cinema history class: dig your grave friend... sabata's coming

The session: Viva Sabata!
Four Movies featuring Sabata, a James Bond of the wild west

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Dig Your Grave Friend... Sabata is Coming (1971)
Directed by Gianfranco Parolini

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
I know I've seen this before -- there were a couple scenes that I recognized. But I have no idea when or under what circumstances.

Plot:
A civil war soldier returns to his father's home, only to find the old man dead. Seeking revenge, he finds himself partnered with an unlikely ally and at odds with a beautiful and brilliant woman who doesn't quite know whom to trust. Together they navigate corrupt officials, hired guns, and shifting loyalties as old scores are settled and new ones are created.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

Let’s get this out of the way first: Dig Your Grave Friend… Sabata’s Coming is a Sabata film in name only.

There is a character named Sabata in the movie, but he’s a tertiary figure and about as far from the iconic Lee Van Cleef version as you can get. This Sabata is just a run-of-the-mill hired gun. Unlike Sabata, he’s a bad guy. Unlike Sabata, he has no clever gadgets or gimmicks. And unlike Sabata, he dies.

Joe said what we were all thinking: it’s obvious this movie was not developed as a Sabata film at all. The name was slapped onto it later to capitalize on the popularity of the character. Maybe they could have given Richard Harrison’s character, Steve, the Sabata name instead—that might have made it fit a little better structurally. But even then, it still wouldn’t really feel like a Sabata movie.

So rather than judge this as a failed or bogus entry in the Sabata saga, it makes more sense to look at it simply as a spaghetti western on its own terms.

And on those terms, it’s entertaining. Good in some ways. But not great by any means.

One thing the movie does surprisingly well is function as a kind of buddy film. Steve ends up paired with Leon, an unintended sidekick who helps him navigate an increasingly complicated situation. (It’s hard not to notice that Leon looks a lot like Ron Jeremy, once that thought enters your head.) The buddy dynamic works better than expected—Steve and Leon play off each other nicely, and their interactions give the movie a bit of momentum it might otherwise lack.

In fact, that relationship is probably the main reason the film works as well as it does. When it’s leaning on the interplay between those two characters, the movie feels lighter on its feet and more engaging.

Where it starts to falter is in its reliance on humor. Several of the barroom fight scenes tip over into outright slapstick, drifting into Three Stooges territory. It’s not that humor has no place in a spaghetti western—but here it’s sometimes pushed too far, undercutting any tension the scene might otherwise have had.

On the other hand, the film does occasionally tap into the kind of nastiness that spaghetti westerns are known for. There are moments of cruelty and grit that remind you this genre can still bite when it wants to. Those moments help keep the movie from becoming entirely frivolous.

This isn’t a deep film, and it doesn’t really offer anything new. But it is fun. As long as you’re not expecting Sabata—despite what the title insists—you can get some enjoyment out of it.

After thoroughly discussing what was wrong with the movie, Joe gave it a ten. But he acknowledged that, within the realm of tens, it’s an eight. Because some tens aren’t as tenny as others.