Director: Ferdinando Baldi
Cast: Tony Anthony, Ringo Starr, Lloyd Battista

During my lifetime, I have gone through a number of personal difficulties, many of which I feel are too personal to go into detail about. You just have to trust me about that statement, and also trust when I say that I have learned a lot from those difficulties, especially since some of those difficulties are of a kind that aren't common in the general public. I have learned from those difficulties some valuable lessons, such as how prejudice can be a dangerous and hurtful thing. Also, I have learned that maybe I am more resilient than I thought I was earlier in my life. But sometimes I wonder how resilient I happen to be, and I wonder what my life would be like - and how I would react to it - had I been given some other kinds of personal difficulties. Poverty would be one such difficulty, and related to that would be various other difficulties such as a lack of food. But more often than not the kind of difficulty I imagine myself having is some sort of disability. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like had I been confined to a wheelchair. To me, it would be bad enough if I were a paraplegic, one reason being that it would take me more time to get from place to place. But at least I would have the ability of using my arms to do many of the typical tasks one has in his or her life. But other times I wonder what it would be like if I were a quadriplegic, and I didn't have the use of any of my four limbs. To tell the truth, I don't like to think too much about what life would be like in that situation. It seems that I would need help with just about everything, and being independent with enough privacy are two things that are very important to me.

Sometimes I think about variations of what I have just mentioned, two examples being having my arms but my legs being missing, or having my legs but my arms being missing. But the potential personal difficulties I dwell on the most - and I think that most other people think about as well - are being either deaf or blind. Personally, if I had to choose between either being deaf or blind, I would choose to be deaf. Since I rely on my sense of sight for so much of my life, it would seem less of an inconvenience to be deaf. True, I wouldn't be able to listen to music, or hear when my girlfriend tells me that she loves me. But I could still watch movies (if there was an English caption option), still easily use a computer, still do all my chores easily from cooking to laundry, and still freely navigate through my city quickly with little to nothing slowing me down. I could list other examples with those, but I think you see the picture... which you probably couldn't do if you were blind. Yes, you could listen to everything you want to, and you wouldn't have to learn how to use sign language. But there would be so much that you would find difficult or impossible to do. While there is a television channel in my country devoted to people with impaired sight (broadcasting TV shows with voiceovers describing what is happening), that's about the only choice you would have to watch TV or movies and understand what's happening. Cooking (and eating for that matter), dressing, and various other household chores would be a lot more challenging. You might have to learn Braille, though whenever I brush my fingers over some Braille text, I can't figure out how people manage to understand it.

On the other hand, I have certainly learned many times over the years that there are a number of blind people who manage to get through life very well, some even flourishing better than people who have the gift of sight. In fact, when I hear of some of their accomplishments, like one blind man I once heard became a medical doctor, I become quite amazed. While I know that blind people can overcome their disability, when it comes to showcasing this in motion pictures, it often comes across as quite unbelievable to me. Sometimes I have to suspend my disbelief considerably, which is what I had to do when I sat down to watch Blindman. Just read the following plot description to get some idea of why I had to do this. The title figure (played by Tony Anthony of Treasure Of The Four Crowns) is, as you figured out, is a man who is blind. But he doesn't live in modern times - he lives in the latter half of the 19th century in the American wild west. But he's far from helpless - his other senses are still there, and with the aid of his seeing eye horse, he is an accomplished gunman. His excellent reputation gets him hired to escort a band of fifty mail-order brides to a Texas community near the border, with the promise of a big payday upon delivery. However, two Mexican bandit brothers known as Candy (Ringo Starr of The Beatles) and Domingo (Lloyd Battista, Flipper's New Adventure) made a secret plan to kidnap the women and use them subsequently for various dark purposes. Finding that the women he was going to escort are now missing, Blindman is of course peeved since he won't be able to collect his money. So he decides to cross the border into Mexico to both recover the women and to get sweet revenge.

