I have been trying to track down a Western that I saw on television about 20 years ago. I’ve tried google, IMDB, etc, but they all usually suggest The Magnificent Seven. So I have then asked people who have seen TMS and it doesn’t seem to be the right movie.
I will start with the details that I am least positive about, and then list the details I recall clearly.
‘The Unsure Details’
-The main character, male, was bald.
-He wore a black hat.
Ok. Not much to go on there.
‘The Less Unsure Details’
-The male lead character had an odd type of rifle. It had a magazine that fed horizontaly through the top of the rifle. Cross feed? If you’ve seen it, you’d know it.
-In the last chamber of the magazine, instead of a rifle cartridge, he loaded a thin cigar. I think at least twice in the movie, after shooting all the bad guys, he pulled the cigar from the magazine and lit up.
-There was another character who was, I think, on the smoking cowboys side. This second guy’s gimmick was that he used ball bearings as weapons. He had an indentation in the top of his boot, into which he would drop a ball bearing, and then flick/kick it at things.
-At one point this second character hides in a well, holding himself in place with his back against one side and his feet against the other.
-There was also a woman involved. All that I recall of her was that she got into a struggle with a man, and then he fell out of a window.
Ok. That’s all I’ve got. No plot. No names. Nothing else. If any of those details ring a bell with anyone, could you please let me know. Even if you can’t help with the movie name, it would be nice to know that this is a real movie - I’ve had so much trouble finding it, I have wondered if I may have started watching something, then fell asleep and dreamed the rest.
You might be thinking of “Adios Sabata”. Yul Brenner uses a gun like the one you describe. I have only seen bits and pieces of the movie, so I don’t know about the plot. There was a trilogy of Sabata movies. Yul Brenner was in the second. Lee Van Cleef was in the first and third.
ETA: do a google image search for “adios Sabata rifle”
Wow. Now that looks like what I’ve been looking for for years. Thanks for that, I’ll go google the movies and see if it’s the one. Looks very promising so far - I’m fairly sure that’s the rifle.
Yep. Adios Sabata is, without a doubt, the movie. IMDB confirms…
-The bald lead.
-The black hat.
-The rifle.
-The cigar loaded in the magazine.
-The metal ball kicking guy.
I can’t imagine why they changed the French invaders in Mexico to Austrians. Yes, the French set up an Austrian archduke as their puppet ruler, and many Austrian officers came along with him and were in the French/Mexican Imperialist army, but there were no white-uniformed Austrian Imperial troops as shown in the movie (although there were some Sudanese-Egyptian slave soldiers, worth a movie themselves).
Was 1970 a touchy time in Franco-Italian relations?
Dunno, but a lot of spagetti westerns were made in Europe on a shoestring budget with whatever they could get for sets and props and extras. There were a lot more of them made than I realized until I saw this documentary from netflix