Cox’s Orange Pippins: You Say Zapata, I say Sabata

So, I watched NAVAJO JOE, about which opinions differ — Tarantino I believe is a fan, Alex Cox less so, and Burt Reynolds even less so. I suspect I’ll never be a huge Corbucci fan, but I thought it was pretty good. Reynolds was maybe hoping it would do for him what Clint’s Italian westerns had done for Clint, an unrealistic hope.

Reynolds is good — physically impressive, but is that even his voice in the English dub? And the role doesn’t give him any humour, which holds back his effectiveness. Burt is a good example of the all-round leading man type, a light comedian with an edge. We also get Aldo Sambrell as a good, vicious baddie, and Fernando Rey as Father Rattigan, the town’s complacent priest (dubbing Rey with a stage Oirish accent actually WORKS, somehow).

I have a theory that The Pied Piper of Hamelin would make a good spaghetti western plot. This one comes fairly close to it, but lacks the Piper’s final vengeance. Since HIGH NOON, revisionist westerns had traded in the trope of the unworthy town. Gary Cooper’s town clearly doesn’t deserve its sheriff, but the movie doesn’t question the necessity of saving it. In YOJIMBO and FISTFUL, the town is practically destroyed in the course of being “saved”. By the time we get to HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER, Eastwood’s most Italianate western (lacking only the high style), the town is intrinsically corrupt.

Alex Cox assembles plenty of Corbucci interview material in which the maestro says things like “I think it’s best not to put women in these films,” which is very weird since his best westerns feature strong women. Navajo Joe has some honest saloon girls and a heroic maid. And it showcases Corbucci’s strongest suite, his sense of landscape. Really magnificent wide shots.

Ennio Morricone, billed as Leo Nichols for some strange reason (Corbucci is Corbucci, De Laurentiis is De Laurentiis, and the credits brag about the Almeria locations so they’re not trying to pass this off as an American film) gives it an epic score of wailing and chanting, but it may be slightly misjudged — most of the biog musical scenes show the bad guys riding into action, so this celebratory theme — “Navajo Joe, Navajo Joe!” — feels emotionally off. But judged purely as music, which is how I first encountered it on one of my many Morricone LPs, it’s pretty great.

Best exchange is between Burt and one of the awful townspeople, who calls himself an American. “Where was your father born?” asks Burt. “Scotland.” “Well my father was born HERE, and his father before him and HIS father before him. Which of us is the American?”

We get yet another crucifixion, when Joe is hanged upside down, arms outstretched, like St. Peter.

Cox’s objections to the juddery zooms and day-for-night shooting strike me as frivolous, especially when the film provides us with Joe’s horse’s POV in a shot/reverse shot that seems to imply man-to-horse telepathy.

ADIOS, SABATA (aka INDIO BLACK, SAI CHE TI DICO: SEI UN GRAN FIGLIO DI…, 1970) is a weird one. Released in the US as a SABATA film, and from the director of the first in that series, Gianfranco Parolini, it was intended to launch an entirely different character, Indio Black. It stars Yul Brunner, not Lee Van Cleef, and he is outwardly a different guy — lots of tassles on his black costume, gold-plated repeater shotgun and pistol. But “Indio Black” and “Sabata” require entirely different mouth movements to say, so I was expecting flamboyant lip flap whenever the hero is named. Didn’t happen. So it seems like the English version was always planned as a Sabata film, or at least, it was while they shot it.

Parolini (aka J. Francis Littlewords) then went on to shoot THE RETURN OF SABATA with Van Cleef, and Indio Black was never heard from again.

The movie deals with some of Cox’s irate objections to Parolini’s cheap-looking first SARTANA — it has great Spanish locations in place of an Italian chalk quarry, looks big and impressive, and attempts to be about something — the Mexican Revolution. Gerald Herter, the Teutonic gunfighter in THE BIG GUNDOWN and the alien-infected swine in CALTIKI, is again an excellent Austrian antagonist.

But it’s not just a Tortilla western and a Zapata western — it’s what Cox calls a “circus western” — it has acrobats and gadgets and gimmickry galore. There’s a guy who kills enemies by flipping steel balls at them with his feet. The baddie has a model galleon rigged up with cannons that fire real bullets. As with most Parolinis, there’s an element of James Bondery, but the other influence is the peplum films, which often featured tumblers. Parolini had worked exclusively in peplums and Bond knock-offs before he got into westerns.

