Sergio Martino’s eerie and harsh Mannaja (US title A Man Called Blade) was one of the last Spaghetti Westerns ever made. This melancholy and superbly shot 1977 film reflects not only the end of a cinematic era, but the final death of idealism before we all marched into the “dismal tide” of the 1980s. The film has three solid leads, one of which only appears in the beginning and end of the film. The grim and laconic hero Blade (crime caper star Maurizio Merli), the sadistic and enraged Voller (a greasy and relentless John Steiner), and the unpredictable Burt Craven (mop top nutcase Donald O’Brien, who looks and plays like sort of a toned down version of Klaus Kinski).
The opening of Mannaja appears almost medieval; you can’t tell you’re watching a western until you see the gun belts three minutes into the movie. A mud encrusted Craven is running through a swamp, with an unseen person in hot pursuit. Here, O’Brien’s manic face is the perfect mask of fear and panic, and the rolling fog lends to the scene’s unsettling atmosphere. It turns out Blade is chasing after him. Craven pulls a gun on him, but Blade is ready with his signature axe.
Blade is a bounty hunter who is not only quick and accurate with a gun, but lightning fast with his hatchets as well. Blade can chop off your hand or impale you in the forehead quicker than you can shoot him down. Though the choreography of Merli’s axe throwing is a rather clumsy and unconvincing, it’s still brutal and shocking when Blade takes someone down with his axe; think of the scene in Kill Bill 1 when The Bride dispatches one of Crazy 88s with an axe to the head. There’s just something about an witnessing an axe impalement that just you want to yell out, “Aaaah, that’s gotta hurt!!”
Blade drags Craven into town to get a $5,000 bounty, but the town has no marshal or sheriff in town to pay up. He tries to get lodging so he and his captive can move on the next day, but Voller and his thugs, who are also mayor’s henchman, tell him to take a hike. This lack of hospitality inspires Blade to fuck with Voller, and voila, the story begins. Blade later tries to muscle in on Voller’s job as security escort for the local shipment of silver, so he goes to Mayor McGowan (Phillipe Leroy), who also owns the silver mine, to get Voller’s job. Blade eventually discovers Voller is behind a rash of highway robberies, and it’s only a matter of time before the two will have it out. But it turns out Blade didn’t just enter that town randomly; he has vengeance on his mind as well.
Mannaja is full of symbolic violence (including a riveting and gruesome miners’ riot), out-of-nowhere double-crosses, and several impressive set pieces. One superb scene involves four thugs hunting down a supposedly blind Blade inside a cave. The lighting and editing in this scene is clear yet disorienting; you really feel you’re spelunking to your death in this sequence. Mannaja also has obvious political overtones, focusing on McGowen’s cruelty to his workers and his Puritanical rule over the mining town.
I also enjoyed the music of Mannaja. At first, I found the weird, Italian-accented baritone voice singing in English a little jarring, but once I started listening to the lyrics, the slow pace of the singing made perfect sense:
You … alone.
A solitary man.
And when the sun goes down
Your memory’s back around
When you … and your heart
Is breaking down
Like … a wolf
At night,
You look for home.
Took all your soul apart,
And make you run away
‘til now
And your mind … won’t forget.
Then a higher pitch, faster chorus comes in with:
This here was your father’s land
Nothing that you can pretend
You want justice,
And you love peace.
When the time has come to kill,
To destroy who loves to kill.
Then your hand … will snap the axe,
And your hatchets … will be satisfied.
Or to put it more succinctly, A Man Called Blade ain’t nutin’ to fuck with.
A Man Called Sergio, the accompanying documentary about the making of Mannaja, puts the film in a whole new perspective. For example, the film was mostly shot in a dilapidated western set, and Martino used the crumbling structures to create a convincingly dirty, muddy, and dying town. The huge Dobermans that Voller lugs around were an inspired choice to make him appear more evil, and naturally there’s a funny story behind the dogs. Martino also talks about Sam Peckinpah’s influence upon Mannaja.
Mannaja is the fitting finale to the cinematic madness launched by The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a mournful swan song to the end of the Spaghetti Western. It is not only Blade riding off into the sunset in Mannaja, but a whole genre as well.
Tags: a man called blade, donald o'brien, john steiner, mannaja, maurizio merli, sergio martino