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Sabata
Return of
Sabata
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Italy
- Germany - France | 1969, 1971
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini
Starring
Lee Van Cleef, Pedro Sanchez
Nick Jordan, Gianni Rizzo
William Berger, Annabella Incontrera
SABATA:
106 Min.
RETURN OF SABATA: 106 Min.
Color
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PG-13
Format: DVD (R1 - NTSC)
MGM Home Entertainment
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Music
from the film
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Nine-fingered
man...
MP3 format - 4.1 MB
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Review
by
Brian Lindsey
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Sabata
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7
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3 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Return
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5
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5 |
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"Classic"
icon is for
Sabata only
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In
the mid-1960s hawk-faced character actor Lee Van Cleef
(The Beast
from 20,000 Fathoms) became an international movie star
when he appeared alongside Clint Eastwood in two of Sergio Leone's
epic spaghetti westerns, playing both hero (For
a Few Dollars More) and heavy (The
Good, the Bad & the Ugly). Although most associated
with villainous roles, he excelled at either what made his
'good guy' characters so interesting is that you always knew
there was a dark and merciless side to them... How could there
not be, with that hatchet face and those gunsight eyes? In his
Sabata films for director Gianfranco Parolini, Van Cleef plays
a mysterious paladin of justice dressed in black, a master gambler
and trick-shot artist extraordinaire whose Robin Hood-like deeds
help the people while securing a substantial financial cut for
himself.
The Sabata movies
were obviously influenced by the American TV show The Wild
Wild West, a series that melded the western with James Bond-style
gadgetry and villains. Unlike every other spaghetti western
hero I can think of at the moment, Sabata does not wear
the classic pistol/gunbelt ensemble on his hip. Instead he carries
a unique four-barreled Derringer in his vest, and employs a
variety of tricks (such as magnets and mirrors) to outwit his
opponents. For long distance fire he uses a special barrel extension
fitted to his Winchester repeater, enabling him to out-range
any rifle trained his way.
As the original film
opens, Sabata rides into the Texas town of Daugherty on the
very night that a slickly-executed break-in and robbery of the
bank goes down. He quickly deduces that the mastermind behind
the $100,000 heist is Mr. Stengel (Franco Ressel), richest man
in the territory. (Stengel knows where the railroad will be
going through and he needs a lot more cash to buy up all the
land while it's still cheap.) Sabata bushwacks the robbers'
getaway wagon and returns the stolen money to the town, earning
a hero's reward of $5,000. (Not something Eastwood's
"Man With No Name" would do... Sabata likes to operate
within the law as much as possible.) Seeing another angle to
the situation, he blackmails Stengel for $10,000
the land baron had better pay if he doesn't want the townspeople
to find out he was the brains behind the robbery. Attempts to
kill Sabata are thwarted and each time the price goes up. Aiding
him in his battle is a knife-throwing Mexican drunk (Ignazio
Spalla, AKA "Pedro Sanchez") and an acrobatic Indian
(Nick Jordan) who likes to sit on the roofs of buildings. Meanwhile,
Sabata keeps his eyes on another stranger in town, a banjo-strumming
oddball appropriately named Banjo (William Berger, anachronistically
dressed as a kind of hippy minstrel). He knows that the man's
eccentric appearance is deceiving...
Sabata
is a fun movie, a great spaghetti western. Like the swordplay
in Japanese samurai flicks the pistol duels are lightning-fast
affairs, with the bad guys dead before they even hit the floor;
they're well-staged in that inimitable Italian style that sets
their westerns apart from their American forebears. A solid
action finale, in which Sabata and his pals assault the villain's
heavily armed compound with dynamite and guns a-blazin', caps
the picture nicely. Van Cleef is given the opportunity to create
an iconic signature character for the genre and does so effortlessly
he's cool, steely and enigmatic, just how we want to see him.
In Return
of Sabata (1971) many of the actors from the first film
are back, playing very similar roles but with different character
names, which only adds to the confusion of an already muddled,
unnecessarily convoluted plot. Van Cleef, of course, reprises
as Sabata, although he chooses to play him in a looser, more
comical style befitting the movie's lighter approach. One could
say that he's channeling Sean Connery in the first pic and Roger
Moore in the second... He also appears in a 'Chuck Heston/Middle-aged
Action Man' toupee in the one brief scene he's shown not wearing
a hat, which is odd because Sabata was proudly balding in the
first movie.
Things get off to
a strange start with a bizarre sequence set at a circus, where
Sabata is employed as a performer
his trick-shot demonstration is staged like a western gunfight
in a Mario Bava horror movie. (Lots of weird camera angles and
colored lighting gels.) Our hero hasn't fallen on hard times;
he joined the circus troupe because he suspects another performer,
magician and one-time counterfeiter Josiah Pickles, is pulling
some kind of lucrative scam along the tour route and he wants
to find out what it is. Pickles disappears when the circus arrives
in the frontier town of Hobsonville; his female assistant is
found murdered. It doesn't take the wily Sabata long to sniff
out a criminal conspiracy involving local land baron Joe McIntock
(Giampiero Albertini), the head of a powerful Irish clan.