Like when I reviewed the movie Old Boyfriends (which had John Belushi in a supporting role), I think most people approaching Blindman would rather first hear about one specific supporting role actor over everyone and everything else. That actor being, of course, Ringo Starr. I aim to please... though unfortunately I have to report that apparently neither Starr nor the filmmakers cared about portraying Starr's bandit character. To be fair, Starr certainly looks the part of a Mexican bandit with his very shaggy and unkempt appearance. But the movie needed a lot more than that. Starr gives an extremely soft and laid-back performance, one that does not suggest menace or any kind of strong emotion, and has his Liverpool accent creep in occasionally. Lines like, "If you don't tell me where she is, I'll break every bone in your body!" are uttered completely flat. Actually, he hardly says a word for the first forty minutes or so of the movie, and not much more beyond that point. In fact, his character exits the movie about twenty-five minutes later despite almost a half hour more of the running time yet to unfold. Of course, more of the movie is focused on Blindman, but he provides little compensation for Starr's lacklustre performance. Actor Anthony frequently looks down at the ground, as if he's afraid to confront a character in front of him. When he does look up, quite often the expression on his face suggests that he is on the verge of bursting into tears (something I've also noticed in other Anthony movies). During the times when his character speaks up, the low monotone of his voice suggests sleepiness or from being under the influence of a great deal of medication.

Having Anthony be livelier would have helped Blindman greatly, but there would still be problems with the title character. For one thing, the movie can't seem to decide if Blindman is akin to someone like Marvel Comics' Daredevil or a blind person with more limited ability. He can shoot the bell of a church multiple times from far away, yet when he's in a hotel room he accidently breaks items. The ability of Blindman throughout seems dictated by the situation instead of him influencing the situation. I tried to look past this inconsistency and Anthony's inadequate performance by focusing when the character is involved with action, and that helped a little. Some of the action isn't bad, such as an early scene where Blindman guns down Candy's men, as well as some hand to hand struggles. But more often than not the action has one or more flaws that makes it hard to enjoy. One reoccurring flaw is that director Baldi (Treasure Of The Four Crowns) likes the camera to get so close to the action that it's hard to follow exactly what is happening, especially with the addition of rapid editing. There are also continuity flaws, such as when several dozen men in a small room are shot with a Gatling gun and there are never more than six or seven bodies seen on the ground at any time, including when the gun stops firing and everybody is dead. Because of these and other problems, Baldi can't seem to raise that much tension or interest with the action or scenes of suspense such as when Blindman is in a room with a poisonous snake. He does do better with other spaghetti western elements, however. A good amount of money was obviously spent here by the producers (including an uncredited Allen Klein), and that results in good photography, scenic locations, big explosions, convincing sets and props (I love the look of the graveyard in the climax), and occasionally an epic feel with dozens of characters milling around yet positioned just right to completely fit in the widescreen frame.

Blindman also was provided with an element you don't often see in westerns, spaghetti or otherwise: nudity. This is a cinematic genius touch that not even John Ford or Bud Boetticher ever though of using. Among the various welcome undressings, there's one awesome sequence with dozens of completely naked women getting water splashed on them, the western equivalent of a shower room in a women in prison movie. All that and the previously mentioned points of merit are partial compensation for the aforementioned flaws, but there's another flaw with one element not previously mentioned: the script. Now, I know many spaghetti westerns aren't brilliantly written, but in this case the flaws are really noticeable. For starters, the movie seems to start at chapter two, which results in the first thirty minutes being somewhat confusing concerning what Blindman is determined to do. Things are eventually made clear, but even before then the story starts to get very cluttered, with various characters being added such as a Mexican general played by Raf Baldassrre (The Adventures Of Hercules). Part of this results in a number of scenes that momentarily divert from the main plot concerning Blindman, such as the funeral/wedding sequence towards the end. All this material results in the movie having a very bloated 105-minute running time. A long running time isn't necessarily a bad thing (take some of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, for example), but the material in this case is often so pointless and/or drab in nature that viewers will start to drift off to sleep. Some of these extraneous details could have been developed into something memorable, such as Blindman's seeing eye horse, but as they are, they come across as a waste of time. Though my love for spaghetti westerns is huge, even I have to admit the tomato sauce in this particular dish didn't have enough spice or flavor to give it that normal amount of kick. Only spaghetti western aficionados might get something out of this, and I think even they will admit the movie has more flaws than points of merit.

(Posted August 31, 2024)