Cinema: A Stranger in Town

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"Death," runs the old insurance man's gag, "is nature's way of telling you to slow down." The joke is the cinematic principle of this catatonic, corpse-cluttered western, which comes as close as a film can to a still picture.

The stranger (Tony Anthony) is a serape-draped loner who joins up with a gang of mustachioed Mexican villains. About an hour after the audience has been sickened by the sight of them drowning priests and kicking women in the stomach, Anthony, too, gets bored by the gore, annihilates the gang and collects the reward on their broken heads. Stranger is actually no stranger at all, but a sloppy copy of such Italian oaters as A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Since the Dollar films were imitation B westerns that copied good westerns, the effect on viewers of Stranger will be like seeing a photograph of a painting of a shadow of a statue of a man.