Cry, Onion! (1980)

CRY, ONION! is Italian director Enzo G. Castellari's addition to the comedy spaghetti western genre, and highly influenced by the spoofery of the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer team. The great Franco Nero plays a permed gunfighter called Onion, who, you guessed it, has a passion for eating raw onions. Watching Nero goofing around and munching down on onions while grinning manically turns out to be very funny, and that silly permed hair of his helps a lot too. Bizarrely, he's been dubbed by a guy who sounds just like Jimmy Stewart in the English version. The plot is nothing special and sees Onion helping out a group of orphaned kids in their struggle against a ruthless oil baron. There's plenty of action and humour here, even if most of it is lowbrow, and I appreciate the surrealist touches, like Martin Balsam's mechanical hand. CRY, ONION! isn't quite up there with the best of Spencer & Hill, but it does the job well enough.

I found this in a second-hand shop that had a VCR and TV to preview the used tapes. From the bizarre opening shot of the oil field and the director's credit, I knew this was one worth the dollar.Franco Nero does his best Terrence Hill impression as the character Onion who arrives in town to start an onion farm on a parcel of land he's bought real cheap from a farmer. What he doesn't know is that evil oil magnate Petrus Lamb has bought/stolen all the property around the town due to the vast oil reserves under the town. Lamb has a strange mechanical hand that's serviced by Adolf Hitler! Thru a plot device out of Once Upon A Time in the West, Onion's property is still owned by the orphans of the original farmer who's been killed by Lamb's henchmen. The rest of the movie revolves around the increasingly silly attempts to steal the lease out of Onion's possession.First of all, the film is very well directed by Enzo Castellari so that already lifts it out of the typical spaghetti western doldrums. The script is very silly with frequent forays into total surrealism. Onion fights with a gun and the many onions that he has hidden in his pants. During a duel he always asks, "Gun or Onion?" The first fight scene with Onion is right out of the first Trinity movie except it mostly done with onions. I suppose it's a parody of sorts, but how do you parody a parody? Martin Balsam is game as the evil Lamb and he seems to be having fun with the mechanical hand he's wearing. I enjoyed the movie for the most part although the overuse of sped-up footage towards the end is a let-down. The English dubbing crew had some fun with this film as they gave Onion a Jimmy Stewart voice and one orphan sounds like Bugs Bunny imitating a gangster. For some reason it works! I wonder what the Italian original sounds like.Not the greatest but with enough bright spots that I enjoyed the film.

One of Franco Nero movies, known in my native country as Cry Onion. I saw this movie back the late 1970s or early 1980s. It is my kind of movie.It came out around the same time frame as the Terrance Hill & Bud Spencer movies They Call Me Trinity and Trinity is Still My Name. I love them. All these years I thought Cry Onion was a Terrance Hill and Bud Spencer movie. I found out different a few hrs ago while in my search to find this movie. Can anyone tell where I can get this movie to buy known in some parts of the world as Cry Onion or Cibollero, El or Cipollaro, Il or Locos del oro negro, Los (Spain). If you know this movie's title as something different please let me know that as well. Help! send me an email @ [email protected]. Thanks!

I saw this film for the very first time not too long ago on TV. I thought it was just the typical spaghetti-western, with a lot of gunfights,blood and dead people. Obviously I was wrong.During the first ten minutes or so it seems a standard European western, but then appears a horse pulling a wagon full of onions where "Onion" (Franco Nero) is hidden. That´s when the fun begins. I´d like to remark from this film the surrealistic details it contains such as the nazi look of the villains, the capacity of our hero "Franco Nero" eating and even drinking! raw onions.If you have the chance to watch it, just do it. I believe you won´t be disappointed.It seems as the couple Franco Nero / Enzo G. Castellari always made good films... (Check some of them: "High Crime", "Keoma", and "The shark hunter"). enjoyable films...