Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte

"If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death" (1968), directed by Gianfranco Parolini and starring Gianni Garko, William Berger Fernando Sancho, Sidney Chaplin(!) and Klaus Kinski phoning in a cameo role, has only one great thing going for it, and that's its ridiculously over the top title. The rest is a banal Spaghetti Western that has no tension and no direction.

The script, such as it is, has a lot of incident and detail, none of which is interesting, as it is completely convoluted and very hard to care what happens to whom. Still, the plot is something like this: Sartana (Garko) gets involved with an insurance swindle run by several dignitaries, who hire a Mexican gang to steal a strong-box, and an American gang, led by Lasky (Berger), to kill the Mexicans.

It takes a very long time, too long, to find all this out, and by that point, I ceased to care. Berger is a good actor, one that fits very well into the greed-fill world of Spaghetti's, but isn't given anything interesting to do and is wasted completely. Kinski obviously was doing his role for the money, which is a shame, as his is, career wise the best actor in the film. Garko has a good opening line ("I am your pallbearer."), but not much else, and doesn't have the same magnetic presence as Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef.

The director made "Sartana" and other "Circus" Westerns like this. They're called "Circus" Westerns because there is so much jumping around and choreographed back-flips that you might be watching a kung-fu movie and not a Spaghetti. The sets here aren't so much grand as big, to accommodate all the acrobatics; it has a hefty budget, but the desert scenes are shot in some quarry. Why? I suspect because Parolini was more interest in making an action film that just happened to be set in the West than creating a Western. These types of Spaghetti's were certainly very popular in their day, and they gave a lifeline to an ailing genre a few years later. I just wish the lifeline had been better. Maybe saying this movie is an insult to the genre is too strong, but when you see progressive and transcendent Spaghetti Westerns like "Black Jack" and "Once Upon a Time in the West" that were made in the same year, you realise how lazy this film is.

Crooked bankers plan an insurance swindle and hire a Mexican gang to steal the bank's gold but they also pay Lasky's gang to kill the Mexicans.

Now this is more like it! Corpses everywhere, strange enemies, even stranger heroes - this is a good Italian Western, right here. Take that, Dead for a Dollar! Gianni Garko (of Body Count) is the mysterious Sartana, out to get some gold that's been scammed by local businessmen in conjunction with an amazingly over the top William Berger (Dial: Help, Maya, Spider Labyrinth and Keoma). Berger for me plays the best character in the film, a heartless, hyperactive killer who is not shy in double crossing folks, but can intuitively know when to hook up with Sartana too if the situation demands it.

Yep, it's one of those films. Missing gold, uneasy alliances, double crossings, and many, many shoot outs leading to corpses lying everywhere and a mere two characters left alive at the end. This is the kind of film you're looking for. It's got everything you want. Except boobs.

Some come for the Garko, who plays Sartana in a laid back, but deadly way, and stay for the Berger, who's anything but laid back here.

WHUP!

Oh, and seemingly, Klaus Kinski turned up on set one day, stared into the camera a couple of times, and got paid for it!

WHUP!

Oh, and this film has the loudest 'eating a chicken' foley effects I've heard ever heard ever heard.

WHUP!

Sartana (played superbly by John Garko) has one of the greatest entrances on screen of all the Spaghetti protagonists. When accused of looking like a scarecrow, he utters the classic line "I am your pallbearer" before gunning down all the bandits facing him. A classic moment, with the black clad Sartana setting the scene perfectly for this Gothic tinged western.

The story itself is a very complicated affair, and one which I'm not completely sure I followed from beginning to end (I blame the wine consumption). In simple terms, the story evolves around a stagecoach robbery and murder (with the culprits themselves hijacked and massacred by Lasky - played by the ever brilliant William Berger - and his gang). Enter Sartana, in the midst of further double crossing and more double crossing. And cue bloodshed aplenty!

Sartana combines the gadgetry of Parolini's later Sabata movies, with the darkness and brutality of Django. There are classic performances from Garko and Berger together with the familiar faces of Fernando Sancho and Klaus Kinski.

The success of Sartana is clearly demonstrated by the string of sequels (and name-checks) that followed. And rightly so, the character is in equal parts cool, mysterious and deadly. Much like the film. I just wish I understood it better (time to put away the bottle, and rewind the video perhaps).

I'm a big Spaghetti Western fan and fairly tolerant of the stylistic excesses, but this film made little sense. It's not clear what is motivating Sartana, the undertaking laughs insanely, William Berger does not know how to act, etc.