Sentenza di morte

It's Kill Bill - The Western made many years before and much, much better.

In a very atmospheric opening, a ghostly man carrying lots of water follows a parched Richard Conte through the desert. Conte has lots of bullets but no water, and those bullets don't seem to finding their mark. Collapsing next to a solitary cross at the top of a dune, Conte flashes back to how he arrived there...

Conte was part of a gang of four guys who robbed and killed the brother of the man chasing him through the desert (who is either called Cash or Django). Five years have passed and Conte has set himself up as an honest rancher, so it's a bit of a downer that this Cash fellow has shown up looking to kill him. After playing a sick joke on Conte and killing him, Cash moves onto his next victim, then the next victim...then the last victim.

I have no idea who the guy playing Cash is, and he comes across as deliberately anonymous except for his milk drinking habit, but it seems to work as he goes up against four titans of Italian genre cinema. The other three are Enrico Maria Salerno, a card shark who delights in taking people's hard earned cash from them, Adolfo Celi as the borderline psychotic preacher who masks his murderous tendencies behind his sermons, and finally, the albino (!) lunatic Tomas Milian who seems to get his rocks off touching gold, and also gets his rocks off fondle blonde women's hair! I actually burst out laughing when he showed up, and yes, he does roll about in filth, screaming.

It's basically a vengeance film carved into four segments, with Cash getting his revenge in four different ways. There is the odd sidekick to take out along the way so there are a few gun battles, but don't expect reality to be making an appearance here because this is the Spaghetti Western at it's most outlandish, and it's all the better for it. The moody scenery (in the desert at the start and in the cemetery at the end are especially creepy), and strong acting from the four bad guys knock this one up a level.

I'd never heard of it until yesterday.