Giuliano Gemma

The Italian studio boom of the late 1950s gave him a start at the edge of the frame. Gemma is an uncredited Melanippo in Hercules Unchained, a Roman officer alongside Messala in Ben-Hur, one of Garibaldi's generals in The Leopard, a segment player in Boccaccio '70. Five years of standing near the middle of very large productions without being in it.

The westerns fixed that. As the title character in Duccio Tessari's A Pistol for Ringo and then as Captain Montgomery Brown in Tessari's The Return of Ringo, both from 1965, he gave the genre something it did not otherwise have: a light, grinning, physically athletic hero in a form built around squinting stillness. Where the American imports played statues, Gemma moved. He vaulted, tumbled and enjoyed himself, and the Ringo films were built entirely around that difference. Arizona Colt in 1966, Scott Mary in Tonino Valerii's Day of Anger and Michele Lupo's California in 1977 mapped the arc from the sunny version of the type to the sour one.

Italian cinema kept him after the westerns dried up, and the range is wider than the Ringo posters suggest. He is Mattis in The Desert of the Tartars, part of a garrison waiting at a frontier fort for an enemy that may never arrive. He is Detective Germani in Tenebre, working a giallo about a novelist and a string of murders with more patience than the genre usually allows. He does broad comedy in Even Angels Eat Beans and Let's Hope It's a Girl, costume romance in the Angelique films, and late supporting work in The Final Inquiry and Mad Love, still cast for the face.