Retro Review: THE COMPLETE SARTANA (1968-1970)

IF YOU MEET SARTANA...PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH
(Italy/West Germany - 1968)

Directed by Frank Kramer (Gianfranco Parolini). Written by Renato Izzo, Gianfranco Parolini and Werner Hauff. Cast: John Garko (Gianni Garko), William Berger, Sydney Chaplin, Klaus Kinski, Fernando Sancho, Gianni Rizzo, Andrew Scott (Andrea Scotti), Carlo Tamberlani, Franco Pesce, Heidi Fisher, Maria Pia Conte, Sal Borgese. (Unrated, 96 mins)

In the wake of Sergio Leone's groundbreaking trilogy of spaghetti westerns with Clint Eastwood, the copycats came so fast and furious that it had to be impossible for audiences to keep up. Giuliano Gemma starred in a pair of RINGO films, Franco Nero had the title role in Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO (1966), Tony Anthony played "The Stranger" in three films beginning in 1968, and Gianni Garko staked his claim to spaghetti fame as Sartana in a series that also kicked off in 1968. These official films spawned countless imitation Django, Ringo, and Sartana films, often with the characters crossing paths, but the five "official" SARTANA films have just been restored and released in a deluxe, extras-packed Blu-ray set from Arrow, because physical media is dead.

Never given theatrical releases in America, the Sartana films had some of the more playfully humorous titles in the genre, and things kick off with IF YOU MEET SARTANA...PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH. It's an incredibly convoluted but always enjoyable series of double-crosses and shifting alliances, as Garko's Sartana, who's more of a debonair wiseass than most of his genre brethren (Arrow's accompanying booklet with an essay by Roberto Curti likens Sartana to a western 007, and it's an apt comparison), involves himself in a mishap-filled pursuit of a chest of gold that no less than four separate sets of bad guys are attempting to obtain. There's outlaw Lasky (William Berger), a duplicitous bastard who mows down his own gang with a Gatling gun in order to keep it all to himself, only to find that the chest is filled with rocks; bandit and self-appointed "general" Mendoza, aka "Tampico" (Fernando Sancho, the genre's erstwhile "Frito Bandito," again cast radically against type as "Fernando Sancho"); corrupt bankers Stewall (Sydney Chaplin, son of Charlie) and Hallman (Gianni Rizzo), who hired Mendoza to steal the gold in the first place while they stashed it away in the casket of the recently-deceased mayor as part of an insurance scam; and Morgan (Klaus Kinski), another outlaw who's unconnected to the gold until an impromptu and ill-fated partnership with Lasky pulls him in.

The familiar spaghetti tropes are all over the place and would establish the SARTANA formula seen in the four sequels:  a shipment of gold buried in casket (THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY), Sartana finding an unlikely ally in Dusty (Franco Pesce), the town's elderly, cantankerous undertaker (A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS), and Sartana's calling card of a chiming pocket watch (FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE), just to name a few. Sartana also relies on some gadgety weapons that director/co-writer Gianfranco Parolini (aka "Frank Kramer") would use in his soon-to-come SABATA trilogy with Lee Van Cleef (in the first and third films) and Yul Brynner (in the second). The more political "Zapata" spaghetti westerns were starting to gain traction in Italy, and by 1968, the first SARTANA came too far into the craze to really do anything new. Still, Garko is a pretty badass hero and the film benefits from its many colorful--and frequently stupid--villains, though Kinski fans may be disappointed in his relatively restrained performance and limited screen time, as he's offed about 40 minutes in.

I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH
(Italy - 1969)

Directed by Anthony Ascott (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Tito Carpi and Enzo Dell'Aquila. Cast: John Garko (Gianni Garko), Frank Wolff, Klaus Kinski, Ettore Manni, Gordon Mitchell, Sal Borgese, Renato Baldini, Jose M. Torres, Rick Boyd (Federico Boido), John Bartha, Franco Pesce, Franco Ukmar, Samson Burke. (Unrated, 103 mins)

