'BUFFALO BILL, HERO OF THE FAR WEST'......ACTUALLY, THE SPAGHETTI-BRATWURST WEST........

Buffalo Bill, Hero Of The Far West (1965)    This one more than fulfills the BQ mission to seek out the weirdest, oddest, nuttiest, most obscure films in 1960's cinema......(our fave era, as you know)......

           And oh my, what a gem we found in this Italian-German western that pre-dates the titanic re-working spaghetti westerns underwent after Leone's "Fistful Of Dollars" revolutionized the genre.......

             You'll see no Leone-like nihilistic anti-heroes, casual cruelty or twanging Morricone guitars in sight here......'Buffalo Bill' s DNA comes more from those overly romanticized  West German westerns based on Karl May novels......the ones with the 'Old Surehand' and 'Winnatou' characters cavorting through the lush Yugoslavian scenery.

             And just like the West German horse-operas, this movie's cartoonish vision of the American West comes from people whose sole knowledge of the era comes from........well,from watching the corniest of old Hollywood westerns......(which  themselves were already a hyperbolic fantasy of what the real West was like....)

             So what you get here is a warped funhouse view of an already warped funhouse view of wild west history.......a virtual encyclopedia of every Western movie cliche ever committed.......Indians and Cavalry battles, double-dealing saloon gamblers, the irascible old codger sidekick,  shootouts and barroom brawls, noble redskins who blurt wooden dialogue like, "Yellow Hand speak with forked tongue", innocent young gals threatened with stake-burning by rabidly evil 'Injuns'.....

             Not all of 'em are evil though......in fact Indian Princess Silver Moon Ray (no, we didn't make that name up) nurses a serious crush on our noble hero Buffalo Bill (the hunk 'o beefcake Gordon Scott, transitioning from 'Tarzan' and 'Hercules' movies...…)

             All this stuff is jam-packed into this one movie......sometimes in duplicate and triplicate, leading to a body count that's equal to several Middle East wars...…..and as in the Germanic westerns, the non-stop music layers on the heroic fanfares while dozens upon dozens of stuntmen tumble off of horses and down long flights of stairs.....

               Of course it's astoundingly ridiculous and about as historically accurate as anything Donald Trump said at his last rally, but that didn't stop BQ from enjoying the hell out of it. Call us crazy (and it won't be the first time), but as a collector of rare Guilty Pleasures, , we sure as shootin' give "Buffalo Bill" 3 stars (***)'

                 ……..he's the Hero Of The Far West alright...….in a galaxy far, far away...….