RIP BUD SPENCER!

The other day I was watching ‘They call me Trinity’, a 1970 movie a typical western movie with a typical plot and had the same ‘masala’ that any Bud Spencer – Terence Hill movie would have. This was certainly not the first time that I was watching this movie. I am a movie buff (enthusiast) and often watch movies umpteen times, you see. But every time I watch with a different perspective. 
 As a kid I always enjoyed these westerner entertainers and still do now as young man of seventy.

I loved the very opening scene in the movie - Trinity, an unkempt, care free western gunfighter being dragged on a sledge, I think it is called travois, by his horse. His unnaturally fast drawing ability and his marksmanship, the way draws his gun and shoots his enemies before they can shoot him in the back, has always been treat to watch!
 
As kids we cousins would enact some character or the other from these ‘flicks’ in our games, which we called ‘Bang – bang’. Bandu would often send Rama, his family servant, to call me to play at his residence, where just two of us would play these bang –bang games in a small passage in my aunty, Kamal Maushi’s place. He had collection of guns, toy ones as well as the real but broken and discarded ones of his dad’s. We were allowed to play with them. He would ask me to be some Red Indian character, some insignificant ‘Apache’ character or a villain like ‘Clarence Leroy Van Cleef. The partition door made up our fort and it was fun to scale the door as ‘apache’ guy and engage in those mock fights with my cousin. We would roll bus tickets into cigars and put in the corner of our lips and throw the dialogues through our clenched teeth, just the way our heroes in the movies did. 

Bandu could easily blend into different roles that he played in our games. He would play the characters played by John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, and many others. But the best one was his ‘Yul Brynner’, his head had been shaved off that time, perhaps it was done for his ‘Munj’ or ‘thread ceremony’, I do not remember. But what I do remember is that Bandu had this natural talent for acting and if someone from the film industry had ever spotted him then, Bandu would have been a very good child artist and a great star actor of today and that too much before Mahesh did. Whenever we were tired of playing any game we would shout, “Let’s play Bang-Bang ”and out came our toy guns and switch over to our favourite game. It was fun to play these games in Ajinkya Mansion, where there were many of us. The elevator became our prison cell. Most of us could draw our toy guns a number of times, may be with some degree of variation, each time holstering it and then slapping some imaginary villain’s face, just the way our hero in the movie did without batting an eye and all before the villain could react or point our gun at the imaginary villain, push it down with our thumb and then spin trigger guard of the gun in our index finger repeatedly and bring it again to point at the villain, the way Clint Eastwood would do. Vijoo would often play some rough character or the other. But I always imagined that the character of that enormous man, an omnipotent buffoon with squinty eyes called Bambino from ‘They call me Trinity’ and ‘Trinity is still my name’, was perfect for him, may be because of Vijoo’s physical structure. 

Bambina was portrayed by Bud Spencer and it was while I was watching this movie that I was reminded of my childhood, of western movies and of Bud Spencer – Bud Spencer had passed away! The next day I learnt that Bud Spencer was no more. He was born on 31 October, 1929 as Carlo Pedersoli. It is said that fairly at studies and played different sports, in particular swimming, for which he showed a great disposition, winning several prizes. In his youth, Mr. Spencer was an athlete, becoming the first Italian to swim the 100-meter freestyle in under a minute. Bud Spencer abandoned his swimming career after the 1960 Olympics in Rome.
He studied chemistry at the Sapienza University of Rome. However, he was obliged to leave his studies when the family moved to America due to father’s work. He worked in the Italian Consulate in Brazil, where he learned fluent Portuguese. Then Colizzi offered a role in a film. Carlo Pedersoli adopted the screen name Bud Spencer — the first name inspired by a beer and the last to honor his favorite star, Spencer Tracy.
Working on a 1967 film, “Dio Perdona Io No” (“God Forgives, I Don’t”), he met Mario Girotti, who would take the screen name Terence Hill and become his frequent movie partner in spaghetti westerns. They went on to work together on over 20 films. Spencer wrote the complete or partial screenplay for some of his movies. This burly comic actor was known as ‘good giant’, who would often punch out bad guys on the screen in a series of westerns.
And while I was watching ‘They call me Trinity’, this ‘Gentle Giant’ had passed away peacefully in Rome at 86 years of age. RIP Bud Spencer!

Vinay Trilokekar