Sabata

Writer-director Gianfranco Parolini and co-writer Renato Izzo follow up their If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death success with Sabata, a lighter take on the same sort of gunslinging mortician concept. While the Sartana series rambled off into incoherence under Giuliano Carnimeo, Parolini and Izzo's second pass at the material is dramatically simpler, with fewer turncoats and a posse of established, agitating, enemies standing in for Sartana's whirlwind betrayals. Although the supernatural element that kept Pray for Your Death exciting is reduced to background radiation here, the mere presence of Lee Van Cleef lends proceedings a cackling, calculating, centre.

Van Cleef, as you would expect, carries Sabata, a film plotted very much like an American television serial. The actor, even at rest, is a striking visual proposition though: glaring, beady eyes and a sharp, bird of prey nose that terminates with tidy moustache and a shark's smile. Physically, Van Cleef plays Sabata unhurried but decisive, obviously harkening back to his two roles in Leone's Dollars series - the expert Colonel Mortimer and the cruel, obsessive Sentenza. Gianni Garko's assumption of an executioner's outfit in the Sartana series is dress up by comparison, these are Van Cleef's robes of office. In this way Sabata instantly feels lived in, a sequel with no previous instalment. The explosive, roller coaster shoot-out that concludes the film, just another notch on Van Cleef's pistol grip.