They Call Me Trinity - Plot

Plot

Trinity (Terence Hill) comes into view accompanied by the movie's song. His horse is dragging him around in a travois. He is filthy, yet seems perfectly content as the horse drags him across the desert and through water crossings. When the horse stops near a dwelling, Trinity gets up, pulls on his boots, gets stung by a scorpion hiding in the boot but is clearly insusceptible to the venom then he drags his Colt 45 in holster and walks inside.

It is the Chaparral Stagecoach Station and restaurant. The owner, noting Trinity's wretched appearance, tells him he will sell him a plate of beans if he has money to pay, a fly infested misshapen slattern prepares the dish. Trinity takes the frying pan along with the plate, scraping the beans from the plate back into the pan and proceeds to eat from the pan with gusto, punctuated by occasional loud burping. The eating scenes are a frequent comic element of the movies in which the team of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer appear.

There are two white men in the restaurant with an injured Mexican prisoner. The two men are bounty hunters and are disappointed to see that Trinity's face does not appear in their batch of Wanted posters and proceed to disparage him for his sooty unkempt appearance. After Trinity has eaten every scrap in the pan, he gets up, strolls over to the men's table, and calmly relieves them of their prisoner. When they ask him his name so they'll know what to put on the headstone, he answers, "They call me Trinity." The resulting double-take foreshadows Trinity's notoriety. Trinity offers them a disarming grin when they refer to him as the "Right Hand of the Devil" and tell him that it's said he has "the fastest gun around."

As he walks outside with their prisoner, the men stick their rifle through a window in preparation to shoot Trinity. But in one smooth movement from behind his back and apparently without aiming, Trinity drops both men in their tracks. It's a zen move showing his effortless, almost mystic skill with a gun. He casually gives the injured Mexican his spot on the travois as he perches himself backwards on the horse so the men can converse as they travel.

Soon they reach a small town where an enormous man with a sheriff's star on his chest is seated outside his office, apparently trying to read a newspaper. He is being harassed by three local toughs standing in the street loudly demanding that he release their friend from jail. Trinity stops to watch the developing gunfight, predicting to the Mexican that the toughs will be "stiff before they hit the ground." When the enormous man quickdraws them with his left hand and outshoots them without blinking, the Mexican asks Trinity who the fast gun is and is told the enormous man is the "Left Hand of the Devil."

It quickly becomes apparent that Trinity and the enormous man, an omnipotent bearded buffoon with squinty eyes—comically called Bambino (baby), are brothers. Bambino (played by Bud Spencer) is merely posing as the sheriff of the small town while he awaits the arrival of his gang from the penitentiary from which he escaped. He is not happy to see his troublemaking brother. However, the two form a temporary partnership to deal with Major Harriman (Farley Granger), who is attempting to run a group of pacifist Mormon farmers off their land with the intention of using their property to graze his own horses. The fact that these horses are valuable and unbranded explain Bambino's grudging willingness to work with his little brother even though he considers Trinity to be a shiftless bum without ambition.

However, Trinity has fallen in love with two Mormon sisters and is genuinely concerned with the Mormon settlers' welfare. He persuades Bambino and Bambino's henchmen to help train the pacifistic Mormons to fight, and in the final battle, the Mormon leader finds in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible that "there is a time for fighting," and the Mormons are unleashed against Major Harriman's goons, using the dirty fighting tricks they learned.

Bambino is flabbergasted and then infuriated to learn that Trinity has given the Major's horses to the Mormons. Trinity is about to be happily married to the two Mormon sisters when he learns to his horror that being a married Mormon means actually having to work. So he skips out and goes after Bambino. But his brother has had enough of him and sends him off in the opposite direction. Trinity gets the last laugh, though. He directs the real sheriff (who has come looking for Bambino) in Bambino's direction.

There are slight differences between the original Italian version and the dubbed English version. In the former, the injured Mexican has more dialogue explaining that he was arrested for knifing a gringo who tried to rape his wife.