Gianfranco Parolini went on to make SABATA in 1969, prompting the hiring of Giuliano Carnimeo, who would direct the remainder of the SARTANA series under variants of his most frequent Americanized pseudonym "Anthony Ascott" (he'd go by "Jules Harrison" for his 1983 post-nuke EXTERMINATORS OF THE YEAR 3000). I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH is sort-of a hybrid western/detective story, with a Sartana impostor orchestrating an elaborate, Joker-esque bank robbery involving a fake corpse and several henchmen wearing uniforms identical to those of bank security.The word is out that Sartana (Gianni Garko) is a wanted man and he's soon pursued by law enforcement as well as various bounty hunters, including a wily poker shark named Hot Dead (Klaus Kinski, having a little more to do than in the previous film but still underutilized). Sartana teams up with grubby sidekick Buddy Ben (Frank Wolff) to clear his name, find the fake Sartana, and figure out why his estranged friend and wanted outlaw Bill Cochran (Federico Boido) was posing as the corpse, and the trail leads quick-draw gunman and milk-drinking casino proprietor Baxter Red (Ettore Manni). Given his name, it should come as no surprise that Baxter Red is a red herring, but there's quite a few over the course of the film, with so many characters--including Sal Borgese as an on-the-take sheriff, Renato Baldini as a corrupt judge, and Gordon Mitchell as another bounty hunter--seeming to have it in for Sartana. Things pick up in time for its SCOOBY-DOO-meets-CLUE ending, but I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH is a sluggishly-paced sequel that's not nearly as enjoyable as IF YOU MEET SARTANA...PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH. Garko is still fun in the lead, Wolff has some amusing moments as Almost Tuco, and Carnimeo carries on the motif of Sartana being seemingly impervious to bullets, but the story just dawdles and takes forever to get to where it's going, and some of the music cues (a recurring harpsichord riff on "Santa Claus is Coming to Town," a doofus being introduced to the tune of "Pop Goes the Weasel") only contribute to the uneven tone of the film.

SARTANA'S HERE...TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN
(Italy - 1970)

Directed by Antony Ascot (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Tito Carpi. Cast: George Hilton, Charles Southwood, Erika Blanc, Piero Lulli, Linda Sini, Nello Pazzafini, Carlo Gaddi, Aldo Barberito, Marco Zuanelli, Lou Kamante (Luciano Rossi), Rick Boyd (Federico Boido), Gigi Bonos, John Bartha, Antonio Casale, Furio Meniconi (Unrated, 92 mins)

The next three SARTANA sequels came in rapid succession, so rapid in fact that there's some dispute over their proper order. Based on its release date in its native Italy, the third in the series (and the third in the Arrow set) is SARTANA'S HERE...TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN. These final three films hit Italian theaters over a four-month period from September to December 1970. Giuliano Carnimeo directed all three back-to-back, though Gianni Garko would sit out SARTANA'S HERE. His one-and-done replacement and the George Lazenby of the official SARTANA series was George Hilton, who would soon become a regular presence in the gialli of Sergio Martino, often teaming with the stunning Edwige Fenech. Hilton is a fine Sartana, though to use another Bond comparison, his Sartana could be deemed the Roger Moore-ish interpretation compared to Garko's Sean Connery. Hilton almost seems to be winking and smirking at times, especially when he's introduced throwing a canteen in the air and shooting it so it rains down and douses a lit fuse that's about to blow up some dynamite. The story is yet another baffling series of scheming double-crosses and backstabbing involving gold, this time from the mine of Appaloosa town boss Spencer (Piero Lulli), who's paying a group of Mexican bandits led by Mantas (Nello Pazzafini in the Fernando Sancho role) to rob his own shipments so he can horde the gold for himself. It's never quite clear what Spencer's ultimate plan is, but it doesn't really matter. SARTANA'S HERE...TRADE YOUR PISTOL FOR A COFFIN is fast-moving and Hilton fits in nicely with the slightly lighter but still generally serious tone, with an added quirk in that Sartana seems to have an obsession with boiled eggs. He ends up disguising himself as a Mexican peasant (a tactic used by Giuliano Gemma's Ringo in THE RETURN OF RINGO) to blend in Appaloosa and figure out how to play the sides against one another. Things are complicated even more with the arrival of dapper, white-suited, poetry-reading gunslinger Sabbath (Charles Southwood, best known as Winchester Jack in Mario Bava's spaghetti western ROY COLT AND WINCHESTER JACK), with whom Sartana may or may not form a Leone-esque unholy alliance. A big improvement over the lackluster I AM SARTANA, YOUR ANGEL OF DEATH, but Hilton moved on and Garko returned for the next film, which was in Italian theaters just two months later.

