Arizona Colt Returns

ARIZONA COLT RETURNS: There’s a tendency to put Spaghetti Westerns into two categories: “those made by Sergio Leone” and “everything else.” And while none of the imitators really came close to approximating Leone’s inimitable style, quite a few managed to be damn entertaining. Like this well-meaning shoot-em-up which pits a lanky Eastwood stand-in (Anthony Steffan) and his loyal but perpetually drunk sidekick (Roberto Comardiel) against a small army of bad guys who’ve framed our hero for robbery and sullied his not-so-good name. Directed by Sergio Martino with his usual energetic pace, there’s nothing here you can’t see in dozens of other Italian Dollars knock-offs that will never make it to DVD. But Arizona Colt hits the trail hard and fast, jumping from one showdown to the next until the nearly 20-minute finale, the perfect capper to a film that’s constantly trying to top itself. Through it all, Martino maintains a good-natured tone, expertly balancing the comic relief with the comic-book action sequences while avoiding the excessive gore that would crop up in the genre thanks to Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, released just the year before. Steffan makes a good scruffy Western superhero, able to split the barrel of a man’s gun with one bullet and woo the ladies with irresistible lines like, “When I look at you, I can think about it making babies.” Now that’s one smooth cowboy. MYA’s release includes a photo gallery of lobby cards and posters along with the German trailer for the film.