The Forgotten Pistolero Blu-ray Review

Diabolik DVD/Carambola Media

Blu-ray Release: December 16, 2025

Video: 1.85:1/1080p/Color 

Audio: English and Italian DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (separate discs)

Subtitles: English (forced on Italian version)

Run Time: 83:24

Director: Ferdinando Baldi

Sebastian (Leonard Mann) was swept away from his home as a small child during a massacre orchestrated by his unfaithful mother and her lover. The event ultimately resulted in the death of his father. Many years later, his childhood friend, Rafael (Peter Martell), finds him living quietly on a farm and, after dredging up Sebastian's forgotten past, the pair decide to set out on a road to revenge. (From Diabolik’s official synopsis)

Ferdinando Baldi was a stalwart workhorse director whose films always looked more expensive than they actually were. Most of his westerns could be mistaken for modest Hollywood productions. They all look nice and have coherent, three-act scripts. Well, most of them – his latter collaborations with American actor Tony Anthony, Get Mean (1976), and Comin’ At Ya! (1981), are over-the-top, one-thing-after-another action spoofs and he made a musical comedy vehicle for pop star Rita Pavone called Rita of the West (Italian: Little Rita nel West) in 1967. 

His first foray into the genre, Texas, Adios (Italian: Texas, addio, 1966), is well remembered for starring a young Franco Nero and he made two likable, by-the-numbers westerns in 1968: Hate Thy Neighbor (Italian: Odia il prossimo tuo, 1968) and Django Prepare a Coffin (Italian: Preparati la bara!, 1968). I’d argue that his best work was his first Tony Anthony western, Blindman (Italian: l Pistolero Cieco, 1971), a take on Zatōichi: The Blind Swordsman (the second spaghetti gunman variation of Zatōichi, actually, after Sergio Corbucci’s Minnesota Clay in 1964) costarring Ringo Starr as the convincingly frightening villain. But The Forgotten Pistolero (Italian: Il pistolero dell'Ave Maria, 1969) – an ironically overlooked title in his catalogue – might be his most sophisticated western, at least in terms of theme, storytelling, and atmosphere. 

The screenplay is attributed to Baldi, Pier Giovanni Anchisi, Mario di Nardo, Federico De Urrutia, and novelist Vincenzo Cerami, who also wrote Blindman and Luigi Vanzi’s The Silent Stranger (Italian: Lo straniero di silenzio, 1968), a spaghetti/jidaigeki hybrid starring Tony Anthony as the title character (it was the third in the series, followed by Get Mean seven years later). The plot is rich with melodrama, in part because it’s based on one of the oldest surviving stage tragedies, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, which is itself based on the Greek myth of the same name. While Aeschylus’ story became an influential philosophical text and has connections to Marxist and feminist theories, Forgotten Pistolero’s political meanings are mostly lost in the frothy drama.

Visually, Baldi’s motifs are borrowed from the typical sources, owing as much to John Ford than his Italian counterparts. His work was never as stylized as Sergio Leone’s or Enzo G. Castellari, but his blocking is clean and he has a good eye for dramatic compositions, all of which serves the sensationally soapy tone as well as the bombastic (though not particularly bloody) action interludes. Editor Eugenio Alabiso, who co-edited The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) with Nino Baragli, can’t quite find the right rhythm during exposition, but does a beautiful job with action and suspense, and produces a handful of impressionistically cut sequences that would make Peckinpah proud.

The cast is fronted by American-born Leonard Mann, who had a moderately successful career in Italy, beginning with The Forgotten Pistolero and including other westerns (Enzo Barboni’s The Unholy Four [Italian: Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta, 1970] and Pasquale Squitieri’s Vengeance Is a Dish Served Cold [Italian: La vendetta è un piatto che si serve freddo, 1971]), poliziotteschi (Mario Caiano’s Weapons of Death [Italian: Napoli spara!, 1977]), and gialli (Maurizio Pradeaux’s Death Steps in the Dark [Italian: Passi di morte perduti nel buio, 1973]). Apparently, he was hired because producer Manolo Bolognini thought he looked vaguely like Franco Nero, which is also how Terrence Hill and Maurizio Merli got their first roles. He retired from acting to become a social worker, LA school district therapist, and prison reform advocate.

