What It’s About: Sabata (Lee Van Cleef) comes into town with a circus, where he meets an old war buddy(Reiner Schöne) who owes him a debt. The McIntocks, a clan of Irish immigrants, runs the town. The head of the clan, Joe (Giampiero Albertini), owns a mine that never panned out, but forces the town to pay a tax-5% on necessities, 20% on luxury items and 50% on gambling and women, which he says will pay for improvement and expansion of the town.  The only catch is that work won’t start until McIntock has all of the money collected.  Sabata doesn’t pay, putting him in conflict with the clan.  Of course, not everything is what it seems. 

Why Watch it Today?: Today is St. Patrick’s Day, and what better way to celebrate a holiday that has come to mean drinking, wearing green, eating corned beef and cabbage, more drinking, cartoon leprechauns, public drunkenness, and tenuous connections to the Emerald Isle than with an Italian Western that features Italian actors playing an “Irish” clan?  Joe spends the last quarter of the film yelling “you will never get my gold”, leading my wife who was sitting in the next room to ask “Why are there leprechauns in a Western?”  If you like Spaghetti Westerns that are on the comedic side, you could do worse that The Return of Sabata.

Where to Get It:  Netflix (rental only) or Amazon

The wonderfully catchy, absolutely ludicrous theme music: