By During the first half of Gianfranco Parolini’s 1969 spaghetti western Sabata, the film’s chief villain Stengel (Franco Ressel) is seen reading Thomas Dew’s Inequality is the Basis of Society just before he kills hired assassin Oswald (Robert Hundar).
The action takes place in an ornately decorated parlour within Stengel’s desert mansion, which has been elaborately equipped with what could aptly be called a fit-for-purpose shooting gallery.
“All men gifted with superior talents, and thus with superior powers, must command and use inferior men,” the campy criminal mastermind quotes from his red hardcover copy of the book* as the hitman enters the room.
Later, just before the two embark on their bizarre indoor pistol dual to the death, Stengel melodramatically taunts: “I like living at the peak of excitement. For life is only worthwhile when you can face death without showing any fear – in fact I enjoy it.”
It’s an odd scene in a peculiar film, although these kinds of references do serve a purpose when it comes to the intentional strangeness which underpins the movie’s unashamedly haphazard narrative.
Dew, of course, was the 19th century US-born pro-slavery advocate and Virginian academic who once wrote: “A merrier being does not exist on the face of the globe than the Negro slave of the United States”.
Meanwhile, the paid mercenary’s name is obviously a nod to Lee Harvey Oswald, the (alleged) lone shooter behind the assassination of 35th American President John F Kennedy in November, 1963.
Although Sabata is not exactly overflowing with these kinds of jokey – and sometimes pseudo-esoteric – references, there are enough of them in it to suggest Parolini (aka Frank Kramer) and Renato Izzo, who together came up with the movie’s original idea and screenplay, were probably hoping these eccentric touches would be sufficient to garner the kind of audience patience needed for the delirious craziness which is eventually unleashed upon the screen.
Whether or not they succeeded will really be up to the individual viewer to decide. Nonetheless one thing is certain – Sabata borders on the freakish; it has a comic book quality, even by the generic standards of the Italian western.
Twists abound
The film begins when Stengel and his partners in crime – Judge O’Hara (Gianni Rizzo) and Ferguson (Anthony Gradwell) – steal $100,000 of army money from the bank at Daughtery, Texas, so they can buy a bunch of real estate and sell it at inflated prices to the approaching railroad developers.
Their dastardly plan is thwarted, however, by the stylishly-attired gunslinger Sabata (Lee Van Cleef), who takes it upon himself to retrieve the stolen booty and return it to the military in order to claim the reward.
Having gotten that business out of the way fairly expeditiously, the sneering stranger in black then begins to extort the criminal trio by threatening to expose their role in the heist.
Being the treacherous and dishonourable villains they are, members of the Stengel-led crime syndicate try to eradicate Sabata, only to find they are no match for his gunmanship and cunning wit. And each time an assassination attempt on him fails, the blackmail price is raised until – by the final reel – it has reached a hefty $60,000.
Along the way the indestructible drifter teams up with the grizzled civil war veteran Carrincha (Pedro Sanchez) and a silent acrobatic Indian called Alley Cat (Aldo Canti). He also forms an uneasy alliance with a musician known as Banjo (William Berger), with whom he has some vague past association.
Together they end up taking on Stengal and his men at the criminal’s rural compound during a night attack involving plenty of deaths, a Gatling gun and quite a few explosions.
This ultimately leads to what becomes the film’s penultimate showdown between Sabata and Banjo, when the pair shoot it out in a duel designed to determine who will end up with the $60,000 extortion cash.
Being a spaghetti western where the plot logistics are pretty much treated with gay abandon, things are not what they seem – although, by the time the final standoff rolls around, any idea pertaining to rigid narrative rules has well and truly been thrown out the window.
An early example of this is when Oswald receives the order from Stengal to assassinate the Virginian Brothers (led by Frankie, played by Joseph Mathews), who take part in the opening robbery.
In a long shot the hitman rides up to their isolated shack completely alone. When the shooting starts, however, some 10 other accomplices magically appear on the scene, ensuring there is a quick bullet-laden showdown. Where they came from is never properly explained; in this film, however, that doesn’t really matter.
Quirkiness acknowledged
Back in 2018 the BFI’s Jon Towlson included Sabata in his top 10 list of Italian westerns.