Cox’s main objection to the first SARTANA and SABATA films was that the action was meaningless, and that’s still sadly a bit true here — the Revolution could have provided a grounding, but Indio Black / Sabata is out for himself, as is just about everyone else. As usual, he’s borrowing from Leone without understanding Leone. The Civil War in THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY was more than a colourful background, it made a point — Leone cited MONSIEUR VERDOUX (another Chaplin connection!) to make his moral relativist point — how can we condemn the likes of Tuco, Angel Eyes and Blondie in the face of so much greater carnage wrought by people fighting over actual issues rather than just loot? Parolini has no such idea in mind, and his film would clearly work better if his heroes were more idealistic.

I think the cynicism of the Italian western can be seen here as echoing that of the filmmakers — the director as hired gun, taking on a job, not really caring whose side he’s on, just wanting to get rich, looking for any chance to screw his employer…

Brynner, who is charismatic as ever, is supported by the exuberant Ignazio Spalla (upper right) and singer Dean Reed, whose style is peak spaghetti — blorange hair and shoe-polish tan. An offense to the eye and soul. And he’s called Ballantine, because the Scots are never to be trusted in the spaghetti west, whether they’re called “Murdok” or not. The honourable exceptions are the MacGregors. heroes of a short series of films scored by Morricone, who are a sort of SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS team.

The movie ends with a character doing a big swear, interrupted by Bruno Nicolai’s (beautiful, inappropriately elegiac) score, a clear Leone swipe. What have we learned? Nothing. But it’s been fun — this would seem like a great adventure movie if you were 10.

Sabata resubmitted

If you wanna get money / And if you wanna be rich / If you want a good life / You’ve gotta be a son of a – / Bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom / Bom bom bom bom bom bom bom bom…

The inanity of the title song of RETURN OF SABATA is hard to beat, and if you happen to be looking for a non-Leone comedy western with Lee Van Cleef, so is RETURN OF SABATA. It might even have the edge on the original. It is not an important film, I stress. But it’s rather jolly. Even Van Cleef seems determined to show he’s not just a cold-eyed stone-face.

Sabata! / Sabata! / The fastest gun in the west! / I said the fastest gun in the west! / Nine-fingered man! / Four-barrelled Derringer! / Sabata is the only invincible man in the countryside…

Yes, you see, Van Cleef was missing the tip of his right index finger, something Leone was very enthusiastic about. In this film, the finger is mentioned and has a backstory (something about Sabata chewing it off to get out of the Southern army). And at the end he shoots a semi-bad guy in the finger, so it’s a motif. And the trick Derringer with extra barrels hidden in the handle (impossible to aim, one would have thought, but Sabata can use it with amazing skill) is a Bondian gadget established in the first film and reintroduced in the opening scene here, a bloody shoot-out that turns out to be part of a traveling wild west show. So Sabata invented the blood capsule, if anyone asks you.

Later, he produces a miniature squeeze-gun, cupped in the hand and fired by clenching the fingers — and this turns out to have been a real weapon, though very uncommon.

Ignazio Spalla, AKA “Pedro Sanchez” returns too, but as a different character, just to keep things confusing.

(Say, we know that Van Cleef and Gian Maria Volonte are playing different characters in their two entries in the DOLLAR trilogy, but can we be sure Clint Eastwood is playing the same guy in all three? Sure, he has the poncho and cheroot in all three (though he only dons it neat the end of TGTBATU, but he has different names.)

Reiner Schöne is really entertaining, although he’s more of an out-and-out swine than the loveable scamp the movie seems to imagine him as. Similarly, both films in the series seem less sympathetic to the female characters then is warranted…

Both Sabata films are fairly boys-only, sexist affairs, with women as decorative murderees — they look forward to the gialli, in a way, with little moments of murder mystery amid the massacring, and director Gianfranco Parolini’s “circus western” atmosphere introduces some visual elements that would have fitted right in with later genre developments. Sabata acquires a kind of girlfriend, though he was sexless in the first film like a lot of spaghetti western heroes — “only interested in killing,” suggested Alex Cox, though money serves as a convenient universally-understood MacGuffin.