HAVE A GOOD FUNERAL, MY FRIEND...SARTANA WILL PAY
(Italy - 1970)

Directed by Anthony Ascott (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Giovanni Simonelli and Roberto Gianviti. Cast: Gianni Garko, Antonio Vilar, Daniela Giordano, Ivano Staccioli, Franco Ressel, George Wang, Helga Line, Luis Induni, Franco Pesce, Rick Boyd (Federico Boido), Jean Pierre Clarain, Roberto Dell'Acqua, Rocco Lerro, Aldo Berti, Attilio Dottesio. (Unrated, 93 mins)

After a brief sabbatical during which he starred as a gunslinger named "Santana" in a spaghetti western that was magically transformed into SARTANA KILLS THEM ALL thanks to dubbing, Gianni Garko returns to the SARTANA series with HAVE A GOOD FUNERAL, MY FRIEND...SARTANA WILL PAY, and it looks like he had some time embrace his inner EASY RIDER by letting his hair grow and sprouting a porn stache and sideburns. Storywise, this is more of the same, with Sartana getting involved in some shady real estate and property disputes, starting when Joe Benson (Attilio Dottesio) is killed by hired guns (who are in turn killed by Sartana, who pays for their funerals, hence the title), with the assumption that his land will be taken over by town banker Hoffmann (Antonio Vilar), whose mustache-twirling villainy should be obvious the moment he introduces himself as a banker. Hoffman is in cahoots with the sheriff (Luis Induni) and saloon girl Mary (Helga Line) to make a killing on Benson's land with the rumors that there's a secret stash of gold (of course), but they didn't realize he left everything to his niece Abigail (Daniela Giordano). Sartana teams up with Abigail--for revenge and romantic purposes--and engineers the requisite series of double crosses, which also involve Chinese gambling house owner and problematic 2018 trending Vulture piece waiting to happen Lee Tse Tung (George Wang), who's introduced being pulled through town in a rickshaw by bowler-hatted manservant, frequently bangs a gong, and never misses an opportunity to drop a "Confucius say..." bon mot. Once Hoffmann realizes Sartana is on to his scheme, he starts a rumor that cheating gambling house dealer Piggot (Franco Ressel) was killed by Sartana, which leads to the dead man's four vengeful outlaw brothers coming to town.

As usual, there's generous helpings of the kind of goofy humor and occasional sight gags that portend the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer westerns that would be shortly coming down the pike, and three films into his SARTANA stretch, director Giuliano Carnimeo finds his groove, and in collaboration with cinematographer Stelvio Massi, really step up his game when it comes to Leone-esque frame compositions and a few split diopter shots of the sort that would become synonymous with Brian De Palma a few years down the road. It's also got a rousing score by frequent Ennio Morricone collaborator Bruno Nicolai, and this, following the direction that George Hilton took the character, probably represents Garko's loosest portrayal of Sartana yet, especially when he pulls an ace out of his pocket and flings it across the room to extinguish a candle during his seduction of Abigail, a move that's pure 007 in spirit. But the story is still confusing as hell, which seems to be the norm for the SARTANA westerns, so you more or less have to just roll with it and assume everyone you see onscreen has ulterior motives that will become more preposterous as the film proceeds.

LIGHT THE FUSE...SARTANA IS COMING
(Italy/Spain - 1970)

Directed by Anthony Ascot (Giuliano Carnimeo). Written by Eduardo M. Brochero, Tito Carpi and Ernesto Gastaldi. Cast: Gianni Garko, Susan Scott (Nieves Navarro), Massimo Serato, Piero Lulli, Jose Jaspe, Bruno Corazzari, Clay Slegger, Frank Brana, Franco Pesce, Sal Borgese, Giuseppe Castellano, Lino Coletta, Raffaele Di Mario, Fernando Bilbao, Beatrice Pellegrino, Gennarino Pappagali, Luis Induni, Renato Baldini, Mara Krupp, Dan van Husen. (Unrated, 100 mins)

