Beans and fistfights, the Italian western conquers the world
The childhood of many boomers was marked by E.B. Clucher’s Trinity and Bambino saga which began in 1970. Five films made between 1970 and 1974 dominated the box office for months enjoying unimaginable success with the public, but not critics, on a global level: They Call me Trinity (1970), Trinity is Still my Name (1971) and Man of the East (1972), Even Angels Eat Beans (1973), Anche gli angeli tirano di destro (1974) became a genre within the genre, something we can define today with a single word: cult.
Italy post-economic boom was travelling at two different speeds: development in the North, unemployment in the South. It’s like saying that in the North people worked and laughed while in the South they laughed, only to avoid crying.
By the 1970s, with Fascism and the war in the past, Italy was a country with a huge desire for laughter and the rediscovery of popular traditions. The radio played Renzo Arbore and Gianni Boncompagni’s programme Alto Gradimento, songs by Sixties singers Mina and Lucio Battisti were popular, black and white TV fare accommodated comedians and the cinemas were showing Italian-style comedy (commedia all’italiana), spaghetti westerns and cazzotti westerns. The success of these films financed and facilitated the production of arthouse films by some of Italy’s best writers and directors who certainly did not garner the same box office numbers.
It would be superfluous to describe the influence of Italian-style comedy where comedy combined the arthouse and popular genres, as did the spaghetti western with Sergio Leone’s greatness celebrated around the world. However, words should be spent on the cazzotti western. It was a revolutionary genre for the time, replacing the irony of the spaghetti western with slapstick. Weapons are almost entirely substituted by fists, duels by comical tussles and fights. It is the same revolution that Gianni and Pinotto brought to swashbuckler films, which this genre ultimately derives from.
The success of the Trinity and Bambino saga was consecrated with the sequel to They Call Me Trinity, Trinity is still my name, partly shot in Molise. The opening scene when first Bambino, then Trinity, rob a gang of outlaws of their horses and pan of beans is memorable. Beans in cazzotti westerns are the equivalent of Popeye’s spinach or Bugs Bunny’s carrot, an element that not only moves the story forward but describes and qualifies the character.
At the time children were going crazy for chicken drumsticks which, thanks to new etiquette, were strictly eaten without cutlery, for pizza which reached its mass heights in those years and also for bitter, iron-rich spinach to become as strong as Popeye and beans in emulation of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill.
Molise is a region with a wide variety of excellent indigenous beans, in particular, Riccia beans which grow in the municipality of that name in the province of Campobasso and the beans known as Molise. Both white beans have thin skins and thanks to quick cooking times are often used in succulent dishes, the pride of Molise, such as u pastone, laganiell e fasciuol, sagne e fagioli.
