If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death

Forget the plot that was usual, this unique genre spaghetti western certainly are their colorful characters, Sartana (Gianni Garko) portraits a soft spoken hero, overtly akin as Clint Eastwood, but highly stylized, handling a sort of cylinder tagged with cards symbols, spinning around, playing poker, winning of course, those enemies as the Mexican General Tampico, who wants for any means who everybody shall call him as real name "DonJosé Manuel Francisco Mendoza Montezuma de La Plata Perez Rodriguez, very usual on realty spanish members, what a name, what character eating the chicken with dirty hands on a few bites only, also the blue eyes Lasky (William Berger) as often a crook and a special guest Klaus Kinski as the skillful dagger man, beauty girls, without forget the funniest older undertaker, the screenwriter and friendly director Gianfranco Parolini states at bonus material that never received a penny for this picture, which he had 30% of the profits, the producer did swear that lost all his money and couldn't pay his share!!!

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First watch: 2020 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.25

Spaghetti westerns can claim some essential classics among their ranks. For a handful of exemplars, and the way that westerns have largely faded as a genre since the 70s, I think it's often overlooked that of all the spaghetti westerns ever made, not all are equal. 'If you meet Sartana... pray for your death' is enjoyable, but I think it's safe to say that it's not one of the best examples of the style. There's a decided bluntness and lack of polish that characterizes the entirety of the picture, not least of all in its editing (brusque and tactless), cinematography, sound design (rather tinny), plot development (far less than fluid and natural), acting (quite overcooked), dubbing, and direction. All the solid bones are here of a concrete narrative, and one that should be compelling in and of itself, yet as it presents to us it feels like much of the fine detail has been sandblasted away, leaving blocky rough edges as one element of the feature ill-fittingly abuts another. This isn't to say that the movie isn't clever at points, but it seems like we're mostly getting the broad strokes, and only the crudest form of the tale as we could be seeing it.

In the fundamentals this is just as suitable as most of its brethren. The production design, art direction, costume design, and filming locations all serve to build a strong look and feel to the proceedings. Action sequences in and of themselves are done well, some better than others while some instances are undercut by curt or overzealous camerawork and editing. All this is well and good, but also only goes so far in securing a picture's favor. And more to the point, again, such quality is set against the wild dearth of subtlety that often strips the plot of coherence as the story advances. I'm not entirely sure that some scenes or beats have meaningful connective threads between them, for they've been worn away by the coarseness. And what is a movie, a western especially, without a distinct, united tale to impart?

'If you meet Sartana... pray for your death' is entertaining, and fairly worthwhile on its own merits. It's also notably flawed, and considerably weaker than many of its contemporaries. Just a little bit more of a delicate hand in any regard would have gone a long way toward improving the title as a whole. Opinions vary and no doubt other folks get much more out of this than I did; I also wonder if I'm not being too kind. One way or another this is a decent way to spend 90 minutes if you come across it, but don't go out of your way by any means.

It is very obvious why Sartana created an avalanche of sequels, only second to Django. Even if it looks like yet another tale about stolen gold, Mexican bandits and switching allegiances, Sartana feels (and is) different. Of course seen back in 1968, it must have wowed European audiences with its bleak cinematography and nihilistic characters. However, 40 years (!) down the line, and it still feels as refreshingly dark and stylish as ever.

As in with most spaghettis, the plot is near incomprehensible. It has something to do about a stolen shipment of gold and a constant switching of allegiances, as thief betrays thief to get the gold. But, again as in with most spaghettis, the plot isn't the issue at all.

Sartana (1968) is a capsule of pure spaghetti western style. Everything is kept very minimal here, from the scarce dialogues, to the perennially empty town streets. Yet there's a hellish ambiance to proceedings and the nonsensical plot only adds to its psychotronic charm. I gave up trying to follow the plot after a while and just immersed myself in the surreal happenings.

Sartana himself is like a crossover between The Man with no Name (the standard by which every spag antihero is measured) and Django, a black-clad amoral anti-hero. He's not out there to catch the baddies. He's just out for money and blood. His quirky gadgets often bring to mind the other Parolini character, Sabata, but Gianni Garko's character plays on a whole other level. There is of course, the occasional comic relief, in the form of an old gravedigger, but it only confirms that Sartana is indeed a grim western. That same darkness would resurface in Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter years later, on the other side of the pond.

Overall, this is a must see for SW afficionados. If you're a fan of Corbucci's nihilistic side (Django, The Great Silence), Sartana will make you cream your pants. Dark, stylish, with a streak of Euro horror running through it, Sartana is a criminally forgotten piece of celluloid. Watch it and find out.

"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.