Bud Spencer & Terence Hill Classic

07/03/2026

Two Drinks, One Shelf of Bottles, and a Friendship Caught Mid-Sip

There's something endearingly simple about this still — no fistfights, no schemes, just two brothers standing at opposite ends of a well-stocked bar, drinks raised in matching gestures, eyes closed in identical satisfaction. Bud Spencer tips his glass back on the left, beard catching the warm lamplight, while across the frame, Terence Hill mirrors him almost exactly, surrounded by a wall of bottles and hanging mugs, his torn sweater the only hint that anything other than quiet refreshment occupies his mind. It's a small, unscripted-feeling moment of pure brotherly synchrony.

This is They Call Me Trinity, 1970, and even in a film built on schemes, brawls, and impersonated badges, moments like this one reveal something quieter underneath: two men who, whatever their differences, share the same instincts, the same tastes, the same unhurried way of moving through the world. Bambino's gruff practicality and Trinity's lazy charm could easily have made for constant friction, but scenes like this remind audiences why the partnership worked so effortlessly — underneath the bickering, they were always, fundamentally, on the same side, often literally raising a glass to the same thing at the same time.

What makes the photograph beneath it feel so gently bittersweet is simply how mirrored, once again, both men's expressions remain across the decades. Bud Spencer, beard turned fully gray, laughs warmly aboard what looks like a peaceful afternoon by the water — a portrait of contentment taken before his passing in 2016. Terence Hill, blue eyes just as clear as they were behind that bar fifty-six years earlier, smiles easily beneath a baseball cap in 2026, present and at peace.

There's a quiet symmetry in revisiting these two now — both raising glasses in their youth, both smiling gently in their final or current chapters, the same easy warmth carrying through every decade in between. Eighteen films, more than half a century of friendship, and somewhere in all of it, this small, perfect moment: two brothers, two drinks, completely at ease in each other's company, long before either knew how much time the partnership would actually be given.

05/10/2026

Hialeah Police Department. Two officers investigating a workshop. One suspect with arms that suggest the investigation should proceed carefully.
The police uniform is always the wrong costume for Bud Spencer.

🚔 Hialeah Police Department. Two officers investigating a workshop. One suspect with arms that suggest the investigation should proceed carefully.

The police uniform is always the wrong costume for Bud Spencer.
Not wrong in the sense of unfitting — he wore it in multiple films and wore it with the complete commitment he brought to everything, including costumes that the costume department could not entirely account for in terms of sheer square footage of fabric required. Wrong in the sense that the uniform implies an institutional relationship with authority that Bud Spencer's physical presence fundamentally contradicts. The badge says: I represent a system. The man wearing the badge says: I am the system, and the system and I have reached an understanding, and the understanding is that I do what seems right and the system finds a way to accommodate the result.
The Hialeah Police patch on the shoulder. The clipboard in the large hand — the official instrument of an official investigation, held with the specific grip of someone who understands that the clipboard is the correct tool for this situation and that other tools may become necessary. The dark glasses. The uniform straining slightly across the shoulders in the way that all uniforms strain across Bud Spencer's shoulders, the fabric negotiating the geometry with whatever dignity it can manage.
Miami Supercops. 1985. I Poliziotti dell'Ottava Strada — the film that moved the partnership to Florida, to the American city that the decade had decided was the most cinematic available, to the specific environment of Miami in 1985 which was neon and water and the warm chaos of a place that was reinventing itself faster than anyone could document the reinvention.
Two Italian comic stars in police uniforms in Hialeah investigating a workshop. The 1980s had a lot of ideas and some of them were better than others and this one was at least visually interesting.

William 'Bo' Jim. Far left. The overalls, the dark hair, the arms — and it is necessary to address the arms, because the arms in this frame are doing something that the arms of the other people in the frame are not doing, which is to occupy an amount of space in proportion to their owner that suggests whoever is investigating this workshop should approach the investigation with some awareness of the physical context.
He is described in the film's materials as a wrestler — the physical performer whose body in 1985 represented a certain kind of American muscle that the decade had decided was worth deploying in film contexts. The overalls suggest: I work with my hands. The arms confirm: extensively.
The bottom left portrait shows the face closer — the dark hair, the strong features, the expression of someone who finds the situation being investigated somewhat familiar, which is either because he knows what happened or because he is the kind of person that situations like this tend to involve.

