If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968)

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

A so-so spaghetti western marred by some fairly inert direction by Gianfranco Parolini. Gianni Garko is Sartana as he runs head on into a town populated with double & triple crossing lowlifes. When a treasure chest of gold goes missing, all hell breaks loose. Parolini, who would go on to direct the classic SABATA a few years later, shows very little imagination here, save for a few gunfights and clever death trap set by Garko. Still, there's much to recommend...Garko is excellent and the supporting cast is very colorful: Sidney Chaplin; Klaus Kinski (billed as Kinsky); Franco Pesce; Gianni Rizzo. William Berger is Garko's chief adversary, a greedy gun for hire who'll stop at nothing for a payday. Pesce, as a very hyperactive coffin maker who seems to be channeling both Walter Brennan and the Italian comic Totò at the same time, is very funny. In the end everyone gets what they deserve! The music by Piero Piccioni is terrific.

"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.

Shrewd and lethal ace gunslinger Sartana (a fine and commanding performance by Gianni Garko) goes after the dangerous band of thieves who held up a stagecoach for a fortune in gold. Sartana engages in a deadly battle of its with the equally crafty and ruthless Lasky (splendidly played to the wicked hilt by William Berger), a total bastard who's willing to do anything necessary (including killing his own men!) to have exclusive dibs on the booty. Director Gianfranco Paulini, who also co-wrote the convoluted script with Werner Hauff and Renato Izzo, relates the complex and compelling story of greed, deceit, and treachery at a constant snappy pace, stages the plentiful thrilling shoot-outs with considerable skill and brio, maintains an appropriately tough and gritty tone throughout, and tops everything off with a nice sense of amusingly sardonic humor. Moreover, there's a marvelously grotesque rogues' gallery of no-count villains: the always terrific Fernando Sancho as wicked bandit Jose Manuel Mendoza, Sydney Chaplin as shifty banker Jeff Stewal, Gianni Rizzo as gross fat creep Alman, Heidi Fischer as the fetching, but duplicitous Evelyn, and, in a regrettably brief role, the immortal Klaus Kinski as Lasky's icy henchman Morgan. Frank Pesce delivers a delightfully spry turn as rascally old coot undertaker Dusty. The tricky narrative keeps you on your toes with all its surprising twists and turns and culminates in a tense and exciting final confrontation between Sartana and Lasky. Both Sandro Mancori's expansive widescreen cinematography and Piero Piccioni's jaunty'n'groovy score are up to speed. An enjoyable film.

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).