By the end of 1970, the SARTANA sequels were coming so fast and furious that it probably would've grown difficult to tell them apart if LIGHT THE FUSE...SARTANA IS COMING didn't mark the end of the official series. Though they continued working together in other westerns, it's a shame that star Gianni Garko and director Giuliano Carnimeo stopped here, as LIGHT THE FUSE is the best of the pentalogy. In a shocking turn of events, the story deals with endless double crosses and the pursuit of a stash of gold, this time with Garko's Sartana getting himself thrown into a prison overseen by corrupt marshal Manassas Jim (Massimo Serato) in order to orchestrate a jailbreak with inmate Grand Full (Piero Lulli), who Manassas Jim believes killed his younger brother and made off with the gold. Also killed that skirmish--recounted RASHOMON-style by numerous characters throughout--was a friend of Sartana's. Shifting alliances abound, as Sartana cuts deals at various points with Grand Full, Manassas Jim, Gen. Monk (Jose Jaspe in the Fernando Sancho "Frito Bandito" role), and femme fatale Belle (Nieves Navarro), while trusting only elderly Plon Plon (Franco Pesce), who of course is killed, making Sartana's pursuit of the gold personal. Not quite as difficult to follow in its labyrinthine plot construction as its predecessors, LIGHT THE FUSE earns its status as the best SARTANA late in the game when Sartana single-handedly mows down Monk's army by MacGyvering a church pipe organ into a giant Gatling gun and multi-purpose firearm and "playing" it in a showdown in the middle of the dusty town in a display of grandiosity that would make Rick Wakeman jealous. It's one of the most insane and inspired moments in the entire spaghetti canon, and helps close out the SARTANA series on a high note.

Retro Review: A PISTOL FOR RINGO (1965) and THE RETURN OF RINGO (1965)

A PISTOL FOR RINGO
(Italy/Spain - 1965; US release 1966)

Written and directed by Duccio Tessari. Cast: Montgomery Wood (Giuliano Gemma), Fernando Sancho, George Martin, Hally Hammond (Lorella De Luca), Nieves Navarro, Antonio Casas, Jose Manuel Martin, "Pajarito," Juan Casalilla, Pablito Alonso, Nazzareno Zamperla, Paco Sanz, Jose Halufi. (Unrated, 99 mins)

Following the blockbuster success of Sergio Leone's A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS in Italy in 1964, countless spaghetti westerns followed at a relentless pace for the next decade. An early hit in the spaghetti cycle, 1965's A PISTOL FOR RINGO made it to American theaters courtesy of Embassy Pictures in 1966, a full year ahead of FISTFUL's belated US release. However, its influences lie more with the '50s style Hollywood B oater rather than the trailblazing work of Leone or Sergio Corbucci's DJANGO, right down to Ennio Morricone's uncharacteristically Dimitri Tiomkin/Elmer Bernstein-like score. Written and directed by Italian genre journeyman Duccio Tessari (who had already scripted several post-HERCULES peplum and would latter dabble in everything from 007 ripoffs to gialli to crime thrillers), A PISTOL FOR RINGO is part of that first wave of spaghetti westerns--along with Ferdinando Baldi's TEXAS, ADIOS and Sergio Corbucci two-fer of MINNESOTA CLAY and THE HELLBENDERS to name just three--that were still emulating the Hollywood style before Leone's more influential FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY set the genre template, along with the more politically-charged Zapata spaghettis like Corbucci's THE MERCENARY and COMPANEROS, and Damiano Damiani's A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL. Corbucci would soon shift gears--the same year he made THE HELLBENDERS, he also cranked out the classic DJANGO--and it wouldn't take long for Tessari to make the change with PISTOL's much different sequel THE RETURN OF RINGO later in 1965.