Bud Spencer. Center. The clipboard, the uniform, the sunglasses — the complete investigative apparatus of Officer Whatever His Character Is Called in this film, deployed with the complete earnestness of a man who has committed to the role of law enforcement officer and intends to perform the role with appropriate seriousness, which in a Bud Spencer film means: appropriately serious until the situation requires something more physical, at which point the clipboard becomes secondary.
He is fifty-six in this film. The dark beard of the 1971 films has lightened — not yet the white beard of the final years, but the transitional beard, the beard moving through its fifties along with the man wearing it. The sunglasses add a layer of official authority to the face that already contains more authority than most official documents can accommodate.
The bottom center portrait — the hat, the half-grin, the specific expression of the later years, the face of a man who has been finding things funny for eighty years and continues to find them funny — carries the warmth that was always the essential thing beneath the authority and the fists and the magnificent physical comedy. The warmth that the uniform could not contain and did not try to contain because the warmth was larger than the uniform.
RIP 2016. The stone. The bronze. The white beard on the medallion. One year after this portrait was taken.

Terence Hill. Far right. The uniform, the cap, the sunglasses — the leaner version of the law enforcement apparatus, the one that fits differently because the body inside it is different, that carries authority of a different kind than the authority the center figure carries. The posture of someone who is officially conducting an investigation and is simultaneously keeping track of every exit, every variable, every way the situation might develop that the official investigation has not anticipated.
He is forty-six in this film. The partnership is seventeen years old. They have moved through westerns and contemporary action comedies and now Miami police procedurals and through all of it the fundamental thing has not changed, which is: when these two people are in the same frame, the frame contains something that neither of them produces alone.
The Red Sox cap in the bottom right portrait — 2026, eighty-seven years old, the silver hair, the smile — is the end of the arc that begins here, in a Miami workshop in 1985, with a police uniform and a clipboard and the blue eyes doing the assessment of a man with remarkable arms.

The workshop behind them. The tools on the blue wall — the clamps and the saws and the organized apparatus of someone who works with their hands and takes the working seriously. The motorcycle parts on the shelf. The window letting in Miami light.
Three people in a space — one there to be investigated, two there to investigate, the power differential clear in the badges and the uniforms and the clipboard and less clear in the actual physical reality of the room, which is the room of a man with arms that suggest the investigation should proceed with appropriate tact.
William 'Bo' Jim. RIP 2016. 2026.
The investigation concluded. The film was made. The partnership produced one more entry in the catalog — one more Tuesday afternoon in a Miami workshop where two men in police uniforms and one man in overalls made something that was not the best film they ever made but was theirs, was part of the record, was another proof of the thing the films kept proving: that when Bud Spencer and Terence Hill were in the same frame, the frame was worth watching.
Always worth watching.
Every frame.
Every film.
Every Tuesday afternoon in whatever city the story had decided to use that year.

05/10/2026

A Miami police precinct. An American flag on the wall. A desk with a bell on it. Bud Spencer in a police uniform on one side of the desk. A large man with a paper fan on the other side of the desk. Between them, a colleague who has the specific expression of someone who has seen this dynamic develop before and is waiting to see how it resolves, which — in any Bud Spencer scene involving a desk and someone on the other side of it — was always going to resolve the same way.

A Miami police precinct. An American flag on the wall. A desk with a bell on it. Bud Spencer in a police uniform on one side of the desk. A large man with a paper fan on the other side of the desk. Between them, a colleague who has the specific expression of someone who has seen this dynamic develop before and is waiting to see how it resolves, which — in any Bud Spencer scene involving a desk and someone on the other side of it — was always going to resolve the same way. 😄🌴🤍