Mann shares the screen with a slew of all-stars and familiar faces. Pietro Martellanza (My Name is Pecos [Italian: Due once di piombo, 1966]) is a sort of secondary lead and major stand-out, alongside Pilar Velázquez (A White Dress for Marialé [Italian: Un bianco vestito per Marialé, 1977]) and Luciana Paluzzi (Thunderball, 1965). The supporting cast includes Argentinian Alberto de Mendoza (A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin [Italian: Una lucertola con la pelle di donna, 1971]), Piero Lulli (Vengeance is Mine [Italian: Per 100.000 dollari ti ammazzo, 1967]), Luciano Rossi (Contraband, 1980), and everyone’s favorite spaghetti western heavy, José Manuel Martín (A Bullet for Sandoval [Italian: Quei disperati che puzzano di sudore e di morte, 1969]).

Generally speaking, spaghetti westerns were based on older American westerns, war movies, historical events, Japanese samurai films, or are simply rip offs of other Italian hits, but there were a handful based on classic literature and myth, including Luigi Bazzoni’s Man, Pride and Vengeance (Italian: L'uomo, l'orgoglio, la vendetta, 1967; based on Georges Bizet’s 19th century opera Carmen), Enzo G. Castellari’s Johnny Hamlet (Italian: Quella sporca storia nel West,1968; based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet), Gianni Puccini’s Fury of Johnny Kid (Italian: Dove si spara di più, 1967; based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), and Spanish director Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent’s Ballad of a Bounty Hunter (Italian: Fedra West, 1968; based on the myth of Phaedra).

Video

As tends to happen with lots of spaghetti westerns, The Forgotten Pistolero has a fuzzy copyright history in the US. This means that previous DVD releases came from copyright-skirting companies, mainly Wild East Productions, who put it on a double-feature with The Unholy Four, and Timeless Media, who stuck it on a 20-movie collection entitled The Best of Spaghetti Westerns. Both releases featured an inferior PAL-to-NTSC conversion. This 1:85:1, 1080p disc is the first Blu-ray edition available in any country, though it has been available from streaming services in HD for some time. It comes from Diabolik DVD and Carambola Media, and was originally a Diabolik website exclusive.

There isn’t any information on where the transfer came from, but I assume it is the same rights holder that put it out on streaming. I’ve gotten used to expecting mediocre and even bad transfers from smaller labels where copyright fuzzy spaghetti westerns are concerned, but this is every bit as good as what I’d expect from Kino at this point. Color quality is pretty good, especially the warmer hues. Some daylight shots appear slightly washed out, but darker interiors feature effective dynamic range and tidy blacks. Textures are on the softer side, though this is in part due to cinematographer ​​Mario Montuori’s diffused and foggy wide-angle photography. Grain levels shift throughout, but remain mostly natural and print damage is minimal.

Strangely, a day-for-night scene at the beginning of the film is incorrectly balanced, so that night suddenly becomes day, before shifting back again when the characters go back indoors (you can even hear crickets on the soundtrack). I don’t know if this is a digital mastering issue or a problem with the original material, but I assume it’s the latter.

Audio

The weirdest thing about this release is that it has divided its English and Italian dubs onto two separate discs, rather than including them as two track options on one disc. From what I can tell, the transfers are the same, though the Italian dub disc has forced English subtitles. This made it a little harder to compare tracks, since I couldn’t just flip between them, but the ultimate results are similar to what we might expect from a well maintained Italian western from the late ‘60s. I personally recommend opting for the English track, since many of the major cast members are clearly speaking English on set and because the dub cast is quite good.

I don’t think that Baldi was trying to rip off Sergio Leone too badly, but composer Roberto Pregadio was definitely doing everything in his power to evoke Ennio Morricone. The main theme also borrows a motif from “Home on the Range” and the music that plays during a ballroom waltz swipes part of its refrain from Tchaikovsky’s "Grande valse villageoise" (also the basis of “Once Upon a Dream” from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty [1959]). This might sound like a complaint, but it is all to Forgotten Pistolero’s benefit. 

Extras

• Interview with Leonard Mann (34:00, HD) – In this archival 2007 interview, the actor, born Leonardo Manzella, speaks to self-described “tough-guy film expert” Mike Malloy about his career, though he mostly discusses his poliziotteschi, not his westerns or gialli. The good news is that Mann appears to have a better understanding of Italian genre fads than almost any other American-born actor I’ve ever seen interviewed on the subject. The bad news is that it’s really hard to hear Malloy’s questions.

• English language trailer

The images on this page are taken from the BD and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.