Lloyd Battista | Through the Shattered Lens

When singer Terri Knight (Vanessa Williams) is shot and murdered, her husband and manager, Jack (Tim Reid), is arrested. It’s a good thing that Jack’s professor in law school was Perry Mason (Raymond Burr)! Perry and Ken Malansky (William R. Moses) take the case and investigate to see who silenced the singer. (Does Perry know anyone who hasn’t been accused of murder? Someone even tried to fame Della!)

This Perry Mason movie was slightly different than those that came before it. It was full of flashbacks, showing how Terri became a star and went from being nice and innocent to being a diva. Every time that Perry or Ken would interrogate someone, it would lead to scene of Vanessa Williams wearing a wig and playing Terri at a different time in her life and career. There was also a lot singing and the movie actually seemed to be more focused on the music and showing Terri’s rise to fame than it did on solving the actual mystery. It was was if Perry Mason got dropped into the middle of a production of Dreamgirls. It didn’t really work for me because Terri wasn’t an interesting enough character to carry the flashbacks but it was still interesting to see a Perry Mason movie trying to do something different.

The most memorable thing about this movie was Angela Bassett, playing a fellow singer and a former friend of Terri’s. She even told off Perry Mason at one point! It was early in her career but it was easy to see that, from the start, Angela Bassett was obviously going to be a star.

In the old west, a professional gunman (played by Tony Anthony) has been hired to escort 50 women to a Texas mining town. The gunman is known as Blindman, precisely because he is a blind man. He is also a fast and deadly with a gun and has an apparent psychic connection with his horse. Unfortunately, for Blindman, it turns out that his partners double crossed him and sold the 50 women to a Mexican bandit. Blindman must go to Mexico to rescue the women from the ruthless Domingo (Lloyd Battista) and his crazy younger brother, Candy (Ringo Starr).

You read that correctly. This is not only a Spaghetti western about a blind gunslinger who owns a seeing-eye horse. It’s also a Spaghetti western that co-stars the man who replaced Pete Best. Of the four Beatles, Ringo was always the best actor and he is surprisingly convincing as a psychotic Mexican bandit. As for the rest of Blindman, it can not compare to the best Spaghetti westerns but there’s enough novelty in the idea of a blind gunman that it is still interesting to watch. Tony Anthony may have been one of the lesser known Spaghetti western stars but he probably gave the best performance of his career as Blindman. Along with being a violent, bloody, and nudity-filled western, Blindman is also a comedy. Most of the jokes are delivered by Tony Anthony, who spends a lot of time talking to himself and who, despite being blind, stares straight at the camera while doing so. (Most of the jokes were also written by Tony Anthony. He’s one of the credited screenwriters.)

Why does Blindman do what he does? As he puts it in the movie, “To be blind, with no money, now that’s a bitch!”