Miami Supercops. 1985. The film in which Bud Spencer and Terence Hill play Miami police officers — because Italian cinema of the 1980s understood that placing these two men in any official capacity in any American city produced the specific comedy that the audience came for, and that Miami in 1985 was the most visually interesting American city available and therefore the correct choice. Miami Vice had premiered the year before. The city was at the peak of its cultural moment. Bud Spencer and Terence Hill arrived in it with the specific indifference to trends that was always their most reliable quality — they did not need the moment, because they had been the moment for fifteen years already and the moment kept catching up to them rather than the other way around.
The police uniform on Bud Spencer deserves its own moment — because Bud Spencer in a police uniform was always the specific comedy of an institution attempting to contain something that institutions were not designed to contain, the badge and the regulation fabric stretched across the frame of a man for whom regulation was always a suggestion rather than a constraint. The arms alone. The shoulders alone. The specific visual fact of Carlo Pedersoli in a Miami police shirt, leaning across a desk toward someone on the other side of it, is the whole premise of the scene delivered before a single line of dialogue.
Bud Spencer — on the left, the police uniform, the dark beard going toward the white that would eventually take over completely, the expression of someone who is addressing the person across the desk with the specific focused patience of Commissario Rizzo — or whoever this Miami policeman was — who always gave the situation the attention it deserved before resolving it by other means. Fifty-six years old. Still in the peak of his powers, still the warmth and the authority and the enormous physical presence that made every frame he occupied reorganize itself around him. The bottom-left panel shows him in the blue shirt of a later year, the warmth unchanged, the smile of a man who has spent his career being exactly himself and found the arrangement entirely satisfactory. He died in 2016, at eighty-six. RIP 2016.
Terence Hill — center, the police uniform, the expression of a man between two large personalities who has correctly identified this as a moment to observe rather than intervene. This is Terence in the specific position he occupied in so many scenes across thirty years of films — the composed presence beside the active one, the half-smile available when the situation produces something worth smiling at, which in any scene containing Bud Spencer and a desk and someone on the other side of it, was reliably imminent. Still alive in 2026, the Boston Red Sox cap confirming it — the same warm smile across four decades. 2026.
Buffy Dee — on the right, the paper fan, the white beard, the specific character costume of someone who has been placed on the civilian side of a police desk in a Bud Spencer film, which is — within the logic of these films — a position that requires the specific qualities of someone who can hold their own in a scene without competing with what the scene already has. Born 1931. An American actor and comedian whose career in American film and television spanned several decades — who brought to this role the specific quality of someone who understood that his function in the scene was to be the specific type of problem that Bud Spencer's specific type of solution was designed for. He died in 1995, at sixty-three. RIP 1995.
The American flag behind them. The desk bell. The paper fan. The police uniforms. The specific Miami of 1985 — the year of neon and pastel and the specific American moment that Miami Vice had made into a visual language and that Miami Supercops inhabited with the cheerful irreverence of a film that understood it was in conversation with the moment and was not particularly worried about whether the moment approved.
RIP 2016. 2026. RIP 1995.
The desk is still there in the film. The bell is still on the desk. The paper fan is still moving. Bud Spencer is still leaning across toward the man with the white beard with the specific focused patience of someone who has almost finished being patient.
Almost. 😄🌴🕯️

05/10/2026

The poker table. The green baize. The money scattered like leaves. And somewhere under that hat — a man who has already seen every card in the deck.

🃏 The poker table. The green baize. The money scattered like leaves. And somewhere under that hat — a man who has already seen every card in the deck.

The hat is the tell.
Every poker player has one — the specific thing they do when they know something the other players don't, the involuntary signal that the body sends before the brain has authorized the sending. For Trinity, the tell is the hat. The wide brim pulled low, the face underneath it barely visible to the other players at the table, the complete stillness of someone who has decided that the less the table knows about what is happening behind the eyes, the better.
The money is everywhere. Scattered across the green baize in the specific beautiful chaos of a game that has been going on long enough for the stakes to accumulate into something significant, for the neat stacks of the beginning to become the archaeology of an evening's decisions, each bill a record of a hand won or lost. The cards face-down, face-up, some bent at the corners from being held too tightly by people who did not yet know how to hold cards the way Trinity holds cards, which is lightly, the way you hold anything you intend to win and do not need to grip...continuavano a chiamarlo Trinità. 1971. Trinity Is Still My Name. The sequel to the film that changed everything — made the previous year, the year that They Call Me Trinity became one of the highest-grossing Italian films ever made and established the partnership as a phenomenon rather than a premise. The sequel that understood it did not need to explain the success, only to continue it, to put these two people back in the same frame and let the frame do what the frame always did when they were in it together.
The poker scene is the film doing what the film does best: finding a situation where the difference between the two men — the quickness and the stillness, the charm and the weight — can express itself completely, where each of them is being exactly what they are and the combination of what they each are produces something neither of them could produce alone.

Terence Hill. The hat. The back of the head and the brim and the hands visible at the bottom of the frame — the specific composition of a director who understood that Trinity at a poker table should be seen from behind, that the mystery of what is happening under the hat is more interesting than the revelation of the face above the cards.
He is thirty-two in this film. The year of They Call Me Trinity behind him and the whole arc of the partnership still ahead — the thirty-two films, the decades, the final collaboration in 1994 that neither of them knew would be the last when they were making it. He is in the middle of the beginning, which is the best place to be, when everything has proven itself possible and everything is still available.
The Red Sox cap in the bottom left portrait — 2026, eighty-seven years old — is the same blue eyes under a different hat. The ease unchanged. The quality of attention unchanged. The hat doing what hats have always done in his iconography, which is to define the distance between what the face shows and what the face knows.

