. There's too much foot-dragging here and thus some of the scenes start to feel more than a little repetitive and forced. After all, there are only so many gun fights and bar-room showdowns that you can fit into the running time. Cut half an hour off the running time and this would have been much more fun.

The Man From Nowhere aka Arizona Colt is a spaghetti western with solid performances from a great cast. The main players are Giuliano Gemma and Fernando Sancho, both of whom are great in this film, as always. Sancho, always the villain, is even more ruthless than usual in this outing. The lovely Rosalba Neri, another familiar spaghetti western face, also makes an appearance in the movie.Gemma, as Arizona Colt, can be likened to Bugs Bunny having some fun being the foil to Fernando Sancho and his gang of Elmer Fudds, but that doesn't make this a comedy western by any means. While there are many amusing parts, the body count is high, and there is a strong element of revenge.The music score is very good, with lots of spaghetti style, and the movie is filmed and directed well. The story takes some time to pull you in, but it does, and it is a good one.I am giving this one 7 stars mainly because I don't think it is as good as Gemma's Ringo movies, but that having been said, I still highly recommend this film. It has a lot going for it.

Five minutes into this film, the Man from Nowhere reveals himself to be from Arizona, rendering the title meaningless, and thus begins yet another Italian-style Western. It's a corker!Our hero is Arizona Colt, and he's a smug as Johnny Yuma. He's also slightly sinister too, or at least I thought so. He cheats at cards with innocent folks, and will only find Rosalba Neri's killer if he can get to shag her sister! Did I say Rosalba Neri? I sure did! She's in this one too, but she gets murdered fairly early, because she's the attractive, sexually liberated one (plus she has dark hair, which makes her evil, or something). I'm getting ahead of myself, however. This one involves Gordo, a bandit whose recruitment method involves massacring loads of prison guards, breaking out all the prisoners, and giving them the option of joining his gang or being shot! He's planning on robbing a town of all it's gold, but he didn't count on Arizona Colt not joining his gang and having no intention of getting shot. Indeed, Arizona proves to be a bit of pest as he's always where Gordo doesn't want him to be (although he doesn't stop either the town being robbed or Rosalba Neri being killed as he's in the saloon having a pint). On the morally shaky promise of getting it on with Neri's blonde, and therefore virginal sister, Colt sets out to bring Gordo to justice, but instead ends up getting shot full of holes. This sets the film up for the big gunfight and a very cool head to head battle between Arizona and Gordo in an undertakers.Although the film seems to follow the same plot as about 400 other Italian Westerns, this one's pretty fast paced and has a lot of shootouts (the town seems to have an endless supply of men to take on Gordo's gang). There's also plenty of that Italian quirkiness, when Colt spells out 'no' in dead bodies as a message to Gordo, and if you like Westerns where the bad guys laugh for minutes at a time for no reason whatsoever, then this is the film for you.

I really enjoy spaghetti westerns, so obviously I have seen a lot of examples of the genre. Though I haven't seen every spaghetti western made, I have seen enough so that I can say with confidence that "Arizona Colt" (a.k.a. "Man From Nowhere") is below average. I wouldn't say it's a TERRIBLE movie - it has some positive attributes. The scenery is nice, the production values and action sequences are acceptable, and Fernando Sancho makes a pretty good villain. However, the movie stumbles in two key areas. The first mistake is that the movie is very slow-going - they should have really increased the pace. The second mistake is that the movie lasts almost two hours, which is far past the breaking point. Had they edited down the script before filming began, these problems may not have happened, and we might have had a pretty good movie. But as it is, I can only recommend this particular spaghetti western to die-hard fans of Euro westerns.