Adiós Sabata

Cowboys And Indio

Adiós Sabata
aka Indio Black
aka
Indio Black, sai che ti dico:
Sei un gran figlio di...
Italy 1970
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini
Eureka Masters Of Cinema Blu Ray Zone B

So the second of Eureka Masters Of Cinema’s new Blu Ray set of the dubbed American prints of The Sabata Trilogy (seriously, why no Italian option on these to give the scores a chance?), is Adiós Sabata, which is the film which makes a mockery of it ever being a trilogy of course. A nice story surrounding the film is that former Sabata star Lee Van Cleef and Yul Brinner, who plays the title character of this film (yeah, I’ll get to that in a minute), just swapped roles and so while Yul Brinner was playing Sabata, Van Cleef was replacing him as Chris in The Magnificent Seven Ride... but the two films are actually a couple of years apart so it’s really not the case. Nice story though.

So, yeah, the reason this film makes a mockery of the idea of a Sabata trilogy is that, well, this is not actually a Sabata movie at all. The film’s original title is Indio Black or, on the Italian release, Indio Black, sai che ti dico: Sei un gran figlio di... and, Indio Black is the central character. And while it’s easy to argue that the characters of Indio Black and Sabata are more or less interchangeable, they don’t use the same gadgets as each other and the tone of the characters is slightly different. Although, gadgets and, of course, acrobatics do play a prominent part in the movie, being as it’s a Parolini film. Also, Ignazio Spalla is back, playing a more cleaned up but, also, very much a similar sidekick called Escudo, of sorts, to Indio. Or to Sabata, if you’re watching it in the English dub, which is problematic only in terms of the great Bruno Nicolai’s truly wonderful score for the film (one of his catchiest and certainly one of his best). Nicolai and Morricone at this time were conducting and sometimes orchestrating each other’s scores (although I believe Morricone denied the orchestration claim) and their music from around this period was very similar in style. So the English dub retains the sweeping score with its trademark whistling but erases the male chorus chanting Indio Black... which is why I lament the loss of the Italian dub from this set.

Okay, the film is set in the specific Mexican revolution of 1867 (as opposed to one of the other Mexican revolutions of this era) and the Austrians are in power. Indio Black... err... Sabata is retained by a client to help out with retrieving some gold from the bad guy Colonel Skimmel, played by Gérard Herter (who some may remember as the Austrian Baron/villain from the incredible movie The Big Gundown (aka La resa dei conti). Indio/Sabata, Escudo, an untrustworthy American painter called Ballantine (played by Dean Reed) and a bunch of Mexican revolutionaries, including a man who can launch ball-bearings from his feet to kill people in acrobatic ways, get caught up in plot and counter plot... as the Colonel is also trying to rip off his own Government and has transported sand rather than gold out to be intercepted by robbers. So lots of shoot outs, double crosses and, as you would expect from the director, a nice array of gadgets.

So the Colonel has a big model galleon on the chest of drawers in the corner of his office and, when he sends his allies who he needs silencing, to open the drawers and take their payment, the miniature cannons on the model fire into them. Since he’s not really playing Sabata, Yul Brinner is kitted out with just a regular derringer and his rifle doesn’t have an extension to shoot long distances... however, he does have a trick rifle. He has a special cigar case which slots into the top and acts as a cartridge feed into he gun for rapid firing/reloading... which is a nice looking thing. Like his character Chris in The Magnificent Seven, not to mention Sabata, he dresses all in black but he’s definitely doing his own thing here, with a big V of his chest showing from the shirt and loads of tassels on the fringe of the arms. Not something Sabata would have worn, I would have thought.

There’s some nice stuff going on with the cinematography and shot design on this one too. Sometimes Parolini will put someone like Brynner in the foreground so just his head and shoulder are on the right of the shot while a full figure of the person he’s having a conversation with (although both are looking directly to camera) is seated and taking up the left of the shot, to push the contrast in size and distance.

There’s a wonderful shot where three paid thugs are sent to collect Sabata from a barn... they enter and the shot shows a screen split by two upright supports of the building, each person framed in one of the three gaps spread across the widescreen aspect ratio. There’s also a great bit where a bunch of barrels and such like, with no ends, are placed at the forefront of the screen and Indio and his friends are walking towards camera but in such a way that they can only be seen in the approach through the circular tube of one of those barrel openings... the shot eventually zooming towards the opening to fill the screen with the view.

Another nice creative piece is the rotating iron cockerel motif used to start a gunfight at the start of the movie... when the cockerel stops, Sabata and the gang who is after him open fire. We see the swivelling cockerel at the foreground of the shot intercut with various pans and zooms over the eyes and faces of the protagonist, antagonists and watching crowd, to build up the suspense. It’s not an unusual device for a spaghetti Western for sure but, it’s well done and makes for a nice sequence.

