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.

 

Hair

The Mayans, we are told, had an incredibly advanced civilisation, despite never developing the wheel or metalwork. So they had to construct their dialogue and performances out of wood. And thus, alas, their dialogue and performances were no match for the leaden dialogue and performances of invading armies.

I really ought to watch TIGER BAY or YIELD TO THE NIGHT or the original CAPE FEAR as a palate cleanser, but my trawl through obscure J. Lee Thompson films instead led me to KINGS OF THE SUN in which Mayan king George Chakiris discovers Louisiana only to discover Indian chief Yul Brynner is already living there.

Of course nobody in this film can talk convincingly, the thick-ear epic dialogue seeming to choke on the miasma of brown face-paint (Shirley-Anne Field is excused fake tan, inexplicably). But if you can’t have good talk, you can at least have good hair.

Chakiris leads the way with his giant quiff and pony tail look, similar to Tony Curtis’s magnificent quiff-and-pageboy cut in THE BLACK SHIELD OF FALWORTH. George could stand on the spot and rotate slowly and you’d get a complete history of human hair from the early hunter-gatherers to the latest in singing Puerto Rican street gangs.

This dude opts for an innovative Mr. Whippy look.

Yul Brynner is excused hair, and gets a very funny introductory shot.

Yul is the whole show. He can’t fare much better than anyone else with the dialogue, although he puts it over better. It’s his movement, his snake-hipped prowl, his snapping jaws in the fight scenes. We have to wait half an hour for him, and waiting for Yul is like waiting for Groucho in a movie as wooden as this, but when he does turn up he walks like really good sexual intercourse would walk. EVERYTHING gets better when Yul is around — the lighting goes from TV movie-of-the-week flat to vivid and modeled (Brando was impressed, on MORITURI, by how Brynner roped the lighting in to aid his performance) — the camera moves go from big swooping crane shots, spectacular at first but quickly tedious since the actors stand around like a forest, spouting duff verbiage that sounds like it’s been auto-translated from the original Mayannaise, to striking mobile POVs and dynamic following shots showcasing the best of Thompson’s style. His cameraman is Joseph Walker, who shot Capra’s stuff. Capra usually worked multi-camera (perhaps as a holdover from the early sound days?) which seems to have helped him get all that life and bustle going. For all its cast of thousands, this movie has zero bustle, and seems incapable of imagining convincing activity for more than one character at a time. Brynner makes damn sure that when he’s on screen, he is that character.

My favourite Yul story is from THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. To Steve McQueen: “If you don’t stop playing with your hat, I’ll take off my hat, and then we’ll see who they look at.”

Inappropriate Smiles

Inappropriate smiling is a recognized symptom of psychiatric disorder. It’s also a useful tool for an actor, since in that profession one must appear not only truthful but interesting (a tall order: name one modern politician who succeeds at both).

Christopher Walken is the master of the I.S. Check out his reaction to the news that his condition may be terminal, in THE DEAD ZONE. No wonder Herbert Lom looks alarmed. And in A VIEW TO A KILL, he grins in disbelief at the exact moment he realizes he’s about to plunge to his death from a helicopter. Suave.

I’m getting seriously into Frank Perry now — with MAN ON A SWING he demonstrated an ability to make the policier genre jump about in unfamiliar ways, while PLAY IT AS IT LAYS manages to make most of the New Hollywood of the 70s seem rather generic and adolescent. TAXI DRIVER is brilliantly made and fascinating to watch, but it’s not terribly mature compared to Perry’s film. That shouldn’t invalidate it, in a sense the film is about juvenile frustration raised to a pitch of psychosis, and a more considered or distanced stance wouldn’t put us in the driver’s seat, as it were. But Perry is dealing with less extreme people, while still following them into the darkest imaginable places.

DOC is a different matter, in that it’s a western, albeit a revisionist, method-actor-driven, psycho-political western. Stacy Keach is Doc Holliday (not as skinny as the other characters say he is, but nevertheless perfection), Faye Dunaway is Kate Elder, Harris Yulin is Wyatt Earp.

To take Yulin first — former newspaperman Pete Hammill’s script characterizes the marshall as a politician first and a killer second, and Yulin plays the fellow with a steely, psychopathic focus that’s suprising to me, since I only knew the guy from NIGHT MOVES. I’d assumed Yulin was a featured character star in lots of movies, but really this is his biggest role. He’s amazing. There’s this moment, when a Clanton provokes Earp —

— and in a second, Earp will turn round with that expression on his unblinking face, and the guy visibly jumps. Face of a turtle, big eyes like windows into Hell. Counter-type-casting at it’s best.

HOW TO NOT BLINK: while making WESTWORLD, Yul Brynner taught Richard Benjamin how to fire his gun without flinching: you basically play Russian Roulette, spinning the chamber and playing target practice, never knowing whether the gun will fire or not. Eventually you’re brain gives up on being surprised, and you can fire the gun without your face noticing.

Keach is also great at not blinking, which is part of what makes his lizardlike cool so mesmeric. You can’t take your eyes off the bastard. Keach has for too long been a sort of second-string hero type, now slipping into not-too-interesting character parts, when his real talent should have been focussed by the kind of unsympathetic/unheroic lead roles abounding in the 70s. For some reason he got this and THE NINTH CONFIGURATION and FAT CITY and not enough others.

Here’s Keach’s reaction to being warned not to show up at the OK Corral, “Because I don’t want you to get killed.”

A textbook Inappropriate Smile.

Even Faye gets in on the act. Her face is as usual all over the place, she’s so in the moment she basically lets it off the leash altogether and allows the various muscles to run amok over the corners of her mouth and eyes. When she first meets Doc she’s a filthy prostitute in a filthy cantina, being pawed by a filthy Clanton. Doc wins her in a hand of cards, then demands a hot bath. The proprietor says there’s no hot water.

“Then light a fire and heat some!” bellows Doc. “I gotta wash this bitch.”

Dunaway’s reaction:

She likes it!

Perry’s work here is excellent, pretty traditional filmmaking but with direct cuts substituting for every other kind of transition. A scene of Earp campaigning for public office seems inspired by DA Pennebaker’s Kennedy doc PRIMARY — it certainly aims for docu-style jitteriness. And the movie is unflinching in its pursuit of Hammill’s goal, to shave off the myth and give us a sense of ignoble history. In a way, by ascribing psychological motivations to figures who survive only via the record of their actions, the movie is serving up a new myth, but it’s one that does seem plausible. The dust and profanity are only a cosmetic alteration, but the film does have a genuinely radical take on the genre.

‘Doc’