The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms

Released the year before Godzilla, and clearly a massive conceptual influence on that film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is a far more jubilant experience than Ishiro Honda's unflinching look at atomic firestorms. Adapted for the screen by Fred Freiberger, Louis Morheim, Robert Smith and director Eugène Lourié, The Beast is partly based on Ray Bradbury's The Fog Horn, a short story published in The Saturday Evening Post that told the tale of a sea monster who has fallen in love with a lighthouse, mistaking its warning honks for a seductive mating call. Lourié's film eventually adapts this incident, diverting from the rambling scientific investigation that makes up the majority of the piece to show Ray Harryhausen's beautiful stop motion monster squaring up to the signal light of a similar watchtower, then climbing all over it, humping the building to rubble. 

Awakened by a hydrogen bomb test in the Artic, Harryhausen's roaming, quadrupedal, Rhedosaur is very clearly the product of a country basking in the glow of fissile radiance rather than having suffered beneath it. This newfound energy is used as a catalyst for wonder and invention, operating at almost a commercial level - a product of pure, American, invention. Indeed, these world altering explosions have a frightening short half-life in Beast, functioning instead as a current affairs axis from which a long buried creature can spring. Late in the film, when the titular monster has finally made its way to an American metropolis, the soldiers attempting to corral the bleeding beast begin falling sick. Rather than position the predatory sauropod as a massive vector of radioactive contamination, Beast soft-peddles the moment, diverting the film's deeper threat to an ancient germ that has slumbered alongside the massive reptile. For the finale, nuclear energy actually becomes a tool of heroism - the only thing on Earth capable of killing Big Rhed is a radioactive isotope, fired from the service rifle of a young, but still dead-eyed, Lee Van Cleef. 

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.

SABATA