And that’s about all I have to say on Indio Black... sorry, I mean Adiós Sabata, although I would point you towards Austin Fisher’s excellent 15 minute piece about the film as one of the bonus features, if you want to better understand the political context of the film and what it was trying to do. Politics isn’t my strong point so I won’t attempt to get into it here... I don’t know who this Fisher guy is but he seems like someone who really knows what he’s talking about (which makes a change from some of the extras I’ve seen in recent times, to be honest). Oh, and one last thing, fans of gialli might notice a small appearance in the film by giallo queen Nieves Navarro (aka Susan Scott) in this as a saloon dancer (and one of Ballantine’s lovers, it’s intimated). But, overall, a fun Western with some nice gadgets and tricks worthy of the director, probably a little more serious than the ‘real’ Sabata films but that’s just Yul Brynner’s inimitable style, it seems to me. A nice print and transfer too, as you would expect from the Eureka Masters Of Cinema label.

La Resa Dei Conti (The Big Gundown)

Cleefhanger

La Resa Dei Conti (The Big Gundown) 
1966 Spain/Italy 
Directed by Sergio Sollima
Screening at the London Film Festival 2012

Warning: Spoilers standing off against each other, 
waiting to be the first one to fire. 

Well... I was more than a little surprised when I found that the organisers of the London Film Festival had chosen to acquire a restored print of one of my all time favourite spaghetti westerns, The Big Gundown, and screen it as part of their Treasures Of The National Archive section in this year’s programme of events. Particularly as I couldn’t remember if I’d actually ever seen it projected on a big screen or not. Hey, it’s actually two years older than I am (so it’s positively ancient) and when you get to my age all those revival and restored re-release screenings over the years blur into one. I just can’t remember all the ones I’ve seen projected at a cinema.

I’ve certainly seen the film a number of times on TV screenings and bootleg DVDs over the years though, so I was positively wetting my lips at the prospect when I found out, a few days before I went, that the definitive print they had restored was longer than anything we’d seen before (it was pretty much butchered on its initial American release and I think the US version is the one which gets shown on TV from time to time). Well I have to say that, if this sounded to good to be true... in some ways it certainly was. And in other ways, I guess it wasn’t.

That is to say... aww, heck... lets get the main disappointments out of the way first... before I remind you how amazing this movie is.

I’d been tipped off that this was going to be showing via the BFI earlier in the year chatting to the UK’s foremost authority on the Italian western, Sir Christopher Frayling, at a film fair (we always go to the same Italian soundtrack stall first, it seems). Well, he was there to say a few words about the movie before the screening started, as I knew he would be, and in it he impressed upon us how this was going to be a more complete version of the film than we’d seen before. I had a few alarm bells ringing in my head when he read an extract of a review out from the time of its original full length screening in the sixties, which described a particular scene. As he read it, I was nodding my head and thinking, “yeah, that’s a good scene and the score in that part is brilliant” etc... but then he said something along the lines of... “of course, we’ve never had the opportunity to see this scene ourself... so I hope to God it’s in there today.”

It was then that I started thinking... “Wait? What?”

So anyway... the screening starts and plays out and I am held spellbound but... it was, I have to say, no longer (and possibly not that much better quality too) than the bootleg edition which had been doing the rounds for over a decade and which could easily be picked up for a fiver. So this was a bit wrong. I sometimes wonder how these people who commission these things have never managed to get access to stuff which the fans have had for a while. It’s a bit bizarre.

A similar, surprising thing happened when I read a book about giallo movies about three years ago... the author had said that he just couldn’t get hold of the films he wanted to research so, in many cases, went with reviews and articles about them from the time. Since I seemed to have pretty much all the movies he was talking about not being able to get ahold of... well, all I can say is it’s about time all these various companies and academic types realised that we’re living in a global community nowadays. The internet and DVD as a universal format used as a bridge between various countries is a reality people are going to have to start getting used to... there are many fan edits and message boards for these kinds of things out there. Especially when it comes to stuff like spaghetti westerns.

The other eye opener for me is that they went with an Italian dub with English subtitles, even though the principal actors were both speaking English. it was understandable but... let me tell you how I think this works and how things like this happen...

The Italians don’t usually record sound when they’re making their movies, certainly at the time when these were made and I suspect things haven’t changed too much in recent years either, but I would be interested to hear if they have. Anyway, it’s all dubbed on after and the principal actors all speak whatever language they are comfortable with. This means that, as an actor, you have to know when a person’s going to stop speaking so you can come in on your cue because, more often than not, you won’t be able to understand a word they’re saying to you. The movie is shot like this and then dubbed, usually very badly, in various languages for release in different countries. Rarely, in any print, is the lip synch any good.

Now then, if the footage is cut out of a US release on its first run, there’s a chance that the sound for those scenes hasn’t been dubbed in English... so what usually happens with these things, when they are restored for the US and UK marketplace, is the language used is often English... but the reinstated scenes are Italian with English subs. For this screening the whole thing was dubbed in Italian with subtitles. I didn’t mind it myself, actually... but the best way to see this particular movie is probably in English for the scenes where they have the audio. If they want to spend money on it (aka, if they don’t want to be cheap about it), then they can always do what they did a few years back on the restored version of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly... which is get Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach back in the studio to dub the missing scenes and get another actor to impersonate the late, great Lee Van Cleef for his scenes. This seemed to work pretty well.

