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| singing behind screens
Cap’n Bud
They may both be legends of Italian cinema, but a pairing between Ermanno Olmi and Carlo Pedersoli is not something anyone would have predicted in the heyday of the spaghetti western - a genre which made Pedersoli a star but which was of no interest at all to the rising young director.
Born in Naples in 1929, Pedersoli began to appear in films in his early 20s. But it was not until 1968, in Dario Argento’s western Today It’s Me… Tomorrow It’s You (Oggi a me… domani a te!), he first used the alias that would make him a household name in Italy: Bud Spencer.
It was common practice for Italian actors to pretend to be Americans in spaghetti westerns (even the great Sergio Leone used the name ‘Bob Robertson’ on the first Fistful of Dollars movie). But Pedersoli stuck with it for the rest of his career, working again with Argento on the classic horror/thriller Four Flies on Grey Velvet (4 mosche di velluto grigio).
The series of films for which he will be best remembered, however, began in 1971, when he was paired with Terence Hill (Mario Girotti) in My Name Is Trinity (Lo chiamavano Trinità). Hill played the title character, a blond-haired drifter modelled on Eastwood’s ‘Man With No Name’, while Spencer was ironically called Bambino. It was a double act that the pair would reprise, in and out of westerns, for a decade or more.
Spencer has remained busy as an actor since the early fifties, most recently on television in a series of films based around a detective called Jack ‘Extralarge’ Costello, a character he first played in 1990 and reprised a dozen times.
Apart from that, however, ‘the old Captain’ in Singing Behind Screens is the meatiest role Bud Spencer has had to work on for quite some time.
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SINGING BEHIND SCREENS
Luigi Musini and Roberto Cicutto present a film by Ermanno Olmi. Cinema11Undice, Rai Cinema, Lakeshore Entertainment SBS, Pierre Grise Productions,
in collaboration with Sky
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Original title: Cantando dietro i paraventi
Prod: Luigi Musini, Roberto Cicutto; Exec prod: Alessandro Calosci; Dir/Scr: Ermanno Olmi; Ph: Fabio Olmi; Prod des: Luigi Marchione; Cost des: Francesca Sartori; Ed: Paolo Cottignola; Casting: Andrea Marrari; Mus: Han Yong.
With Bud Spencer (The old Captain), Jun Ichikawa (Widow Ching), Sally Ming Zeo Ni (Confidante), Camillo Grassi (Nostromo), Makoto Kobayashi (Admiral Ching), Xiang Yang Li (Supreme Admiral Kwo Lang), Guang Wen Li (Imperial dignitary), Ruohao Chen (Imperial emissary), Davide Dragonetti (Young man), Alberto Capone (Military client), Carlene Ko (Mery Red), Sultan Temir Omarov (Admiral Thin Kwei), Bellino Zheng (Little Guiady).
International distribution: Lakeshore International.
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