A Unique Blend Of Western And Martial Arts

Featuring a Western icon and a 1970s martial arts star, The Stranger and the Gunfighter served as a unique and memorable blend of two different genres. Released in 1976, The Stranger and the Gunfighter was a highly unusual film for Lee Van Cleef, an actor with a close association with the Western medium.

Best known for his role as Angel Eyes in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More, Lee Van Cleef made a multitude of Westerns during his career. They weren’t as high-profile as the Spaghetti Westerns he made with Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone, but some proved to be entertaining entries into the genre nonetheless.

After his work with Eastwood and Leone on the Dollars Trilogy, Van Cleef starred in a slew of 1970s Westerns, appearing alongside several other recognizable actors, including Carrol Baker, James Mason, and Jim Brown.

Many were fellow Western actors, whereas some amounted to unusual partnerships – case in point being his involvement in The Stranger and the Gunfighter, which teamed him with an Indonesian actor known for his roles in some of the best kung fu movies of the 1970s.

The Stranger and the Gunfighter Is A Western Team-Up Between Lee Van Cleef & Lo Lieh

In 1974, Italian movie studio Harbor Films partnered with Shaw Brothers, the biggest name in Hong Kong’s kung fu movie industry, for a film titled The Stranger and the Gunfighter. The joint Hong Kong-Italian production represented a mix of two distinctly different genres, kung fu movies and Spaghetti Westerns.

To that end, an actor associated with each genre was last for its two lead roles, with Spaghetti Western veteran Lee Van Cleef getting one spot and the other going to Lo Lieh, one of the many actors in Shaw Brothers’ stable of martial arts stars.

Lo Lieh made a name for himself by starring in Five Fingers of Death, which beat Enter the Dragon to the title of the first kung fu movie to become an international hit. Over the years, he starred in well over 100 martial arts movies, playing villains more often than not. This included Clan of the White Lotus and 36th Chamber of Shaolin, two of Shaw Brothers’ best movies.

The Stranger and the Gunfighter leans on the two stars’ backgrounds, with Van Cleef playing a gunslinger and martial arts star Lo Lieh taking on the role of a Chinese immigrant and kung fu expert. In the movie, Lo Lieh’s character, Ho Chiang, comes to the American Wild West to find buried treasure that’s being used as leverage against him by the film’s villain.

To this end, Ho Chiang teams up with Lee Van Cleef’s Dakota, with the pair having to combine their respective talents to overcome a number of challenges and get their hands on the treasure.

Having a character using martial arts on his enemies is a surprising but entertaining departure from standard Western movies, considering that saloon brawls and old-fashioned slugfests are the kind of fights normally expected from Westerns.

The Stranger And The Gunfighter Isn’t Lee Van Cleef’s Only Martial Arts Western

A cowboy looking interested in Take a Hard Ride

As unique as The Stranger and the Gunfighter may seem for both actors, it was the first – but not the last – martial arts Western to feature Lee Van Cleef. In the following year, he appeared in Take a Hard Ride alongside Enter the Dragon star Jim Kelly, whose martial arts expertise was applied to the portrayal of his character, not unlike The Stranger and the Gunfighter’s use of Lo Lieh.

While The Stranger and the Gunfighter and Take a Hard Ride only emphasize the kung fu skills of Lee Van Cleef’s co-stars, it’s worth noting that the actor had more than his fair share of martial arts knowledge. He got to put his own talents to the test in the 1980 Chuck Norris-led martial arts film, The Octagon, as well as NBC’s 1984 martial arts TV show, The Master, where Van Cleef played the main protagonist.