A PISTOL FOR RINGO is an entertaining time-killer at best, the kind of Saturday matinee-type western with a wisecracking hero in Ringo, aka "Angel Face," played by Giuliano Gemma under the pseudonym "Montgomery Wood." He's an outlaw with a heart of gold who guns down four men in self-defense and is promptly thrown in jail by the sheriff (George Martin). At the same time, a band of outlaws led by Sancho (Fernando Sancho in his usual "Frito Bandito" persona that he embodied in seemingly dozens of these things) have robbed a bank and commandeered the outskirts-of-town home of wealthy landowner Major Clyde (Antonio Casas). They're holding his family hostage in exchange for the sheriff--who's engaged to Clyde's daughter Miss Ruby (Lorella De Luca, who would marry Tessari a few years later)--backing off and letting them go. Instead, the sheriff offers Ringo a get out of jail free card: pretend to be an outlaw just passing through and seeking refuge, and ingratiate himself into Sancho's gang, eliminate them all, save Miss Ruby and the hostages, and collect the reward money. Despite its vaguely DESPERATE HOURS scenario, A PISTOL FOR RINGO never takes itself too seriously. Gemma (dubbed by Marc Smith, who would later infamously revoice Franco Nero in ENTER THE NINJA) is loose and likable, but compared to where the genre would go under the leadership of Leone and Corbucci, Tessari displays all the technique, style, and pizazz of a random episode of GUNSMOKE or RAWHIDE. There is one underexplored subplot with Clyde almost being Stockholm Syndrome'd by falling for Sancho's woman (Nieves Navarro, the wife or producer Luciano Ercoli and frequently credited later as "Susan Scott"), and it's got a great theme song performed by Maurizio Graf, but it's so beholden to Hollywood westerns that it even borrows SHANE's ending with Ringo riding off alone. A PISTOL FOR RINGO was a huge hit in Italy in the summer of 1965, and by the end of the year, Tessari and most of the main cast would be back for THE RETURN OF RINGO.

Fernando Sancho as--wait for it---Sancho in A PISTOL FOR RINGO.

THE RETURN OF RINGO
(Italy/Spain - 1965; US release 1966)

Directed by Duccio Tessari. Written by Duccio Tessari and Fernando Di Leo. Cast: Giuliano Gemma, Fernando Sancho, George Martin, Hally Hammond (Lorella De Luca), Nieves Navarro, Antonio Casas, "Pajarito," Monica Sugranes, Victor Bayo, Tunet Vila, Juan Torres, Jose Halufi. (Unrated, 97 mins)

It's obvious that at some point between finishing A PISTOL FOR RINGO and starting the sequel THE RETURN OF RINGO, director/co-writer Duccio Tessari and writer Fernando Di Leo (an uncredited script contributor on PISTOL) saw A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS. RETURN is an in-name-only sequel, bringing back much of the same cast (producer Luciano Ercoli even makes sure his wife Nieves Navarro gets a musical number) in different roles with Giuliano Gemma playing a character named Ringo, but clearly not the same Ringo from the previous film, much like Clint Eastwood's archetypal "Man with No Name" is similar in each installment of the Leone trilogy, but they aren't the same character. Here, Gemma's Ringo is a Union soldier returning to his home near the Mexican border two months after the end of the Civil War. He's devastated to find his entire family buried in the local cemetery after the town was taken over by a group of Mexican outlaws led by the evil Fuentes brothers, Esteban (Fernando Sancho, cast radically against type as "Fernando Sancho") and Paco (George Martin, who was the good-guy sheriff in the previous film). When Ringo learns that his wife Hally (Lorella De Luca) has been abducted, informed she's a widow, and is being forced into an arranged marriage with Paco and the useless sheriff (Antonio Casas) has no plans to do anything about it, he goes undercover as a Mexican peasant to wipe out the Fuentes gang and rescue his wife and the young daughter he never knew he had.