Antonio Monselesan. Center of the table — the bearded face, the specific expression of a frontier card player who has decided that the situation requires concentration and is concentrating. He is one of the regular faces of the Italian genre cinema of this era — the supporting actor who appeared in film after film, who built the world around the stars by being a completely real presence in the world's periphery.
The military uniform in the bottom center portrait tells a different story from the frontier shirt of the poker scene — this is the same actor in a different film, a different decade, a different costume. The face recognizable in both: the quality of someone who inhabits whatever they are given with the same completeness, who makes the costume the character rather than the other way around.
RIP 2015. He was eighty-five. The decades of work in Italian cinema — the westerns and the genre films and the hundreds of faces that required a face like his to be complete — preserved in the permanent record of what he made.

Bud Spencer. Upper right of the table — recognizable even from this angle, even in a group shot, even when the camera is not pointing directly at him but catching him in the peripheral composition of a scene centered on something else. The dark beard, the shoulders, the specific mass of him that the green baize table barely contains — the presence that fills any frame it enters, not by trying but by simply being what it is.
He is forty-two in this film. The partnership with Terence Hill is four years old. They have made God Forgives... I Don't!, Boot Hill, They Call Me Trinity, and now this — four films in four years, the grammar of the collaboration fully established, the rhythm of it running without friction, the specific ease of people who have found their formation and settled into it.
The black and white portrait in the bottom right — the face older, the white beard fully present, the hands folded before the face in the specific gesture that this photograph has always shown, the expression that is both private and warm — carries the complete arc from the 1971 poker table to 2016. The same warmth. The same quality of someone who finds his own life, even at its most difficult, worth the finding.
RIP 2016. The stone in Rome. The grin in bronze. The white beard on the medallion. All of it still ahead in 1971, all of it growing from this poker table, from this green baize, from this scattered money and these hidden cards and the hat that tells nothing about what is underneath it.

The poker table is the perfect metaphor for what these films were doing.
In poker, the game is not about the cards you hold but about the gap between what people think you hold and what you actually hold — about information and its management, about the face you present and the face you have, about the specific intelligence of knowing when to show your hand and when to keep the hat pulled low.
Trinity understood this completely. Trinity always understood this completely. The blue eyes behind the hat were always doing the calculation — the full calculation, the one that accounted for everything visible and everything not visible and everything that could be made to appear one way while being another.
The genius of the partnership was that Bud Spencer could not have done this and did not need to — his intelligence was a different kind, direct rather than oblique, the intelligence of someone who assessed the situation and responded to it without requiring the response to be mistaken for something else. Together, the oblique and the direct produced something that neither of them could produce alone: the complete coverage of every situation, every angle, every requirement.
The scattered money. The hidden cards. The hat.
2026. RIP 2015. RIP 2016.
One still here. Two in the permanent record. The poker table still in the frame.
And somewhere under the hat —
Trinity.
Still holding his cards.
Still telling nothing.
Still knowing everything.

05/09/2026

At seventy-nine, he got on a motorcycle and made a film about finding your way back. Some journeys you can only take when you're old enough to know what you're looking for.

🏍️ At seventy-nine, he got on a motorcycle and made a film about finding your way back. Some journeys you can only take when you're old enough to know what you're looking for.

The helmet is the detail that earns its place.
Not the motorcycle jacket — though the jacket is doing what leather jackets do in Italian cinema, which is to say everything at once: the road, the freedom, the specific romance of someone who has decided that the world is best encountered at speed and with the wind finding the gaps in whatever you are wearing. Not the scarf at his throat, though the scarf says something about the care of someone who has been cold before and has learned to prepare. The helmet. The motorcycle helmet sitting on the head of a seventy-nine-year-old man who has decided, at seventy-nine, that the story he wants to tell requires him to be on a motorcycle.
Most people at seventy-nine are thinking about comfort. Terence Hill was thinking about Thomas.
My Name Is Thomas. 2018. The film he wrote and directed and starred in — the most personal film he had made, the film that came two years after June 2016, two years after the partnership that had defined fifty years of his career became something different, something that continued in a different form through grief and memory and the specific stubborn loyalty of someone who refuses to let what mattered stop mattering just because the circumstances have changed.
He did not say it was about Bud. He did not need to say it. The film says it in the way that all personal films say their true subjects — sideways, through metaphor, through the story of a man on a motorcycle journey who encounters a young woman and finds in the encounter something that reconnects him to what he believed about the world before the world took something essential away.
A pilgrim film. A film about walking — or riding — toward something you have lost and are not sure you can find but cannot stop looking for.

