Further Details

Title: Blindman
Format: DVD
Condition: New
Number Of Discs: 1
Genre: Western
Actors: Ringo Starr, Tony Anthony
Director: Ferdinando Baldi
Audio Language: English
Runtime: 3 hours and 25 minutes
Region Code: DVD: 1 (US, Canada...)
Studio: Abkco
Description: PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
Tony Anthony, Ringo Starr, Lloyd Battista. A blind gunslinger escorts fifty women to a remote Western town where they are to marry the miners working there. But when the women are kidnapped by a Mexican gang, Blindman must saddle up to save them alone! Directed by Ferdinando Baldi

REVIEW
In February 1971, Ringo took the role of Frank Zappa stand-in Larry the Dwarf in 200 Motels, Zappa's surreal comedy about the life of a rock band on tour. But the ex-Beatle yearned to expand his range beyond comedic parts. Which is how, four months later, he found himself traveling to Almeria, Spain, to play a cowboy in Blindman, a Spaghetti Western directed by Ferdinando Baldi.

This wasn't the first time Starr had been to Almeria, a city whose arid outskirts doubled as North American deserts in hundreds of European-produced Westerns, most famously Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Five years earlier, he had visited John Lennon there while his bandmate was filming How I Won the War with Richard Lester. (Lennon famously wrote "Strawberry Fields Forever" during that film's production.) This time, however, he was in the company of Allen Klein, the tough-talking American lawyer whose controversial tenure as the group's manager had led directly to McCartney's exit from the band. Klein, who was co-producing Blindman for his company ABKCO Films, thought Starr would be perfect for the part of Candy, a lovelorn outlaw whose obsession with a rancher's daughter ultimately leads to his own demise. (The fact that his character bore the name of the titular heroine of Terry Southern's satirical novel, the adaptation of which Ringo had just appeared in, was completely coincidental.)

Briefly released in the US in early 1972, and not released in the UK until late 1973 in a severely censored version, Blindman had ultimately little impact on Ringo's acting career. But ABKCO's new reissue of the movie (which has been mastered from its original 35 mm negative, and will be released November 4th in DVD and digital download formats) offers folks a welcome opportunity to re-appraise the once-obscure cult film in all its restored Techniscope glory.

A gritty tale of double- and triple-crossing in the white slavery trade of the old west, Blindman stars American actor Tony Anthony in the title role of the sightless bounty hunter who with a little help from his friends, namely a trusty seeing-eye horse must take on bloodthirsty bandits and the Mexican Army in his quest to deliver 50 mail-order brides to hard-up miners in Texas. Blatantly based upon the itinerant blind swordsman of Japan's popular Zatoichi films, Anthony's character gives new meaning to the term "dead-eyed shot"; he only needs to be pointed in the general direction of a town's church steeple in order to ring its bell with a rifle blast.

Filmed both in Spain and at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome, Blindman features more lavish sets than are typical for the genre, probably because of the money that Klein and ABKCO were pumping into the production. (The newly restored version of the film does ample justice to Riccardo Pallottini's gorgeous cinematography.) Klein himself makes an un-credited appearance in one of the early scenes; the irony of him playing a sweaty, double-crossing bandit will not be lost on anyone who recalls the music mogul's reputation for unethical business practices. Former Beatles road manager Mal Evans appears in the same scene as one of Klein's grimy, rifle-toting co-horts, though the meta-reference regarding his role is sadder five years later, while drunk, depressed and under the influence of valium, Evans would make the fatal mistake of pointing an air rifle at three members of the LAPD. --Rolling Stone Magazine

Blindman, the 1971 cult Spaghetti Western starring Tony Anthony and Ringo Starr and directed by Ferdinando Baldi (David and Goliath starring Orson Welles), will be released on DVD, Blu-ray and in digital formats on November 4 by ABKCO Films. The newly restored versions are in HD, mastered from the original 35mm negative. The release is preceded by midnight theatrical screenings at IFC Center in New York City on October 7 and 8, and a double feature with Jodorowsky s El Topo at the Castro Theater in San Francisco on October 21.

Blindman is Baldi s take on the immensely popular Zatoichi films of Japan. According to a press release, A blind gunman (Tony Anthony) escorts a group of 50 women to Texas, where they are to be married to miners. When the mail order brides are kidnapped by a gang working for two Mexican banditos (one of whom is played by Starr) and their villainous sister, the captors find out their opponent, dependent on his horse and his hearing, is a deadlier challenge than they might have expected. Featuring a 5.1 audio soundtrack by Stelvio Cipriani, Blindman is considered one of the most stylish and absurdist of the Spaghetti Westerns from the early 70s.
Shot at Cinecitta Studios in Rome, and on location in southern Spain, Blindman was co-produced by Tony Anthony, Allen Klein and Saul Swimmer, the latter of whom co-produced the Beatles film Let It Be and directed George Harrison s The Concert for Bangladesh. Blindman features many classic Spaghetti Western locations in their heyday the Western town of Decorados in the Tabernas desert, the massive fort built for the American film El Condor, the railroad station from Once Upon a Time in the West, the cortijo from Duck, You Sucker, and the mission location featured in The Bounty Killer and Death Rides a Horse.

In his book 10,000 Ways to Die: A Director s Take on the Spaghetti Western, Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) describes the production design by Gastone Carsetti in Blindman as being exceptionally fine, adding, his triumphs are a ghost ranch, surrounded by a mesa-sized cemetery, and Domingo s town which . . . he insists on painting black, anticipating High Plains Drifter s city-painting schemes by several years. The images of a jet-black settlement with a white-walled church, surrounded by the Tabernas desert, are sensational.

Ringo Starr, having just launched his solo career the year before, amidst of the dissolution of the Beatles, was so imbued with his role in Blindman that he recorded a song describing the premise of the film. The B-side to his 1972 single Back Off Boogaloo, the aptly titled Blindman, was produced by Klaus Voormann, a member of Plastic Ono Band and cover art designer of the Beatles Revolver. --Best Classic ands

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