This is partly a reminder that not all auteurs are directors. I would argue Tom Cruise is an auteur. He makes movies that fit his personal brand and he has a strong vision of how to present himself on the screen. Sure, he has at times moved away from this, but everyone knows he has a very specific way of approaching the movies he stars in.

With that in mind, let us highlight at least two people who have been responsible for a lot of guilty pleasure movies. And they were definitely auteurs. They had well-defined characters they would put into different settings and just have fun with it.

Weirdly, Terence Hill was an established actor as Mario Girotti with a fifteen year career before choosing to work under a pseudonym. The idea was that it is easier to sell a movie outside of his native Italy if you use English names, so Mario and his longtime collaborator Carlo Pedersoli, also known as Bud Spencer, made 17 movies together under their pseudonyms. (The idea was so popular, other producers in Italy tried to form similar duos with fake American names and very similar looks, but they couldn’t really compete with the originals.)

I don’t know how universal this experience was but in my childhood they were absolutely everywhere. They weren’t exactly big stars or cultural icons but the movies they made were available in large quantities in every video rental store (for those of us who still remember them) which meant that everyone was aware of them even if they weren’t talked about much. So, when something is popular but not something you admit to watching, it must be a guilty pleasure.

Even now, my friends sometimes reference them and now almost defunct library streaming service Kirjastokino still has a bunch of the duos movies available (the service seems to be dying as they have lost most of the libraries in Finland to another service).

As with Jean Rollin’s section, I am not going to cover any specific movies here. The pair had a very clear template they always followed. They made action-comedies, often in a Western setting.

Hill would play a mischievous character who would survive through his carefree attitude and quick thinking. This would lead him into trouble that would often be the driving force in the movies.

Spencer, who was 14 years older than Hill and had a much bigger stature, would play supernaturally strong characters who were not interested in Hill’s character’s games or antics, but often had no choice but to take part. He would avoid showing it but he always had a heart of gold.
Eventually, there would always be a big fistfight, possibly multiple. In those fights Hill would use his youthful energy (although he wasn’t exactly young at this point) to maneuver himself into winning his part while Spencer would take on multiple foes at a time to show his strength.

And all of this was just a coincidence. Bud Spencer was supposed to star with someone else in their first movie (God Forgives… I Don’t), but the other actor was injured just before the shooting started, so they brought in Hill and this gloriously named movie started their career together.

The two of them are so widely known as a pair that they a Wikipedia page as such. This is understandable, as their 1971 film Trinity Is Still My Name, is still in the top 10 in Italy based on admissions when more than one quarter of the population saw it in a theater.