Return of Sabata

Return of Sabata opens with such promise. Lee Van Cleef's gunslinger clambers around a warped fun house, blasting assassins to acid rock licks while a committee of evil green overlords look on, impassive. Van Cleef prowls this cluttered, canted arena like a tiger, the opposing gunmen full of nerves and trepidation. They back away at his approach, Sabata's presence so powerful that the snap of his revolver reload is enough to extinguish candles. Disappointingly, this surreal touch is quickly punctured, then outright abandoned, replaced with a scattershot plot centred around Sabata's reflex objection to sales tax.

Gianfranco Parolini's final stab at Sanata is awful, a film full of dangling threads and character relationships based on shallow, physical proximity rather than anything organic or, God forbid, logical. Van Cleef, presumably bored with the role, catapults himself into full-on parody. This is the unbeatable cowboy reinterpreted as a gurning lech - Sentenza pulling comedy faces, hurling nerds at flustered showgirls then striding along a narrative path that amounts to running circuits around the saloon that houses his best girl, Annabella Incontrera's underused Maggie. Excruciatingly discursive, Return of Sabata's main contribution to the character's collapsing mythos is a few peculiar notes of violent bigotry - Sabata proudly fought for the Confederacy and also displays an open contempt for gentlemen of Irish descent.

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.

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.

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death opens with a rash of betrayals - double-crosses quickly become triple-crosses before ballooning into quadruple and quintuple-crosses. This breathless, action-packed duplicity culminates with William Berger's wild, sun-burnt gringo hand-cranking a Gatling gun at a posse of assembled turncoats - his allies only moments earlier. Co-writer-director Gianfranco Parolini, working with fellow screenwriters Theo Maria Werner and Renato Izzo, use their characters, and the society they inhabit, purely as mechanisms for communicating treachery. A typical scene within the film will work to establish an implied or explicit connection between two parties before one, or even both, quietly reveal some level of deception. All in the service of securing a hoard of gold.

Every character is running an angle, teasing out information on a luxuriously furnished set then scurrying away to plot in another, well-appointed room. All, that is, except Sartana. In contrast to a town lousy with sweating, greedy conspirators (many of which already occupy privileged positions within the settlement's ruling class, it has to be said), Gianni Garko's drifter is cool and elegantly dressed. He's an unflappable expert, loaded down with trick pistols and mocking inaction. Rather than simply manipulate desperate criminals to his own advantage, Sartana actively harasses and ridicules his quarry. Initially it seems that he just wants the gold all for himself but, as the film rolls on, Sartana's derision takes on a ghostly, supernatural quality. As well as disappearing and reappearing in ways that are not humanly possible, the cocksure cowboy also survives fatal gunshots wounds - stepping out of swirling smoke, only moments later, to judge and punish those that would murder for personal gain. As its name implies, If You Meet Sartana Pray for Death is positively biblical.