Technically it’s debatable whether the movie should really have been mentioned given the English film critic counted Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy (which came in at number one) as a single entry and – as the Parolini film was ninth – one could reasonably argue it was actually the author’s 11th favourite spaghetti oater of all time.
Although there’s no doubt there are some fans of this colourful genre who regard the instalments of Leone’s seminal trio as inseparable, and would therefore agree with Towlson’s rationale, for the record this reviewer doesn’t – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) is, in his estimation, a far superior work to both A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965). Furthermore, a case could conceivably be made that, aside from Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name character and a few narrative quirks, there is not a great deal of cohesion between them.
Putting these objections aside, one undeniably compelling aspect regarding Towson’s list is the fact he holds a movie as deliriously crazy as Sabata with such high regard – putting it above Enzo Barboni’s immensely popular 1970 comedy They Call Me Trinity and just beneath Sergio Corbuccci’s sombre The Great Silence (1968).
Almost as interesting, perhaps, is his assertion that Parolini “largely eschews the usual spaghetti western tropes in favour of wildly over-the-top action and colourful characters”.
While this may be accurate to a certain degree, it is also only half true insofar as Sabata is – by its final curtain – an Italian oater through and through, freely borrowing from earlier films of a similar ilk as it injects its own self-styled sense of humour into the mix.
Like the above-mentioned Leone titles, the Parolini movie contains a lone and seemingly indestructible gunslinger (Van Cleef) who teams up with a rogue element (in this case it comes in the form of Sanchez – a Bud Spencer lookalike out of the Trinity films – and Canti) in order to take on the unscrupulous villains running a Spanish-looking town somewhere in the middle of nowhere (which, it must be pointed out, is big enough to have its own art studio).
Meanwhile, the Stengel-led plan to acquire real estate in order to take advantage of the imminent arrival of the railroad is a plot development kind of similar to the one underpinning Leone’s 1968 masterwork Once Upon a Time in the West.
Additionally, Sabata’s uneasy association with Banjo is not dissimilar to the one between “Blondie” (Eastwood) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
On that note, there is a truly spaghetti western moment in Sabata when Ferguson recruits the mother-pecked gunman Sharky (Marco Zuanelli) to kill the titular character after a bunch of other guys have failed to do so in the town’s Grand Palace Hotel.
Although this latest assassin manages to corner Sabata in a workshop, he makes the mistake of saying: “When I stop laughing, you’re dead,” giving his projected target the chance outsmart him.
It’s at this point the viewer expects a Tuco-like throwaway line: “If you’re going to shoot, shoot – don’t laugh.” The laconic anti-hero, however, refrains, choosing to save a wisecrack for another time.
Undeniable influence
Whilst Sabata, which itself is the opening salvo of a trilogy (with the others being the Parolini-directed Adios Sabata [1970] and 1971’s Return of Sabata), may not have the gravitas of the Dollars films, it’s worth noting that, like the Leone movies, it has managed to have an impact on subsequent western works.
For instance, one of Sabata’s neat tricks is having a rifle capable of shooting over a longer range than the ones owned by his enemy; indeed, it is the reason why he can so easily slaughter the entire wagonload of bank robbers during the early part of the story.
This same ploy was exploited a few years later in Don Medford’s violent and nasty The Hunting Party (1971), when a cattle baron (played by Gene Hackman) and a bunch of his rich mates hunt down an outlaw gang (led by Oliver Reed) and cowardly pick off its members from a distance using their superior rifles.
And, as Austin Fisher – author of Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema – points out in the extras included with Eureka Entertainment’s Blu-ray issue of the movie, US director Robert Rodriguez may well have partly based El Mariachi (Antonio Bandaras) on the Banjo character in his 2003 actioner Once Upon in Mexico, wherein a stringed musical instrument conceals a deadly weapon.
FOOTNOTE
*I’m not too sure if this book actually exists.
More on The Sabata Trilogy from Mark Fraser:
Sabata | Return of Sabata | Adios, Sabata
Top 10 Films reviewed Sabata as part of The Sabata Trilogy Blu-ray box set from Eureka Entertainment.
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