THE SILENT STRANGER

With the saddle on the shoulder and a hanged horse, an anonymous cowboy awakens in the middle of a crowd of intrigued and mocking farmers. After a journey of several months, he winds up in a Japanese harbour to claim the several thousands of dollars promised to him on a parchment that he now has to hand over to a certain Motori. The case is promising but unpredictable, especially when a well informed samurai steals his freedom and his horse. Directed in 1968 by Luigi Vanzi and produced by the main actor Tony Anthony, "Lo straniero di silenzio" is a film from the late 1960s that is historically the first that combined two brotherly genres, samurai and western. And he does it with a lot of empathy: from the very first minute, we see that the cowboy doesn't understand a thing and fails entirely. No translator or common ground in this land wiped away by typhoons. For a few dollars more, the foreigner plays the part of the grain of sand that goes from one clan to the other in the ultimate fight between two clans of samurai. Halfway between western and chanbara, we get to meet a multilingual princess, a sword dwarf, a gun in medieval Japan, and an undescribable vehicle. A fun rarity!