Everyone in Hobsonville
citizens and visitors alike
has to pay exorbitant sales taxes to fund various municipal
projects slated for future construction. These fees are collected
in a community trust and stored at the bank. Sabata, obviously
the first card-carrying Libertarian to set foot in the place,
immediately makes waves when he calmly refuses to pay. (A 50%
tax on whores? That's gouging!) McIntock naturally sets his
goons on Sabata, which merely results in pissing the gunslinger
off. Sabata recruits/buys himself some allies
an old war buddy turned saloon owner (Reiner Schφne); the town
crier (Sanchez again); a pair of acrobats (Nick Jordan, Vassili
Karis)
and proceeds to rob the bank of the Hobsonville Trust Fund.
They get away with it, only to discover that the money is funny...
Over the years McIntock has been regularly stealing from the
fund to buy gold, replacing the pilfered cash with counterfeit
bills. But Sabata's the kind of guy who makes sweet lemonade
when handed a lemon. He offers to sell the counterfeit cash
back to McIntock for 30% of its face value; otherwise he'll
spill the beans to the townsfolk about just what their lauded
community leader has been up to...
It took me two screenings
of Return of Sabata to decipher
this. The script lays out the plot in a needlessly confusing
manner; for more than half the movie one is likely to be clueless
as to exactly what is going on. This is Return's
chief weakness
that and the decision to make it an even more lighthearted affair
than first film. The Sabata pics make a nice counterbalance
to the grim, symbolism-heavy "Marxist" spaghetti westerns
of directors such as Sergio Corbucci and Giulio Questi, but
I don't want to see Lee Van Cleef edging into Terence Hill/Trinity
territory. The guy looks like a human chainsaw sculpture...
He should just be a bad-ass, not a funny bad-ass. (And
in Van Cleef we're talking one of the greatest movie bad-asses
of all time.) Return's problem
is that it doesn't take itself seriously enough while being
insufficiently humorous to a be a flat-out comedy or spoof.
Parolini (Five
for Hell, directing under the alias "Frank Kramer"),
helms both Sabatas with a lively visual style, moving the camera
around a lot and employing odd angles and framing; overuse of
the zoom lens
especially in Return
occasionally rankles but it's a minor irritation. (His compositions
are utterly destroyed in Pan & Scan mode.) These mises-en-scθne
are greatly enhanced by the jaunty music of composer Marcello
Giombini (Knives of the Avenger).
While Sabata features a solid,
if mostly traditional, genre soundtrack, the score for Return
is a different kettle of fish altogether... Bizarrely anachronistic
(even for a spaghetti western), it features one of the goofiest
yet irresistibly catchy theme songs I've heard in any
type of movie in a long, long time. ("Nine-fingered
man / Four-barreled Derringer... / Sabata... He's the only invincible
man in the countryside!")
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These
titles were originally released by MGM Home Entertainment as part
of the Sabata Trilogy collection in October 2005. (The
third film being the 1971 pseudo-sequel Adios,
Sabata starring Yul Brynner in Van Cleef's stead.) I'd
heard about audio sync problems with discs in the set, so I didn't
buy it. When the DVDs were issued in stand-alone form earlier
this month (May '07) I said what the heck, any glitches will surely
have been fixed by now... I really wanted to see these movies
in their correct aspect ratio and thus bought them. Now what's
that old saying about a fool and his money?
Starting 45 minutes in and lasting about half
an hour, the audio track on the Sabata
disc is woefully out of sync, about a quarter-second ahead of
the images. It's incredibly annoying to say the least, especially
given that the identical DVD for Europe's Region 2 is reported
to have no such problem
some of the film's best scenes are ruined. I tried it out on a
couple of different players with the same result, so it's clearly
an issue with the disc's authoring. And, of course, it would
be the superior movie that's affected...
It's a crying shame, an inexcusable screw-up
on MGM's part. (Whose product is now being distributed by Fox.)
Otherwise I'd have no major complaints with the budget-priced
Sabata DVD, since it offers a fine-looking print of the
film (occasional hair in the gate excepted), anamorphically presented
in its original 2.35 AR, with a solid mono English audio track.
As for the Return of Sabata disc,
it has exactly the same positive attributes and fortunately doesn't
suffer any sound sync problems. Both DVDs come with a French language
track (also out of sync on Sabata)
and English subtitles, along with trailers and promos for other
western-themed MGM films. Neither disc appears to be flagged for
progressive scan. At least they're cheap. 5/29/07 |
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