Sabata

Lock, Stock &
Seven Smoking Barrels

Sabata
aka
Ehi amico...
c'è Sabata. Hai chiuso!
Italy 1969
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Minor spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last watched the Sabata films... fortunately I was gifted with the new Eureka Masters Of Cinema The Sabata Trilogy Blu Ray set for Christmas*. That being said, anyone who knows the movies will know (or soon come to realise) that, like Sergio Leone’s ‘Man With No Name’ trilogy, the three films don’t form a trilogy at all but, at least in the case of the Sabata movies, the third one, Return Of Sabata, is actually a direct sequel to first movie. And, yeah, I’ll talk about that more when I look at the ‘second’ film, Adios Sabata (aka Indio Black) for this blog.

Okay, after a load of pepla, secret agent moves and the like, Sabata was only around about the third Western directed by Gianfranco Parolini, following on from his Johnny West and Sartana movies. Well, it’s more like an assault on the genre actually because, while he certainly goes out of his way to bring in the popular tropes, he also brings a lot of his own baggage with him and injects it into the movie.

The production designer was Carlo Simi, who worked on many a spaghetti Westerns including, of course, a few for the maestro of the genre, Sergio Leone. Perhaps the biggest element of familiarity for the genre trappings of the film was Parolini’s decision to hire the nine fingered actor Lee Van Cleef (he’d lost the top of one digit while building a playhouse for his daughter) to play the title role. And, yes, his costume in this is very similar, if not identical, to the one he wore playing Colonel Mortimer in the first of his big hits, For A Few Dollars More... opposite Clint Eastwood, for the aforementioned Leone. In the Leone film he played a bounty hunter and, Sabata is not much different to that character except there’s no history between him and the villain of the piece waiting for a surprise reveal in this one... although he does have a history with the secondary lead, William Berger playing the banjo playing character... um... Banjo.

The plot is simple. The evil planners of the town of Daugherty are ripping off the army by stealing money, in a bank robbery shown early on in the film, which sees a lot of soldiers killed. The film’s primary villain, Stengel, played by Franco Ressel, needs the money to buy some land which will at least double in price when the railway comes to buy it from the owner. However, very quickly, the new drifter in town, Sabata, kills many of the robbers and returns the stolen safe to the town. It then becomes a game of the villains trying to get Sabata, who has evidence against them, out of the way and not pay his ransom for silence... while also trying to kill anyone else who knows about their evil doings. But mostly just by trying to kill Sabata in various ways, which the title character is far too smart to fall for, leaving a trail of hired killer corpses in his trail.

There are betrayals, double crossings, surprise reveals, plenty of action, a very satirical look at how the governing bodies try and rip off the little people (hmm... I wonder if the current UK Government have been taking lessons from this movie) and a wonderful score by Marcello Giombini.

Helping Sabata are Ignazio Spalla, as the knife throwing Carrincha and Aldo Canti as the acrobatic Alley Cat (or Indio, depending on which country’s version you watch). And talking of acrobatics... it’s one of the two big things which director Parolini brings to the fight, so to speak. He always had a lot of acrobatics in his movies. And, of course, especially hot off of the various secret agent movies released then, there’s a whole host of gadgets and surprise weapons that Sabata or his enemies use against each other. Indeed, in the US and UK, the movie was promoted with a kind of ‘James Bond in the West’ spin to it, although that really isn’t what this is.

For example... and it’s no surprise due to both some posters and also the obviousness of the fetishistic nature of some of the accoutrements of the main characters, Banjo’s banjo also includes a hidden rifle as part of its make up. What is a surprise are some of Sabata’s gadgets. He has a screw on extended barrel for his Winchester which allows him to shoot much further than an ordinary rifle could... some of the posters heralded him as ‘The Man With The Gunsight Eyes’. But there’s also his tricky Derringer. Not only does it have four barrels in place of the standard single shooters, it also has another three barrels hidden in a drop down piece from the handle, first revealed when Sabata flips his pistol 90 degrees and shoots from the stock, so to speak.

There are also lots of other trick moments which make the movie entertaining, such as a pull thread on the derringer hidden in a bag so that when Sabata pushes the bag to a killer disguised as a priest, it activates it and shoots the villain from the inside of the bag. There’s a nice moment at the end of this sequence too, when Sabata throws a coin across the room to snuff out a candle.

But another thing that makes it watchable is the heart behind some of the characters. Sabata and Banjo, who are mostly allies in the film (to an extent), both knew each other from opposite sides of the civil war. Also, the down on his luck ex-civil war veteran Carrincha bemoans that nobody will take his medal to put up for a gambling stake or to swap for a bottle of whisky. Luckily, the medal saves his life from a stray bullet later in the movie and, for the ‘not dead after all’ reveal for the character, Parolini gives that medal a lot of foreshadowing throughout the film.

Finally, it’s really not a bad looking film technically. Parolini moves the camera about in various spaces with his characters, revealing new details about their environment and their positioning in it as he does so... but he’s not above adding in a quick close up insert before returning to the camera movement from a slightly closer angle, also making use of the zoom lens when required. He also uses the positioning of the camera to reveal Sabata’s trick of appearing in a frame as a painting, before he’s rumbled... the shots hitting a mirror which has been framed perfectly somehow in the villains view by the ‘human canvas’.

And, yeah, that’s me about done on the first Sabata film. It’s a heck of a lot of fun and so rides up there with some of the best of the Spaghetti Westerns, certainly from that late 1960s/early 70s period of the genre. If you like your Westerns then this one is definitely one to take a look at. And I’ll get onto the next ‘unofficial’ entry in the series, also made by the same writer/director, for my next Sabata review.

*Christmas 2021... it takes me a while to get the reviews up sometimes.