What’s the most interesting thing about this particular screening of The Big Gundown, though, is that in this version they chose to put the English language version of the song over the credits and end titles instead of the Italian vocal version. Not that I mind, I love the English performance of the song (by the same singer, Christy) but I just found it a strange choice, especially considering the proximity of the last word said in the film on screen in the English version and the deliberate juxtaposition of the crashing Christy vocal which follows it.

Which brings me to my other little grumble... Christopher Frayling apologised for the “screechy song”! I was gobsmacked... I love that song. What’s the world coming to when people can’t appreciate the opening title song to The Big Gundown.

Anyway... enough of that.

If you’ve not seen The Big Gundown before and you like spaghetti westerns... then you really need to check this one out. It’s one of the greats. Lee Van Cleef plays Corbett, a respectable bounty killer, who is more in it for justice than any money he may make from it. When a local big wig offers to fund Corbett’s future political ambitions, one of his “favours” is that Corbett track down a Mexican who has raped and killed a child... a Mexican by the name of Cuchillo (the knife). However, this is a film about political corruption and, as he tracks down, captures, loses and retracks down Cuchillo, who is played absolutely brilliantly by a scene stealing Tomas Milian, it becomes clear that Cuchillo might not actually be guilty of any crime other than being poor and that Corbett is being used to blame and kill a man to cover up the crime of the son-in-law of the man who sent him on his mission.

The film includes various action sequences which highlight both Van Cleef’s stoic and sturdy ‘avenger of justice’ and Milian’s ‘young hippy’ of a character who relies on his animal cunning to always stay ahead of Van Cleef and the performances really are a joy to watch. We even have some sequences with Nieves Navarro (who giallo watchers will best know under the name Susan Scott) in them as a lady landowner of a ranch full of men she keeps fighting amongst themselves for the promise of her sexual favours (sexual favours which both Corbett and Cuchillo indulge themselves of, I might add).

Sergio Sollima is one of the more conscientious of the genre directors and this western is beautifully shot, much like you’d expect from something by either of the other two great ‘Sergios’ of the form, the genre’s kickstarter Sergio Leone and, equally, Sergio Corbucci. Vast landscape canvases with various shots showing figures large and small in contrast to each other, against the flat surface of the cinema screen... it’s all bold stuff and I can tell you, you really get a lot more out of Milian’s subtle facial reactions when you see this on a large screen. It’s just fantastic.

There’s a fair but of action and a lot of humour all put into the mix with a more serious political (possibly) subtext which ultimately leads to a heartwarming alliance for both of the characters you’ve been cheering all along. Lee Van Cleef’s opening sequence where he takes down three criminals after giving them each a bullet of ammunition (in a beautifully framed shot which would have echoes later down the road for the spaghetti western) and Cuchillo’s opening sequences, where he outsmarts Corbett before you even get to see his face... are equal delights.

And, of course, there’s the music.

Ennio Morricone’s masterful score (arranged and conducted by another great Italian composer, Bruno Nicolai) is almost overpowering but the film is strong enough to stand up to the pounding and lyrical humour that Morricone throws at it (a piece for this which specifically references one of the villain’s penchant for classical piano is even used, completely out of context, in the opening shots of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). The action writing is superb and it’s all mixed into the foreground like it needs to be... in those days the sound guys and the directors had a little more respect for the power of the score... not like these days where it’s often buried within the mix. Seeing it with this score coming out loud at the cinema was fantastic and I have to confess I was toe tapping to a lot of the movie as I was watching... hope the guy sitting next to me didn’t mind.

One thing about this screening which was very gratifying was that the venue was so full... it may even have been a sell out (and it wasn’t in a small screen either). To counter that, though, I thought it was kinda sad that the average age of the audience attending seemed to be people in their 50s and 60s... younger people need to see this great stuff and get inspired by it too. It blows away a lot of modern action movies!

Since this movie has been recently ‘restored’ (although I think it might be the same as the old Japanese Region 2 DVD in terms of content... if you quite rightly don’t want to go down the bootleg route) then I’m pretty sure that this is currently being prepped for either a US Region 1 or UK Region 2 release, although I’m told that the new German release DVD uses the same restored master as this one, from the same company.

Either way, it’s a film every fan of these kinds of westerns will want to see and, if you like this one, I can tell you now that the sequel, once again starring Tomas Milian as Cuchillo and from the same director, is at least as good as (if not better, although sadly without Van Cleef) than the first one. It’s called Run, Man, Run after the chorus from the song in The Big Gundown (Seeeeeee! It was popular enough a song to name a sequel after the lyrics!), has a blinding score by Bruno Nicolai (there are rumours as to who actually composed it, put about by the director in many interviews, but I’m told by a specialist in this field that those rumours are untrue) and it would, obviously, make a great double bill with this one. Curious thing about Sergio Sollima though, is that he’s a director who doesn’t like endings. So, while The Big Gundown has a lot of closure in it... you are left with the feeling that there is more to be told just around the corner. Run, Man, Run is even more blatant in ending the film at a point where you think you are in the middle of the story... so if you’re a fan of the traditional beginning, middle and end format of storytelling, you’ll just need to adjust your hat a little. You won’t want to miss out on either of these two movies.