The weirdly asexual he-man mythos connects pretty directly to the peplum, where desire is expressed mainly through flexing and fighting — and Parolini was a veteran of that genre. It also goes back to Leone (FOR A FEW DOLLARS is an extended flirtation between two gunfighters), another graduate of the sword-and-sandal school, and I guess you can find some of its origins in YOJIMBO and SANJURO.

Van Cleef is by now more used to the idea of doing comedy, and his facial expressions get surprisingly varied. I didn’t want to see him camp it up TOO much — playing it straight is often a good policy in this kind of thing — but he manages to avoid embarrassing himself.

Sabatage

An old Dutch master.

As a film, SABATA aka EHI AMICO… C’È SABATA. HAI CHIUSO! (1969) by Frank Kramer aka Gianfranco Parolini, may not be that special. but for me it was the answer to a forty-five year question that I had never troubled myself to ask.

(Sabata means “Saturday” so the original title is a pun — HEY FRIEND… IT’S SABATA/SATURDAY, YOU’RE CLOSED!)

The BBC used to show seasons of films — more a BBC2 thing — and as a kid I saw both Barboni’s Corbucci’s TRINITY films and Leone’s DOLLAR trilogy — and this. Only I never knew what film this was. But the question was hardly pressing, and in the age of the internet it probably wouldn’t have been hard to get the list of films shown back in the seventies, or to search for a spaghetti western featuring a drunken Civil war veteran (inexplicably dubbed with a pseudo-Mexican accent — or am I ignorant of some role played by Mexico in that conflict?) who’s continually cursing the uselessness of his medal for bravery. (Cue ironic pay-off when it proves useful after all.)

It’s fun, childish stuff, and Marcello Giombini’s Morricone rip-off score is catchy and likeable. MG also scored films under the pen-name Pluto Kennedy, which delights me strangely. Lee Van Cleef is Sabata and the character who lodged in my brain is played by one Ignazio Spalla, whose career was mostly confined to Italian oaters and was often billed as Pedro Sanchez, fooling no one.

I could do a piece proving that the spaghetti western gunman has as convoluted a history as that of the gentleman sleuth, but I’m not going to. I’ll only note that director Kramer’s middle film in the SABATA trilogy, ADIOS, SABATA aka INDIO BLACK, SAI CHE TI DICO: SEI UN GRAN FIGLIO DI… is actually about a character called Indio Black, or maybe Black Indio, played not as here by Lee Van Cleef but by Yul Brunner aka Yuli Borisovich Bryner. That must have made for a real sloppy dubbing job, since the lip movements required to say “Sabata” are in no wise similar to those that go into “Indio” or “Indio Black” or “Black Indio.” Another fake Sabata is Vittorio Richelmi in Spanish knock-off JUDAS… ¡TOMA TUS MONEDAS! aka WATCH OUT, GRINGO! SABATA WILL RETURN, where the character was originally called Texas (good luck dubbing that one, too)… then there’s Anthony Steffen in SABATA THE KILLER aka ARRIVA SABATA! which at least seems to have been conceived as a Sabata film, though made by other hands; Brad Harris in WANTED SABATA aka SABATA VIVO OU MORTO; Raf Baldassare in DIG YOUR GRAVE FRIEND… SABATA’S COMING aka ABRE TU FOSA AMIGO… ILEGA SABATA.Mind you, when you get into the DJANGO series, things get lunatic, with whole companies of lip-flapping C-listers dragooned in to fill Franco Nero’s capacious boots, and some entries being released as Sartana films or Django films in different territories, with different degrees of lip-flap. Still, the Hercules “series” makes even this chaos seem orderly.

The only “proper” SABATA sequel is È TORNATO SABATA… HAI CHIUSO UN’ALTRA VOLTA! (SABATA IS BACK… YOU’RE CLOSED AGAIN!) aka RETURN OF SABATA — same director and stars, and it’s also good childish, violent fun. I will address it more fully soon.

SABATA stars Angel Eyes; King Minos; Sergeant Garcia; Frank Bimble; King Lotar; Countess Grabowsky; and Lotte Krayendorf.