Adiós, Sabata

Although organised into the Sabata series by a cautious American distributor, Adiós, Sabata, the latest mysterious stranger movie from writer-director Gianfranco Parolini and co-writer Renato Izzo, is very much its own thing. Yul Bryner plays the title character - called Indio Black in the original Italian release - less a hawk-eyed gunslinger and more of a robotic folk hero, working with Mexican revolutionaries to expel genocidal Austrians from their war-torn country. This politicised framing offers something that both the Sartana series and previous Sabata film have lacked - a consistent objective that runs deeper than, basically, greed. In this way Adiós allows its characters to be portrayed as heroic; they're risking their necks, working towards a higher, altruistic, ideal.

By providing this basic decency, Adiós can more easily create sequences and situations in which we fret for the lives of Indio and his allies. The character's hardscrabble patriotism gifts them a fleeting sense of interiority, whether or not the film actually seeks to pursue a psychological perspective. The film's bad guys - an occupying Austrian army - tap into something a little more abstract than the usual corrupt officials too. Gérard Herter's pompous Colonel is introduced firing a succession of rifles from his balcony. Instead of clay pigeons, the Colonel blasts fleeing Mexicans; prisoners of war who've been corralled into pens then told if they can make it to the compound's gates, they are free. These broad, easily understandable, stakes add an extra layer of satisfaction to the film's explosive, concluding action scenes.