It Can Be Done Amigo (1974)

Thanks for the memories!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This fitfully amusing Spaghetti western comedy embraces the time-honored concept of incongruity as the source of its laughs and shuns overt shoot'em up violence where the corpses outnumber the horses."It Can Be Done, Amigo" opens with our barrel-chested protagonist Hiram Coburn (Bud Spencer of "They Call Me Trinity") sitting atop his horse sprawled out on the ground and trying to convince the steed that it must eventually rise. "How the hell did I ever get stuck with a loser like you?" Hiram complains, "Hell, you feel tired and you drop to the ground like you was dead. It ain't natural in a horse. What do you take me for? You got the idea I'm going to carry you? There's no more water, the sun's hot, and this ain't no place for lunch." Traditionally, horses in westerns dating back to the 1930s and the popular B-westerns of the day depicted the horse as a better friend to the hero than a dog. The horse was always dependable and usually got the hero out of trouble. On the other hand, Coburn's horse—Rufus—is anything but helpful. This reversal of the convention of the intelligent horse is the first example of humor in this western.The second example of humor is Hiram himself. As played by the big, lovable lug Bud Spencer, Hiram is an off-beat western hero. First, he wears no gun. Instead, he relies on his 'Hulk-like' fists to decimate the opposition. Second, the running gag throughout "It Can Be Done, Amigo" is that Hiram carefully puts on his spectacles before he slam bangs his way through opponents in fistfights. Normally, combatants remove their eyewear before they wade into each other with fists galore. Hiram is virtually indestructible.Once Hiram convinces Rufus to arise, they run across several wild mustangs and the horses follow our hero until he runs into a group of hardcases that decide that Hiram has stolen the horses. They are about to hang him for horse theft when young Chip Anderson (Renato Cestiè) and his uncle—an attorney—appear on the scene in a wagon, and the uncle demands that Hiram deserves a trial. The vigilantes still plan to hang Hiram. Little do they know that Hiram has a guardian angel in the person of Sonny Bronston (Jack Palance of "Shane") who intends to see that Hiram marries his sister Mary (Dany Saval) to clear her good name before he shoots him. Consequently, anybody that tries to do evil to Hiram incurs Sonny's wrath. Again, incongruity lends itself to the humor of this lightweight western. The first time that Hiram sees Sonny, our hero describes Sonny to his horse Rufus as "a man with bullets where his brains out to be." Hiram escapes from the calaboose when some outlaws blow it up to rescue one of their own. A vigilante tries to shoot Hiram, but Sonny shoots the rifle out of the guy's hands.All of this serves as a set-up to Hiram as he rides off into the desert on Rufus and stumbles across the lawyer strewn on his back in the desert and left for dead. The dying attorney plays on Hiram's sentimentality to take care of young Chip and take him to a town called Westland where he owns a broken down ranch. Reluctantly, Hiram accepts this mission. During the scene with the dying lawyer, Hiram repeatedly closes the man's eyes so he can die, but the attorney keeps opening them and issuing Hiram more instructions.Once they reach Westland, Hiram and Chip meet a man who acts as the preacher and the town lawman and this character tries to buy Chip's land for a $1000 dollars, but the boy refuses to sell. In town, Hiram is mystified by a man who buys up buckets of dirt and eats them. Initially, Hiram believes that the guy must be searching for gold. However, it isn't gold, but oil. Eventually, Hiram is forced to marry Bronston's sister Mary. During a big celebration at their house, a fistfight erupts and during the brawl, oil spouts from the ground. As everybody but Chip and Hiram ride off, Hiram decides to become the man of the house, puts on his spectacles, and enters the house to make a baby with Mary.No, "It Can Be Done, Amigo" is only about a third as funny as the "Trinity" movies, but it provides an interesting change-of-pace for blood splattered Spaghetti westerns and the production values are solid. Bud Spencer gives his usual, disgusted with everybody performance and he has a running gag where he challenges all comers to wager a bet that the bottom of a can is longer compared with the length of the can.One thing that does stand out magnificently about this Italian western is the spectacular orchestral score by Luis Enríquez Bacalov who later won an Oscar in for the 1996 movie "Ii Postino." Bacalov also wrote another beautiful score for the Lee Van Cleef Italian western "The Grand Duel." Maurizio Lucidi began his career as an editor on the muscleman epic "Goliath and the Dragon" with Mark Forest and went on to cut the Tony Anthony shoot'em up "A Stranger In Town" as well as the Gordon Scott western "The Tramplers." "It Can Be Done, Amigo" isn't the best Bud Spencer movie, but neither is it the worse, settling somewhere in between.

I got this movie in a DVD-pack of 24 (cheap) Westerns, mostly spaghetti westerns like this one. And although for the most part I thought this was poor even by spaghetti western standards, I was really delighted by the Hiram Coburn character as played by Bud Spencer.Spencer is new to me, but after seeing this flick and reading the other comments I think I'll just have to go out and find Call Me Trinity or one of the Trinity flicks. My own take on Bud Spencer's character in this movie (Can Be Done Amigo) is pretty much a match for that outlined in the other comments. I just want to add that I was just delighted by this character.Of course spaghetti westerns, and westerns indeed, are full of strange and oddly appealing characters. But this Coburn character is a knew one to me.Laid back, cool, looking down at the ground and grunting softly whenever someone says something to which he takes exception ... then quietly putting on his wire-rimmed spectacles any time he is going to pound someone ... is really appealing to me for some reason. He's a big bear of a man. He wears no guns, but his fists pound all opposition into the ground - or through the nearest window or door or the like. I only would have liked Coburn to put on his glasses just before the final strangely funny and strangely appealing fight scene. I got a feeling of a cross between Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges and even Batman ... the early series of Batman with loud reports every time a fist hit anyone. "Bam!" "Pow!" you remember. well, same here, except there's no visual aid, just the loud sound of "bam." All in all, I really liked this gem of a characterization in this movie. Guess I'll have to find Call me Trinity ... ! Charles Delacroix

