Spaghetti Westerns? We just eat ‘em up! [archived newspaper article]

 

The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Florida)

Sunday, Sep 10, 1972

 

Previews

      by

Charles Brock

Entertainment Editor

I READILY confess to fondness for spaghetti westerns.

     There is a joyous innocence in their amoral heroes and villains alike. There are no hangups in these free souls. They weren’t scarred by lack of love from their mothers, nor was their psyche crushed because their fathers made faces at them.

     They are motivated simply by greed or lust, and their action is as direct as a .45 calibre bullet. Their feats of derring-do would make a Ulysses or a Hercules gnash his teeth in frustration.

     We know, of course, that they aren’t drawn from life. Spaghetti western fans find them no more believable than cartoon characters. We are entertained, diverted, by their wildly unrestrained performances. When the show is over, we go our way untainted by their hedonistic behavior, unsoiled by their rampant slaughters.

     The latest spaghetti western to splotch itself on local screens features a blind hero. But he still manages to do all the things spaghetti western heroes traditionally do… i.e., personally massacring just about every sleepy-looking Latin extra available.

“Blindman”

Showing at the Town and Country

 

THE CAST

Tony Anthony, Ringo

Starr, Lloyd Battista,

Magda Knopecka,

Agneta Eckemyr,

Raf Baldassarre, and

“fifty of the world’s

Most beautiful women.”

Rating R  

Other than the blind hero, this spaghetti western has still another innovation: a seeing eye horse. (Yes!) More obedient even than Trigger, he also picks out trails with laconic ease, neighs numerically whenever banditos approach, and never fails to deposit his master in front of the nearest saloon. And he has a lot to put up with: His master is forever mounting him from rooftops and balconies, an unsettling practice that is enough to give a horse middleage sag fast.

     The thrust of the story is a contest between the hero and numerous villains (Mexicans, naturally) for possession if “fifty beautiful women” credited in the preceding cast of characters.

     These poor souls are stolen, chained, rescued, rechained, restolen for a full 90 minutes shooting time. They are pictured in just about every state of flagrante delicto you can think of. (Well, more in flagrante than delicto, really).

     There’s also a wild villainous. Her main attempt on the blind man’s life is to put a snake in his salad bowl. He retaliates by tying her up naked in the courtyard and leaving her to sunburnt to death.

     Ringo Starr, of all people, wanders in as a lovelorn bandit, and is used by the blindman as ransom for the women before he makes a timely exit from the film.