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.

The Purge: Anarchy

Unexpurgated

The Purge: Anarchy
2014 USA/France
Directed by James DeMonaco
Cinema release print.

It’s funny. Although it was only last year, I thought I'd remembered not really being overly fond of The Purge, the first movie in this series. However, I just looked back at the review I wrote of that one (which you can find here) and I actually didn’t give it a bad write up. I was quite defensive about it on some points and, interestingly, one of the points I was going to push in my review of this film, also is pre-empted by me in that initial review. I also picked up on a fair few problems with that first movie and, I have to say, at least one of those problems is repeated in this one too.

The Purge: Anarchy retains none of the characters of the first film and is set one year after the events of that first installment, in the year 2023. It takes the central premise from the original, a twelve hour Government sanctioned period where any crime, including murder, is legal... to keep the crime rate down for the rest of the year... and runs with it. Now it doesn’t expand a great deal on the initial idea but, what it does do, is it explores the obvious symptoms of The Purge and also enhances the, perhaps somewhat obvious, hidden agenda as to why the government wants these annual purges happening.

While the first movie was pretty much a siege turns into a home invasion movie... this installment plays out as the absolute opposite of that tactic. It concerns multiple sets of characters who are, for whatever reason, out on the streets and trying to get to shelter while trying to survive the animalistic death orgy that is the annual “purge”. This surprised me somewhat because I thought it was going to just be a slightly altered re-tread of the first one and, while I had obvious reservations about that, this one really appealed to me and I enjoyed this a whole lot better than the original... despite the fact that Ethan Hawke and Lena Headey weren’t in this one.

It’s an ensemble piece, of course, and the various protagonists are all pretty strong in this. My particular favourite was the main antihero character “Sergeant”... played with great presence by Frank Grillo, who played one of the main "H.Y.D.R.A inside S.H.I.E.L.D" bad guys in the last Captain America movie (reviewed here). He does an absolutely bang up job as a tight lipped, no nonsense, knight in tainted armour killing machine and I read just today that the majority of his dialogue, including his back story, was cut from the movie. Now this is interesting because I bet he wouldn’t have been as half an interesting or compelling character if he’d been talking all the way through so I find it interesting that an already good performance can be strengthened via the “less is more” route in the editing.

I was thinking all the way through the film that, if this had been shot in the late 1960s or early 1970s, this central character would have been played by either Charlton Heston or Yul Brynner... because this is exactly the sort of violent, dystopian science fiction thriller that they would have both had lent their talents to... although I’m not sure Heston would have liked the underlying message of the movie. I touched on this in my review of the first movie but The Purge: Anarchy is very much in synch with the story and attitude to specific films like Planet Of The Apes, The Omega Man, Rollerball, Soylent Green, Westworld and The Ultimate Warrior... almost all of which starred either Heston or Brynner, of course (the exception being Rollerball). I guess a late 1970s/early 1980s comparison could also be made via films like The Warriors and Escape From New York. Just a small bunch of individuals trying to survive a night in the city. Always good for a “hang any action stealth/chase sequence you like on it” kind of plot and these kinds of films can be kind of entertaining (although I seem to remember not thinking much of The Warriors when I saw it back in the heady days of “the video rental age”).

While the film is violent, the concept is pushed out just a little bit to include an anti-Purge faction and what I can only describe as a Government “enhancement” group... in that the government are found to be slaughtering citizens wholesale as an augmentation to the purge because they are required to keep the population down. There’s always a reason that Governments pass these stupidly Draconian laws and, while the reasons are left pretty much to your own speculation in the first movie, this one blatantly comes out with the idea near the end of the movie.

The class structure is once again explored, in this one. There’s even a big tip of the hat to The Most Dangerous Game (aka The Hounds Of Zaroff) in that a whole load of people are captured and taken to a wealthy mansion and courtyard area where rich people bid vast sums to hunt and purge on the poor, huddled and, obviously, unarmed masses in a controlled area with the added advantage of the latest state of the art weaponry. Of course, if this sounds too much like shooting fish in a barrel well... don’t worry, it is... but it’s Hollywoodland time here so, you know, I don’t want to say too much about what happens in this scene but it certainly relates to my next paragraph.

The one problematic thing about this movie, which is also very much a hang over from the first film, as far as I remember, is the number of “deux ex machina” style moments where someone is saved from certain death by the intervention of another character or group of characters the audience had temporarily forgotten about. Like the first film, there’s just way too many of these moments in this one but I have to cut it a little slack because I guess there’s more chance of that kind of thing happening when you’re working on a bigger canvas and not confined to fighting your battles inside a small home. I do, though, think these moments do become quite tiresome, repetitive and increasingly unbelievable as the movie progresses to its final conclusion.

However, this is small price to pay for a film which holds, as its central idea, the concept that guns and violence are a bad thing and I am once again amazed that a film which is so blatantly anti-gun law and opposed to “the right to bear arms” is not heavily snipped by the American censors. Sure, the film revels in violence (well, violence in art is quite often very watchable, to be fair) and it does the obvious thing of trying to have it’s cake and eat it in terms of the play off between the violent nature of the film and the underlying message of anti-violence but, as far as I’m concerned, the subtext of the movie, which is reenforced by the action, or should that be inaction, of one of the lead characters near the films denouement, kind of wins my heart over on this one. As far as I’m concerned, this can only be a good thing and I just hope that all this doesn’t go over the heads of a the teenage audience that these kinds of entertainments are primarily aimed at.

The Purge: Anarchy is a nice bit of violent science-fiction that preserves the lineage I outlined earlier in this review without missing the point of some of those films. It’s a much more entertaining and thoughtful, if not overly subtle, tale than its predecessor and if you are into these kinds of action fests then you will probably be into this one. Definitely something I will catch again in the next couple of years.