A loose spaghetti western reworking of The Odyssey, THE RETURN OF RINGO is a huge improvement over the OK but unremarkable A PISTOL FOR RINGO. It's significantly more atmospheric with its bleak, dusty Almeria desert landscapes, and this incarnation of Ringo is much more serious and driven, with a wife and daughter to save and vengeance to exact as opposed to the blithe and carefree Ringo from the first time around, whose only concern was reward money. It's a grimmer, darker, and more violent film, with Ringo introduced blowing a guy away in a saloon and blood splattering against the wall behind him. Tessari directs RETURN in a more Leone-like fashion, with some tense action sequences, one incredible shot of a silhouetted Ringo (in a great resurrection motif) revealing his true self to the Fuentes gang just before ruthlessly massacring the lot of them, and with music by Ennio Morricone that's still a bit Hollywood (again with a bombastically overemphatic Maurizio Graf theme song) but leaning more toward the distinctive sounds of a spaghetti score. Despite the American success of A PISTOL FOR RINGO, THE RETURN OF RINGO only received a spotty release later in 1966, though the first film was popular enough in the States for MGM to rechristen Sergio Corbucci's 1966 western JOHNNY ORO (starring Mark Damon) as the unofficial sequel RINGO AND HIS GOLDEN PISTOL for its 1967 US release. A PISTOL FOR RINGO and THE RETURN OF RINGO have just been released in a double feature set from Arrow, with numerous extras, including archival interviews with Gemma (who died in 2013) and De Luca (who passed in 2014), who talks at length about the career of her late husband Tessari (1926-1994), and commentary tracks with spaghetti scholar Henry C. Parke and fan/cult screenwriter C. Courtney Joyner (CLASS OF 1999, DOCTOR MORDRID). When viewed in succession, both films serve to show the transition taking place in the spaghetti western genre in its infancy, from the mimicking of old-school Hollywood to the new standards being set by the Italians in the formation of their uniquely original style that would soon be influencing American westerns in just a few short years.

Cult Classics Revisited: OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) (1982)

OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO)
(Spain/France - 1982)

Written and directed by Max H. Boulois. Cast: Tony Curtis, Joanna Pettet, Max H. Boulois, Ramiro Oliveros, Nadiuska, Gerard Barray, Fernando Sancho, Aldo Sambrell, Sara Mora, Tom Hernandez. (Unrated, 86 mins)

Martinique-born jack-of-all-trades Max-Henri Boulois has dabbled in a bit of everything over his career: he was some sort of "French athletics prodigy" in the early 1960s before embarking on his career as an author and political commentator.  He also found time in the 1970s to record some albums under the name "Max B," parlaying whatever notoriety that brought into a few supporting roles under his "Max B" moniker, which led to a three-film run as independent auteur Max H. Boulois, self-financing, writing, directing, and starring in films under his Spain-based "M.B. Diffusion S.A." production banner.  Boulois' filmmaking efforts are little more than clumsy, Martinique-shot vanity projects that are among the most obscure in all of exploitation cinema:  1980's BIG GAME, aka MAD MEX: THE BLACKFIGHTER and the 1981 casino heist thriller BLACK JACK never scored a US release, though by the time of BLACK JACK, Boulois was able to afford real actors like the legendary Peter Cushing and former THUNDERBALL Bond girl Claudine Auger.  But Boulois' magnum opus is his ill-conceived, budget-starved 1982 effort OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO), a modern updating that turns the Shakespeare tragedy into an action film set in an unnamed African country, with Boulois' General Othello leading a band of guerrila fighters against the rule of a tyrannical despot. Shakespeare updates are nothing new in movies, but you know you're in for something special when the opening credits misspell Shakespeare's name.

Like his previous films, OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) is pretty much a Boulois home movie, with barely-audible dialogue often drowned-out by the overbearing use of Beethoven selections on the soundtrack.  The only real reason to sit through it is to check out a hammy Tony Curtis booze-and-coke-sweating his way through his performance as the duplicitous Col. Iago, Othello's racist second-in-command who plots his superior's downfall.  Resentful of Othello and his marriage to humanitarian aid worker Desdemona "DeDe" Fergusson (Joanna Pettet), the daughter of a powerful US senator (Tom Hernandez),  Iago sets in motion a complex plan to destroy Othello and Major Cassius (Ramiro Oliveros), and usurp control of the guerilla fighters himself.  Curtis sports a ten-gallon hat in a couple of scenes for no reason, and elsewhere rants and raves, likely ad-libbing lines where he expresses his disgust at Othello's "chimpanzee hands, those thick lips, and that smell" all over the privileged, white Desdemona (almost every white male is a vile racist, right down to Sen. Fergusson, outraged over his daughter's marriage, complaining that Othello practices witchcraft and probably "cast a spell" on Desdemona). Boulois doesn't use much of the Bard's actual writing, but when he does, as in one scene where Curtis delivers an Iago soliloquy, it comes off as hokey and awkward amidst the modern vernacular. OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) came at a time in Curtis' career when his substance abuse problems essentially made him an unemployable pariah in Hollywood, resulting in appearances in some truly dreadful films like Ulli Lommel's BRAIN WAVES (1983) and the Alexander Salkind fiasco WHERE IS PARSIFAL? (1984).  As far as he could be from the likes of SOME LIKE IT HOT and SPARTACUS, desperate for work and probably figuring he could score some primo blow in Martinique, Curtis appears to be invested in this and even showed up at Cannes in 1982 to shill for it, going so far as to sit down with Roger Ebert to discuss it. Cannon chief Menaham Golan acquired the distribution rights to Boulois' film, but didn't do much with it other than dump it in a few foreign territories under their "Cannon International" banner. They never released it in US theaters and it never turned up on video, though it can be found on the bootleg and torrent circuit.

OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO)'s cult status is minor, due largely to the depressing presence of a slumming Curtis, reduced to appearing in a Eurocine co-production that looks like the typically slipshod Jess Franco films that the French company was financing around the same time. In keeping with the Eurocine tradition, shots vacillate from night to day in the same scenes, while other scenes end abruptly, sometimes in mid-sentence, there's little continuity, and the dialogue--Curtis and Pettet appear to be speaking on-set; Boulois and the others sound dubbed--often ranges from garbled to completely inaudible. There's little sense of pacing, and even with spaghetti western stalwarts Fernando Sancho and Aldo Sambrell in supporting roles, the whole thing is a real snooze when Curtis is offscreen. But such is the life of the cult film enthusiast. Bad-movie fanatics and connoisseurs of trashy cinema are always willing to explore films of the "Does this piece of shit really exist?!" variety, and on that front, OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) doesn't disappoint.   What can I say?  This is the life we've chosen.

Joanna Pettet during her 1970s heyday

Pettet, whose career got off to a promising start in the late 1960s with Sidney Lumet's THE GROUP, the 007 spoof CASINO ROYALE, and Peter Yates' ROBBERY, doesn't embarrass herself, though it's hard to believe she wasn't entertaining better offers than this or another vanity project around the same time, co-starring in the drive-in thriller DOUBLE EXPOSURE, where producer Michael Callan cast schlubby character actor Michael Callan as a fashion photographer surrounded by a bunch of models who can't wait to sleep with Michael Callan.  The beautiful, British-born Pettet was a constant presence on American TV in the 1970s but for some reason, she never made it big. Not long after her OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) triumph, she had a short but acclaimed run on KNOTS LANDING, followed by a few other appearances of no significance.  Pettet quit acting after a harrowing experience in late 1989, when she was among the hostages held by Filipino rebels plotting a coup against then-President Corazon Aquino.  She was in Manila shooting the low-budget Roger Corman/Cirio H. Santiago production TERROR IN PARADISE and the insurgents took over the hotel where she was staying and the area around it as they closed in on the Presidential residence at the Malacanan Palace.  Pettet managed to escape and decided that easy money in shit movies wasn't worth it anymore.  The film was unreleased until 1995, the same year Pettet and ex-husband Alex Cord (AIRWOLF's "Archangel") lost their 26-year-old son to a heroin overdose.  She was a companion to the great British actor Alan Bates in the final days before his 2003 death from pancreatic cancer, but beyond that, the now-71-year-old Pettet has completely retired from public life.  She deserves to be better-known.

The hulking Boulois has a bit of screen presence but isn't much of an actor, though as far as self-financed, would-be auteurs go, he's not as bad as, say, John De Hart in GETEVEN, Tommy Wiseau in THE ROOM, or Phil Pitzer in EASY RIDER: THE RIDE BACK. Despite all the ingredients for some outstanding Cinema du Batshit, OTHELLO (THE BLACK COMMANDO) is a pretty dry and tedious affair, very rarely going as bonkers as its misbegotten concept and incompetent execution would imply. After the world failed to embrace his "Sheakespeare" interpretation, Boulois abandoned movies and music and returned to journalism, writing several non-fiction books and being a regular French TV presence in the coverage of European and Middle East politics.  His website hasn't been updated since 2011.



(special thanks to Marty McKee for sending me his copy of this--you sure you don't want it back, Marty?)