Sartana kills them All Review (Scherpschutter)

Director: Rafael Romero Marchent Cast: Gianni Garko Guglielmo Spoletini Maria Silva Chris Huerta Andrés Mejuto Carlos Bravo Carlos Romero Marchent Alvaro de Luna Cristina Iosani Raf Baldassare Music: Marcello Giombini

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1971

# The title (and all those Sartanas)

You can read the title of this movie right by reading it wrong, vice and versus. The producers wanted to have 'Sartana' in the title because they had signed Gianni Garko, the man who was Sartana (like Franco Nero was Django and Giuliano Gemma was Ringo), but Garko felt there was no Sartana character in the script (1). To satisfy all, it was decided to have a pseudo Sartana in the title: Santana: Lo irritarono … e Santana fece piazza pulita, meaning: They irritated him … and Santana made clean slate. In France, and a few other countries, Garko became Sabata, in Spain he was called Larry Santana. In the English speaking world he would be Sartana, and kill them all.

# The plot

Santana and Marcos are two buddies who have been double-crossed by their partners in crime, and therefore have a large posse on their trail. When they’re finally surrounded by the sheriff and his men in the countryside, they play cards as to know who will play the decoy, and who will get the chance to escape. Marcos wins the card play, but Santana noticed that his buddy was cheating, so it’s decided that Marcos will spend some time behind bars while Santana starts looking for the Burton brothers, who are in possession of the loot of some $ 100.000. Marcos almost immediately escapes from jail by making the deputy sheriff his new accomplice. Other queer folk attracted by the large sum of money are a femme fatale who dreams of owning a saloon (and likes to play with fire), and a family of criminal lunatics, led by a handicapped father.

# The lack of a background

With his untidy hair and leather jacket, Garko’s character is far removed from the spectral gunman dressed in black the actor will forever be identified with. Like Garko’s appearance, the movie is a patchwork of variegated elements, enjoyable most of the time, but lacking coherence, both in style and story-telling. It often parodies the genre, but it’s not really a comedy and there are quite a few violent moments. Following the picaresque tradition of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, it offers a series of vignettes with the several characters first getting themselves into trouble, then getting themselves out of trouble again (and again and again). But those picaresque stories need a ‘meaningful’ background to give some depth to the adventures of those rascals. There’s no Civil War or post-war society here, actually there’s no background at all.

# Eye candy and assorted villains

Sartana kills them all has its shortcomings, but it's nevertheless quite enjoyable and I guess most visitors of this site will want to ride along with the two amigos, as the theme song says (2). Garko isn’t at his very best here (he seems a little confused about his character), but Spoletini turns in a flamboyant performance and Silva is eye candy as the fiery Maria. The family of lunatics is absolutely wonderful: the crippled father, commanding from his wheelchair, his four deranged sons, all wearing a distinctive outfit, making them look like Long John Silver and his assorted bunch of pirates. Note that the father wears the uniform of the Confederacy, probably a reference to Joseph Cotton’s renegade officer from The Hellbenders, who also was a family father. There are more references to illustrious genre examples, the most daring (and unexpected) of all is made during the final moments, when some allusions are made on a threesome relationship à la Paint your Wagon. A reference to that movie in a spaghetti western? Well, it was a Clint Eastwood movie, and anything starring Clint was worth referring to in those days.

How to watch it? The Koch Media DVD has been out of print for quite some time now, but there are still copies floating around on the Net. I watched a fansub upped on cinemageddon. It’s a rather prestigious affair and apparently quite a few prominent spaghetti western fans were involved in the making of it. It has glorious image quality and offers English subtitles to the original Italian language track. The only problem is that the subtitles don’t match the Italian dialogue. They most probably are a translation of another language track, but nevertheless enable viewers who don’t understand Italian to watch the movie under the best possible circumstances.

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Notes:

• (1) Marco Giusti, Dizionario del Western all’Italiana

• (2) According to the Database, it is sung by Peter Boom, a Dutch actor and singer who spent most of his life in Italy. Boom was born in Bloemendaal, Holland, in 1936, but moved to Italy at the age of 19. He worked with the crème de la crème of Italian soundtrack writers, including Morricone, Nicoli, Bacalov and Giombini. As an actor he appeared in over thirty films, always in smaller roles. He had a cameo in Enzo G. Castellari’s The Inglorious Basterds. He also did a song for the first Sabata movie, but it was not included in the soundtrack (and seems to be lost), and recorded an alternative version of Espanto en el Corazon/Corri uomo corri (released on CD), sung by Tomas Milian over the film's credits. Boom also wrote two detective novels (in Italian)

External links:

• Peter Boom’s official site (Italian/English): http://digilander.libero.it/pboom/

• An Interview with Peter Boom (English): http://www.soundtrackfan.com/livescores/other/italian/italian-interview-peter-boom.htm

--By Scherpschutter