If you meet Sartana, pray for your Death Review

From The Spaghetti Western Database

< Se incontri Sartana prega per la tua morte

1968

Dir: Gianfranco Parolini

Made on a shoestring, this became one of the most lucrative and influential ventures in the history of the spaghetti western. It pushed the industry towards a more tongue in-cheek-approach of the genre (soon degenerating into parody and slapstick), gave us one of modern cinema’s most charismatic (and enigmatic) anti-heroes, the black clad gentleman killer Sartana, and multiplied the salary of its star by a factor of ten: Garko was signed for 2 million Lire for this movie, but was soon able to ask 20 million for the same part in the sequels. Don’t get too excited, this was still only $ 200,000. In Italy, in those days, nearly everybody was a millionaire.

The origins of this movie have much been discussed. Producer Addobbati has always sustained that he got the idea for both movie and the Sartana character when he saw Alberto Cardone’s Mille dollari sul nero, in which Garko played a villain called El Sartana. But Fabio Piccioni, one of the scriptwriters, claims that the name was not taken from that movie, but chosen by a group of men who had written and discussed the script over a few glasses of wine in a bar on the famous Roman square Piazza de Popolo. According to him, Sartana is a word from the dialect of the Abruzzi region, North-east of Rome, meaning frying-pan (1). One of the writers was Guido Zurli, a jack-of-all-trades of the industry, who was first appointed as director, but later fell out with Addobbati. According to Piccioni it was Zurli who brought in Gianni Garko, not Parolini, who was contracted only relatively late in the process. This could explain the near-lack of acrobatic action scenes, one of the main characteristics of Parolini’s style. Garko rolls over a few times while shooting his opponents, but it’s all rather tame compared to the circus-acts of the men from the flying trapeze of some of Parolini’s other movies.

The story, is more or less as follows: several dignitaries, among them the bank director, organize an insurance swindle by hiring a Mexican gang, led by Tampico, to steal a strong-box, an American gang, led by Lasky, to kill the Mexicans, and Lasky to kill all his men (and come back alone). Or maybe Lasky wasn’t hired to do that, but just did it and obtained a fair price for it. Anyway, to make things even more complicated, the strong-box is filled with rocks when opened by Lasky, and there’s also a mysterious stranger, called Sartana, who starts putting his nose into everything. Basically the script is a mix of the premises of A Fistful of Dollars (the stranger intervening in a conflict between gangs) and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (the quest for a hidden treasure). Only in this case there a not just two warring factions, but a multitude of them, almost as much as there are characters, complicating the story with an endless series of double-crosses and changing alliances. I know some people have watched the film several times in order to unravel the inextricable plot, but I guess all interpretations will leave some loose ends …

In the first draughts, Sartana apparently was a more Zorro-like character, but he was further developed by both Garko and Parolini. They soon agreed it was wiser not to give anything away about Sartana’s background, and let the audience guess, like his opponents, who and what he was, a bounty hunter, an insurance agent, or even a ghost. Parolini, who liked the Bond movies, came up with the idea of the ultra-cool props like the four-barrel derringer with the playing-cards cylinder. Another source of inspiration, was the cartoon Mandrake the Magician, hence the cloak and his mysterious appearances. With the influence of 007 in mind, it’s remarkable that Sartana is not presented as a womanizer. Actually, this aspect is attributed to two other characters, corrupt politician Stewall (Sidney Chaplin), and slimy heavy Lasky (Berger), while Sartana is presented as a seemingly a-sexual creature, only interested in money and playing games.

The film was very successful, even more so abroad (especially in Germany, Eastern Europe and Japan) than at home, and spawned four sequels. Like Zurli, Parolini soon fell out with Addobbati, and the sequels were directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. Garko appeared in three of them, but in-between he was once replaced by George Hilton. Parolini would start his own ‘Sartana franchise’ with the Sabata movies, while Garko played characters like Cemetery (who bears some resemblance to Sartana), Santana (who bears no relation to Sartana) and Holy Ghost (who seems more a travesty of Sartana). Some think Carnimeo’s Halelujah movies (with Hilton) are an even more light-hearted continuation of the Sartana venture, others think only the four movies with Garko count as genuine Sartanas. We all have our ideas about the series, and we all have a personal favourite.

The first Sartana is ferociously violent, and even though the violence is mitigated by the tongue-in-cheek approach, it lacks the light-hearted tone of the Carnimeo sequels. It also lacks their better production values. It was entirely shot in Lazio area around Rome; for the hacienda of Mexican villain Tampico, a former villa of Mussolini was used (in those days it was uninhabited, later it was squatted by junkies, today it’s a museum). The location work is all but imaginative. The film has a cheap, occasionally ugly look. But the action scenes and the actors make up for that. Berger has a good time as the womanizing (but secretely homosexual?) Lasky, a slimy heavy if there ever was one, and Sancho has the time of his life as (and I hope I get this right!) José Manuel Francisco Mendoza Montezuma de la Plata Carezza Rodriguez, generally known as Tampico. But it is, of course, in the first place Garko’s movie. His laconic way to counter tasteless remarks about his appearance with a quick and witty repartee – like the legendry “I’m your pallbearer" - even inspired Sergio Leone to invent a special word for it in Italian: a parolinata (a contraction of parolata, a quick word, and the director’s name, Parolini). Still Leone had his doubts about the movie. He had heard how people corrupted its title to 'Se incontri Sartana, digli che è un stronzo' (If you meet Sartana, tell him he’s an asshole), and to him this was a sign that the glory days of the genre were over.

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