I must admit to being relatively new to the whole Bud Spencer/Terence Fisher thing, but I've already found myself a personal favorite movie in the stack. This infectious, dopey, quasi-surreal Spaghetti Western/comedy, tailor-written for Bud Spencer, then at the height of his post TRINITY glory.Like a good Simpson's episode, IT CAN BE DONE AMIGO's plot defies verbal description: A shambling, lummox like behemoth of a scoundrel (Spencer, standing about 6'4" and weighing 300lbs easy) finds himself going from two bit horse thief to community hero, in spite of his best efforts to avoid otherwise. He is also avoiding Jack Palance, comically over the top as a super-slick Pistolero who will see his "disgraced" sister married to the lummox, or else. Palance is traveling the west with his group of showgirls that he promotes in the most ridiculous looking coach I have ever seen in a Western, and at one point suffers a bout of whiplash that renders him bent over like a pretzel for about a quarter of the film. There are additional intrigues about a young boy traveling to his fostered parent's homestead with an uncle, who turns out to be dead but still entrusts the tyke to Spencer anyway. With much grumbling and gruff muttering, Spencer slowly becomes a father figure, the kid decides that Palance's sister would make a good mother figure, and even plots by local desperadoes won't stop this rolling boulder of humanity once it gets going.And also like a good Simspon's episode, what the film does is to present us with a small community of memorable, likable, amusing cartoon characters who inhabit a very real world made up of what appear to be sets left over from ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, but now somewhat run down and falling apart. The whole film has a sort of ramshackle, on-the-fly look to it that is very endearing, having the appearance of a typical Western, but being a whole heck of a lot more. Even the meanies in the movie have very human qualities, like the identical twin mustachioed gunfighters (one is left handed, the other right), the weaselly Desperado that Spencer cons out of a turkey dinner in the film's beguiling opening section (the look on Spencer's face after having a bottle broken over his head is priceless: "Not again ..."), and especially Jack Palance, who has never been better as he chomps on a cigarillo and intones "You're gonna marry my seester".Then there is the wandering geologist who pays people to eat some of their dirt (he's looking for oil), Spencer's highly intelligent and communicative horse (who is asked for and gives advice on a few occasions), the bumbling gang of Pistoleros who keep trying to do Spencer in and keep paying for it, and the pretty, busty, blond woman who only wants to marry Spencer, whom she has a love/hate relationship with that is especially amusing when they discuss his eating habits ("I eat like a hog 'cos that's the way I like it."). The effect that this otherwise dainty, attractive young woman has upon the huge, gentle Spencer is the film's best joke, because he only wants to eat, ride, talk with his horse, and not have any responsibilities.Don't we all, though? The movie IS Spencer's, and was either written specifically for him OR was the role he was born to play, probably a bit of both. One of the alternate titles for the film is THE BULLDOZER RETURNS, AMIGO and is very telling of his Hiram Coburn. He doesn't wear a gun, and doesn't need to. He is big, strong, fast, and outsmarts people as much as pounding them into the ground like telephone poles. One of the interesting quirks given to his character is that Spencer puts on a pair of Ben Franklin wire rim glasses just before he starts swinging the beef, and my favorite moment from the film is when one of the bad guys tries three swift punches to his bread box that have the effect of punching the Hoover Dam. It's hilarious ...But to use the analogy one more time because it's so fitting, just like a good Simpson's episode, you have to see it for yourself to understand the magic that this stupid, funny, quirky little movie has going on. And you can: Look for a DVD Box Set by the nefarious Treeline Films obnoxiously called FIFTY WESTERN CLASSICS with 50 fullframe PDM Westerns on twelve double sided DVDs, each enclosed it it's own cardboard drink coaster. The print used was a dingy, fullframe formatted TV print, but it's utterly hilarious, addictively watchable, somewhat thought provoking, and proves once again that the best movies are always the ones that tell stories about people. Perhaps Mr. Lucas should have given this a looksee while making up his last STAR WARS movie, which was about action figures and computer games and making money. And as a result, it sucked. IT CAN BE DONE AMIGO was shot on a budget of probably less than $100,000 in even today's money, and is a far superior entertainment that actually has a soul. Imagine that.I give this one unusually high marks: Nine out of ten, and recommend it to anyone planning to put relics of humanity into a satellite to be launched in the direction of the galaxy Andromeda as an example of what we were capable of.

Ivan Coburn (Spencer) deflowered the sister of the fastest gun around, Sonny.(Jack Palance) Sonny wants Coburn to marry his sister so she wont live in shame, and then Sonny wants to kill Coburn. During all this Coburn has to take care of a small boy named Chip Anderson whos uncle died from a gun shot. I laughed alot during this movie....many fights and one liners....This movie was much better than I thought it would be. I think it's for Terence Hill and Bud Spencer fans only...or if you like the whole sphagetti western thing. There is something unusal in this film....there's a guy who pays 2 dollars for a bucket if dirt..and then he eats it!!??? (he's looking for soil with oil in it.) The start to this is also funny.....Coburn complains to his horse through the whole credits because it wont move, but when he sees a man with a gun the horse jumps to it's feet!My vote is 6/10. A good movie for people who like "They call me Trinity" style movies!