Terence Hill. Thomas. The motorcycle helmet, the leather jacket, the blue eyes still doing what they always did — looking carefully at everything, missing nothing, carrying in their specific quality of attention the complete history of fifty years of Italian cinema and the more private history of a friendship that was now being carried alone.
He is seventy-nine in this film. He wrote it. He directed it. He put himself on a motorcycle and rode through the Italian countryside and found in the riding the same thing that riding in the films had always provided — the forward motion, the commitment to the next thing, the specific freedom of someone who has decided that stopping is not the right response to loss, that the right response to loss is to keep going and see where the going leads.
The blue eyes in this frame are the blue eyes of 1942 and 1962 and 1970 and every frame in between. Changed in every way that eighty years changes eyes — the lines around them, the settling of the face into its final form — but unchanged in the quality behind them. Still looking. Still paying attention. Still finding the world worth the attention.
The bottom right portrait shows him as he is now — 2026, eighty-seven years old, the silver hair, the blue jacket, the smile of someone who has arrived at a great age with his character intact and finds the arrival, on balance, sufficient. The specific peace of someone who has done what they came to do and done more of it besides and who has not yet decided to stop.

Veronica Bitto. The young woman in the top frame, her head close to Thomas's, the specific warmth of an encounter between two people at completely different stages of a life and finding in the difference something that both of them needed. The full smile — the uninhibited smile of a young actress completely present in the scene, completely giving what the scene requires, completely herself.
She was twenty-three in 2018. The film found her at the beginning of something — the career still building, the face still in the process of establishing itself in the permanent record of Italian cinema. What the top frame captures is the beginning of that establishment: the smile, the warmth, the quality of someone who brings to a scene more than the scene requested.
2026. The bottom left portrait shows the face eight years later — the hair shorter now, the specific quality of a young woman who has continued the work and found in the continuing that the work was worth continuing. The blue eyes that in the top frame were directed at Thomas are in the portrait directed at whoever is holding the camera, with the same warmth, the same presence, the same quality of someone who finds the world interesting and intends to keep finding it so.

This film is the one that most of the people who know Terence Hill from the westerns have not seen. And it is perhaps the most important film he made after 2016 — because it is the film that says, without saying it directly, what happens to a person when the most important partnership of their life changes its form.
You get on a motorcycle. You ride. You encounter a young woman who needs something and you find that helping her is a way of helping yourself, that the world still contains things worth doing and people worth knowing and roads worth riding.
You keep going. Because stopping was never the arrangement.
The arrangement — the one that was made somewhere in the late 1960s on a film set in Almería or Rome, the arrangement that ran for thirty years of films and then ran silently and invisibly for two more decades of friendship — the arrangement was always: we keep going.
One side of the arrangement changed its form in June 2016.
The other side is still keeping the arrangement.
Still on the motorcycle.
Still looking for Thomas.
Still going.

05/09/2026

1969. Four men on horseback. One of them would become a legend. One of them already was.

🤠 1969. Four men on horseback. One of them would become a legend. One of them already was.

The colors are the first thing that stops you.
In a decade that understood Technicolor as a statement rather than a tool, Boot Hill made its visual argument loudly and without apology: the yellow shirt, the sheepskin coat, the green and turquoise of the rightmost rider, the whole chromatic declaration of a film that had decided the frontier should be as vivid as the people moving through it. This is not the dusty muted palette of the serious spaghetti western — not Leone's ochres and browns and the specific sun-bleached restraint of Almería. This is something more festive, more Italian, more committed to the proposition that a western could be warm in color the way it was warm in spirit.
Four men on horses under a dark ceiling, riding toward whatever comes next, each of them wearing their costume the way they wore everything in these films — with the complete ease of people who had decided that the costume was simply what they were wearing today and did not require any additional relationship to it.
La collina degli stivali. Boot Hill. 1969. Giuseppe Colizzi directing — the third and final film in his collaboration with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill, the trilogy that had started with God Forgives... I Don't! in 1967 and that traced, across three films, the developing language of a partnership that was still finding its register, still discovering what it could do when the right two people were placed in the same frame.

