Film Review - Adios, Sabata!

Gianfranco Parolini had already had one smash hit in the spaghetti western genre with If You Meet Sartana, Pray for Your Death in 1968, introducing Gianni Garko as the titular gunslinger. Two years later he made the Lee Van Cleef vehicle Sabata, with the American actor as a slightly more mysterious version of the Colonel Mortimer character that had effectively restarted his career in For A Few Dollars More.



Parolini had already seen Giuliano Carnimeo have a hit with a Sartana sequel and with a second Van Cleef film in the works, either he or his distributors decided to cash in on the success of the first Sabata film before anyone else did and so his current project Indio Black was hurriedy renamed and redubbed as a Sabata sequel; the film had been intended to star Van Cleef in the first place but he was booked to play Chris in MGM's The Magnificent Seven Ride!; ironically, his place was taken by Yul Brynner, who had originated the role of Chris in the first Magnificent Seven film. It was his only spaghetti appearance.

That Brynner's character is a black-clad gunslinger with a trick weapon - a lever-action rifle with an eight shot magazine containing seven bullets and a cigar which the character lights up after inevitably dispatching the bad guys - makes it as clean a switch as this sort of thing ever is. The action centres on that old spaghetti staple of the Mexican revolution, with Sabata a mercenary hired to steal an Austrian army gold shipment with help from crazy bandito Escudo (Ignazio Spalla, having the time of his life) and shifty, handsome Ballantine (Dean Reed, an American singer who found considerable success in South America and then Italy).

Beyond Sabata's crazy weapon there's not a huge amount to distinguish it and there's the usual sequence of double-crosses, trickery and pangs of social conscience Zapata westerns tend to turn up, but despite a somewhat sluggish performance from Brynner it's rarely boring, if not one of the high points of the genre.