A Man Called Blade

A bounty hunter known as Blade rides into town carrying a hatchet. He has an old score to settle with the man who controls the silver mine, and everyone in town stands on one side of it or the other. The film is not interested in inventing a new revenge story. It is interested in tone: made in the late phase of the Italian western, it is muddy, dark and unusually cruel, as the genre had become by then. The hero is not good, only less bad. The form leans on the hatchet more than the gun, and the fights are bloody and short. The violence has none of the ritual air of the classic duel. Sergio Martino directed. Martino is known primarily for giallo, and the close-up language of violence he brought from that genre is carried here into a western. Maurizio Merli takes the lead. Merli was known for playing hard-nosed police inspectors in seventies Italian crime films, and he brings the same hardness to the desert. John Steiner and Philippe Leroy are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers curious about the late, dark phase of the spaghetti western. Who it is not for: anyone expecting the finesse of the genre's classics. The film is coarse, bloody and its story is predictable from the start.