George Eastman. Far left. The yellow shirt, the dark hair, the specific energy of someone who has arrived in the frame with momentum — not the ease of the stars, not the settled quality of people who have found their position, but the live-wire quality of someone who is using every tool available and finding the tools sufficient.
Luigi Montefiori — who took the name George Eastman because the industry of 1969 thought American names traveled better, which was true and slightly absurd simultaneously. He was twenty-seven in this film, at the beginning of a career that would produce decades of work in Italian genre cinema — the westerns, the horror films, the action movies, the complete catalog of someone who found their world and worked in it with consistency and commitment.
The face in the bottom left portrait — closer, more recent, the dark hair still present, the eyes carrying the specific quality of someone who has been paying attention for a long time and intends to keep paying attention — is the face of someone who has made his peace with what his career was and is, which is a long and real and specific thing, not a monument but a body of work built film by film across decades.
2026. Still here. Eighty-two years old. The energy that the yellow shirt suggested still visible in the face.

Terence Hill. Second from left. The hat, the sheepskin coat — the costume of Cat Stevens, which is either a reference to the folk singer or a coincidence of nomenclature that the film never explains and does not need to. The blue eyes doing what they always did, which is to assess the situation with complete attention while the face maintains the specific ease of someone who has decided that the situation is, on balance, manageable.
He is thirty in this film. The partnership with Bud Spencer is two years old. They have made two films together and are making the third and have not yet made They Call Me Trinity — the film that will change everything, that will take what these three Colizzi westerns established and amplify it to the scale of a cultural phenomenon. In 1969, they are still building toward that. Still finding the grammar. Still discovering, film by film, what the partnership can do.
The bottom second portrait shows them both — Terence and Bud, in a formal event, suits and ties, the silver hair and the white beard, the two men who were in the sheepskin coat and the fur collar in 1969 now in their eighties and still, still, unmistakably themselves. The ease still present. The warmth still present. The partnership still visible in the way they occupy the same frame — close, comfortable, the specific geometry of two people who have been beside each other for so long that proximity has become the natural state.
2026. Terence still here. Bud in the same frame, the white beard and the warm eyes — RIP 2016 — the portrait of a man taken in his last years, still warm, still completely himself.

Bud Spencer. Center. The fur collar coat — the specific costume that says: this man takes up space and intends to continue taking up space and has dressed accordingly. The dark beard still dark in 1969, the beard that would spend the next thirty years transitioning from dark to white while remaining, at every stage, definitively his. The hands on the reins, the horse beneath him, the expression of someone who has arrived somewhere and is deciding whether the arriving was worth the ride.
He is forty in this film. Carlo Pedersoli, who had been a swimmer and was now an actor and who was, in 1969, still in the early chapters of the partnership that would define his legacy. The sheepskin costume is not elegant. Nothing in these films required elegance. What it required was presence, and Bud Spencer had enough presence to make a sheepskin coat look like a choice made by someone who understood exactly what they were doing.
RIP 2016. The white beard. The stone in Rome. The grin in bronze. All of it still forty-seven years away in this 1969 frame — still ahead of him, still unwritten, still the future that nobody in this frame could see.

Woody Strode. Far right. The wide hat, the green and turquoise — the colors that in this frame are doing something specific, that are setting the rightmost figure apart from the others in a way that the Technicolor understood and deployed deliberately. Thomas — the character who moves through the film with the specific dignity that Woody Strode brought to every role he ever played, which was the dignity of someone who had been an athlete and a soldier and a actor and had found in all three the same essential quality: the complete physical authority of someone who knows what their body can do and is comfortable in the knowledge.
Woody Strode had played Draba in Spartacus in 1960 — the gladiator who chose death over participation in the system that enslaved him, the role that established him as someone whose physical presence carried moral weight, who could stand in a frame and make the frame feel like it contained an argument. He had worked with John Ford. He had worked with Leone. He had been, across three decades of cinema, one of the great presences in the international film industry — underused by Hollywood, better appreciated in Europe, found by Italian cinema which understood what he had and deployed it with more intelligence than the American industry had managed.
RIP 1994. He was eighty years old. He had kept working until close to the end — the westerns and the genre films and the European productions that valued what he brought, the career that was not the career his talent deserved but that was real and complete and left behind performances worth watching and a presence worth remembering.
The hat and the turquoise are still catching the Technicolor light.

Four men on horses. 1969.
The year before They Call Me Trinity. The year before everything changed. The year when the partnership was still finding its voice, when the films were still building toward the thing they were going to become, when nobody on this set or in this frame could quite see what was coming.