The Western has been around as long as Hollywood. It stands to reason I guess that, when looking to tell tales on the big screen with this new medium of cinema, many American filmmakers looked towards the history of their homeland. However, by the 1960s Hollywood’s rendition of the Wild West was in danger of becoming the Mild West. Thankfully, a stranger was on the horizon and rode into town, with the express desire to shake things up a bit. That stranger was the Italian Spaghetti Western, with its offbeat charms, grotesque, larger than life characters and tall tales, ultra-violence and pointed anti-Capitalist commentary. It can be argued that the Spaghetti Western was never really meant to succeed, let alone outgun its American rivals. These films were initially cheap imitations; Euro-puddings made with financing from Italy, Germany and Spain. A faded Hollywood B-lister dropped into the Spanish deserts, surrounded by a Babel ensemble. What changed the ambition and indeed the fortunes of the Spaghetti Western was Sergio Leone and his 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars. The film made audiences worldwide sit up and reconsider the potential of the Western. Gone were the simplistic morality tales with good guys in white hats and the bad guys in black hats – in Clint Eastwood’s iconic The Man With No Name, the anti-hero was born unto the genre and the West was never the same again.

Leone followed up his success with A Fistful of Dollars with two sequels, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Both films saw Lee Van Cleef co-star alongside Eastwood, his austere and finely-tailored black attire a (truly) neat contrast to the unshaven younger man’s poncho-wearing, cigar-chomping protagonist. Leone would produce the definitive statement in the genre with Once Upon a Time in the West (returning only to reluctantly helm Duck, You Sucker – which I have previously reviewed on here) in 1968, but the Spaghetti Western he had had such a guiding and defining hand in would continue in suitably anarchic fashion. Anti-heroes like Django (1965) and Sartana (1968) owed a debt to Eastwood’s brooding, enigmatic stranger in town and, in a display of the genre now eating itself, a succession of quick, cash-in imitations using those names jostled for audiences attention alongside many official sequels, their tones often reflecting whatever was doing good box office at the time. This magpie, melting pot aesthetic wasn’t unprecedented; Leone himself, seeing how successful James Bond was with audiences, crafted the character of Van Cleef’s Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More wholly in the 007 mould; a cold, urbane hired assassin with an arsenal of weapons and gadgetry. Audiences took to the character instantly, which led to many imitations – including Sabata – and a shot in the arm for Van Cleef’s career. The character of Sabata appeared in three, ‘official’ movies; Sabata (1969), Adios Sabata (1970) and Return of Sabata (1971), which have been collected together and released to Blu-ray this week on the Eureka label.

What’s interesting about the Sabata Trilogy is that it has no real right to be one. The director of 1969’s Sabata, Gianfranco Parolini, was initially contracted to helm a sequel to the successful Sartana which he made the previous year and which starred Gianni Garko in a title role that was heavily influenced by what Van Cleef had done as Colonel Mortimer. However, when Parolini and producer Aldo Addobbati fell out, Parolini found himself staging a rival to his own creation – thus the similarly sounding Sabata was born, with the director going one further by actually hiring Colonel Mortimer himself, Lee Van Cleef. In Sabata, the aquiline featured, black-clad hero arrives in town just in time to witness an audacious heist upon the army payroll. Killing the robbers, he returns the stolen money back into town, where he learns that the masterminds behind the robbery are a trio of respected and powerful establishment figures; a judge, a banker and a cold-blooded effete rancher called Stengel (Franco Ressel). Not averse to a spot of blackmail, Sabata threatens to inform the army on the dignitaries. Whilst the judge and banker are willing to pay, the ruthless Stengel has other ideas and hires a series of assassins to rid him of this problem, including Sabata’s old friend, Banjo (William Berger), a musician whose chosen instrument contains a rifle.

Beyond this premise, the film’s plot is both labyrinthine and impenetrable – not helped by the fact that several sequences appear to have been cut. No matter, just enjoy the spectacle! I mentioned earlier how the success of Leone’s take on the Western genre made Hollywood sit up and pay attention. Whilst that is certainly true, it’s fair to say that by 1969, the genie was out of the bottle in terms of what could be done with the Spaghetti Western. Hollywood had seen what could be achieved, and they were busy replicating the formula themselves for what would become known as the Revisionist Western. The spotlight was shifting back Stateside, leaving the Europeans to become more and more outlandish in an effort to capture the imagination of audiences. Sabata and its subsequent sequels are the perfect examples of this kind of filmmaking. The Bond influences are ratcheted up to eleven, with swift changes of location and ever-increasing gadgetry in the arsenals of both protagonist and antagonist. The villains become more bizarre and sadistic, the stunts more outlandish, and the rogue’s gallery of supporting characters even more roguish than usual. Ever keen to reflect the times, Sabata has its own counter-culture figure in the shape of Banjo, a long-haired, bell-wearing, womanising, wandering minstrel and gun for hire, portrayed by William Berger, whose hippie credentials were that he was once the roommate of Keith Richards. Throw in a foul-mouthed, slovenly drunk (Ignazio Spalla) and a pair of mute, acrobatic bank-robbing brothers and it really is on with the motley – though nothing can prepare you for Sabata’s ace in the hole; Franco Ressel’s deliciously camp villain, Stengel. Ressel, with his helmet of hair and pale, almost translucent appearance brings all the implied kinkiness of your average Bond nemesis to the fore. An autodidactic Texan elite, he rules the town with an iron fist from his palatial ranch (in reality, the Villa Mussolini) which contains a private torture room complete with mechanical duellists he deploys to execute those who cross him.

A good villain however is nothing without a good hero to go up against. Van Cleef certainly brings his enigmatic charisma to the central role and he impresses with his weaponry, including a rifle with an extendable barrel for long-range shooting, like Colonel Mortimer used, and a range of miniature guns that would make Sartana envious. However, if we consider the character of Sabata at length, it’s more of a mixed bag. The anti-hero characteristics are definitely here; a blackmailer not averse to shooting his enemies in the back, Sabata is also surprisingly respectful of authority for a Spaghetti Western hero, refusing to steal the army money for himself and he’s not above leaning on Stengel with the threat of going above his head to ‘Colonel Rafferty’ should anyone try to cause him harm, which just isn’t very badass really is it? Nevertheless and with concerns aside, Sabata was a very popular picture and audiences wanted to see more of this new hero. It wasn’t long before their wish was granted.

The first thing that must be noted about Adios Sabata is that there’s no Lee Van Cleef. This leads us to the second thing; this was never meant to be a Sabata movie. Yul Brynner, the super smooth and follicly challenged star of The Magnificent Seven had originally signed on to play the character of Indio Black whilst, ironically Van Cleef had gone off to replace him in a Magnificent Seven sequel. However, the clamour for more Sabata saw Parolini change his protagonist’s name early on (lip readers will note that those actors mouthing their lines in English are clearly saying Sabata, rather than Indio) to make this an official sequel. With a growing interest in the Zapata Western (films set in Mexico during the revolution), Adios Sabata transplants our black-clad gunslinger into Austrian-controlled Mexico, where he is asked to rob a wagon load of gold intended for the occupiers. With the aid of yet another motley crew, Sabata captures the wagon, only to find its cargo is sand rather than gold. but with sand. Yet another corrupt authority figure as at the heart of this scheme, Colonel Skimmel (Gérard Herter) an evil, monocle-wearing Austrian officer who wants the gold for himself.

This second film basically imitates much of the first in the standard ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ attitude many cinemagoers have come to expect from their sequels. Skimmel is a distant relative of Stengel; a dandy with a cruel streak as wide as the Grand Canyon, he possesses a model battleship with real miniature cannons to kill unfortunates for his amusement, when he’s not shooting fleeing scores of them in the back in his courtyard. Ignazio Spalla returns from the first movie, this time playing Sabata’s revolutionary accomplice, fat and foul-mouthed as ever. He too has a sadistic streak, asking one of his gang to perform ‘The Flamenco of Death’ before executing those who cross them. If a flamenco-dancing revolutionary isn’t too weird for you, check out the guy who attacks opponents by spin-kicking tiny cannonballs from his feet! The ambiguous role that William Berger previously performed as Banjo in the first film is filled by Dean Reed’s Ballentine, a perpetually smirking, easy-going piano player. Reed was a familiar figure in Italian cinema whose real-life counter-culture credentials certainly topped Berger’s; who needs a mate of the Rolling Stones when you can have the ‘Red Elvis’, an American crooner who supported Communism and lived in East Germany? Brynner it is said, did not get on with Reed at all on account of his politics, which actually works well on screen as the friction of their uneasy alliance plays out. As for Brynner’s take on Sabata, well it’s distinctly his I guess. There’s very little here to differentiate the character from any of the black-clad cowboy roles Brynner conveyed and would go on to quietly lampoon in Westworld. The fact that the character wasn’t initially written as Sabata is apparent in the loss of the more morally dubious aspects of his character; here Sabata is a near-mythical folk hero, beloved of priests and orphans.

Van Cleef returns for the final movie in the official trilogy, Return of Sabata which possesses a truly striking, somewhat post-modern opening scene. In it, Sabata is bathed in glowing lights, facing all comers before an impassive group of observers. When his pistols have done talking and he is the last man standing, a door opens and a group of clowns tumble in. We have been witnessing a circus act – one of the accusations the declining years of the Spaghetti Western genre faced was that its action was becoming too acrobatic, too spectacle-like, its characters and narratives too broad and colourful, leading to Alex Cox coining the phrase Circus Westerns. Arriving in Texas with his Wild West Show, Sabata soon uncovers corrupt activities that lead all the way to, yup you have guessed it, a local dignitary and a wild clan of Irish immigrants. Sabata enlists the aid of the usual eccentrics – including Nick Jordan, one of the acrobats from the first movie, and the ever-faithful Ignazio Spalla – and sets out to clean up the town. This time around, Parolini seems to want to flesh the character of Sabata out more, but in doing so he seems to rob him of some of the things that made him interesting. For a start, he discovers his libido and moves in on Annabella Incontrera’s kind-hearted sex worker. Sabata, more interested in women than money? Oh well, at least he’s still number one with a gun. The film unfortunately is far from number one. Arguably the weakest of the three, Return of Sabata takes some time to get going, and when it does its plot is often incomprehensible. The return of Van Cleef is its main redeeming feature.

Extras in the release include some very good audio commentaries from Kim Newman (Sabata) Mike Siegal (Adios Sabata) and C. Courtney Joyner and Henry Parke (Return of Sabata), and video essays on each instalment from Austin Fisher.

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THANKS FOR READING MARK’S REVIEW OF THE SABATA TRILOGY

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