This is one of those movies that is just plain great. I would recommend this movie to anyone, not just spaghetti western fans.
Tony Anthony is great in this movie. This is the second Anthony spaghetti western that I have seen, and the other one (A Dollar Between the Teeth) is incredible also. After seeing this film, I am convinced that Tony Anthony deserves more recognition as a spaghetti western star than he has gotten. He belongs right up there with Nero, Gemma, Eastwood, and Milian (no one comes close to Lee Van Cleef). His character in this film is one tough hombre. He really takes a beating, but always returns to create Hell on Earth for his enemies. He has a lot of great lines in this movie too.
The movie really stretches ones suspension of disbelief when the blind man is able to ride a horse to Mexico, and when he exhibits his uncanny ability to aim a gun, but this is such a high-quality film that it manages to pull it off with ease.
The music score is excellent -a great classic spaghetti western sound with a little bit of sitar thrown in.
Besides being a spaghetti western, this film also borrows some elements from exploitation movies, (lots of scantily clad and naked women, women behind bars, etc.) but manages to do it without sacrificing the quality of the movie. Fans of both genres should be especially pleased with this film.
This is a must-see for spaghetti western fans, and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys movies that are somewhat off-beat, and very well made.
Blindman
1971
Western
Blindman
1971
Western
Plot summary
Blindman (Tony Anthony) is a blind gunfighter who rides a seeing-eye horse, Boss. He is contracted for $50,000 to provide safe transport for 50 European mail-order brides who have asked miners in Lost Creek, Texas for their hands in marriage. But his business partner Skunk (Renato Romano) betrays him by allowing Domingo (Lloyd Battista),a Mexican bandit, to kidnap the women for his own purposes. Blindman heads into Mexico in pursuit, where he discovers that Domingo and his sister Sweet Mama (Magda Konopka) are using the women as a lure for an Army General (Raf Baldassarre) whom they intend to hold for ransom alongside the brides. With the aid of Pilar (Agneta Eckemyr),the unwitting object of Domingo's brother Candy's (Sir Ringo Starr) affections, "El General", Boss and many, many sticks of dynamite, our anti-hero stops at nothing to get even with Domingo and his siblings and deliver on his contract.
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a fantastic spaghetti western
"I want my fifty women!"
I've seen literally hundreds of Westerns, and for the longest time I never saw a woman actually shot dead on purpose until I ran across 1948's "The Hawk of Powder River" with Eddie Dean in the lead role. That whole concept gets blown to smithereens here when half of Domingo's (Lloyd Battista) gang recklessly shoots away at a couple wagon loads of scantily clad women as they run for cover, while the other half chases them down for a little you know what. It's one of the more surreal scenes you'll see in a spaghetti Western, a genre that's known to have it's share of them.
What you have to do though, is suspend major disbelief when it comes to the title character portrayed by Tony Anthony. I can grant some semblance of marksmanship to a shooter who can't see based on a compensating factor like acute hearing, but all Blindman needed was for someone to point out the general direction of a target or an enemy. Like the bell in the steeple tower he managed to gong about a half dozen times while moving around. Really?
But if you like your Westerns with a heaping dose of marinara topped with Parmesan, this might just be the way to go. There's a whole host of colorful characters here with names like Skunk, Dude and Sweet Mama, and if your eyes don't deceive you, yes, that's Ringo Starr in one of the leads up until about the sixty minute mark as a Mexican outlaw named Candy. Quite honestly, I thought he really filled the bill as a bearded thug, he played the part well until he got shot in the back by Blindman. He really should have been allowed to make it to the end of the picture.
The whole story is filled with double crosses by various characters to thwart Blindman from his original mission, that of delivering fifty mail order brides to miners in Lost Creek, Texas. Those were no ordinary mail order brides either, every one was most certainly cast for their eye candy appeal, with generous assets prominently displayed throughout the story.
If the concept of a blind man in a Western intrigues you, another flick you might want to catch with a bit more credibility is 1964's "Minnesota Clay" with Cameron Mitchell in the title role. In that one, Clay loses his vision gradually and begins to rely on his hearing to compensate for the loss, which comes in handy for his final showdown. The film also uses shooting locations in Spain and Italy, pretty handy when it comes to ordering all that linguini.
Vincenzo Cerami, RIP
The most noticeable thing about Ferdinando Baldi's "Blindman" is that Ringo Starr plays a supporting role in it. Yes, the annular member of the Beatles appears in a spaghetti western...with his voice dubbed! It's more than a little jarring to hear the man who sang "Yellow Submarine" and "Octopus's Garden" have a neutral accent.
But anyway, it's an OK movie, not great. Tony Anthony plays a man hired to deliver fifty brides to the miners, but the brides get kidnapped and so he has to take charge. It's got a lot of the things that we can expect in a spaghetti western, along with a few things that wouldn't have been acceptable just a few years earlier. It's a fairly interesting flick, partly to see the most famous drummer in the world play a bandit, but mostly just to see this lesser known entry in the genre. Good times.
PS: Producer Saul Swimmer also co-produced the documentary "Let It Be" and directed the documentary about George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh. In other words, this is one spaghetti western that's all about the Fab Four.