It seems that the Wild West was quite the crowed place when you consider how many drifting, nomadic, charismatic gunslingers seemed to roamed the land, righting wrongs while simultaneously looking to make their fortune by any shifty way necessary. If you wasn’t following the latest schemes of the Man With No Name, then there was the more gothic stylings of Django and his dozens of unofficial various or even the exaggerated, almost cartoonish competence of Sabata or the multiple teams ups of the various incarnations of the Dirty Dozen (although they don’t technically count as they aren’t a part of the Spaghetti Western movement).
However, there was one more reoccurring soul out there wandering from town to town with their feelers out for easy money or hidden stashes of stolen gold who went by the name of Sartana and appeared in a series of movies that featured some of the finest flamboyantly titles the genre had ever seen.
Let’s hope you don’t pray for death soon after you meet him…
OK, so try and pay close attention, because the sort of capers that Sartana gets up to tend to be a mite more convoluted and complex than your average Spagetti Western and I’ll try an do my best to keep up.
A cold blooded ambush upon a stagecoach triggers a frenzied search for a shipment of gold that was on board that also kicks off a near endless string of flimsy alliances and sudden double crosses that spring up at a moments notice. Take that attack on the stagecoach for example; the hapless people aboard are murdered by a Mexican gang who are working for General Mendoza who needs funds, but they all promptly bite the bullet (literally) when the scheming, greedy Lasky ambushes them with his gang, who he turns on later and massacres them with a handily placed gatling gun. However, despite all this subterfuge and shooting, it turns out that the gold isn’t where its supposed to be so the search is on to try a figure out who has the gold and where it’s being stashed. Would the sadistic knife man Morgan have a clue when he isn’t abusing pensioners for fun? How about Lasky’s partners in crime, the banker Alman and the politician Stewal, who all hope to get a third if the loot once their leg man has located the loot; or the money obsessed Eveyln who desperately will go with anyone who vmcan keep her in the life she’s accustomed to? Oh, and let’s not forget Mendoza who wants that money to fund God knows what and the snake-like Lasky who will apparently build or drop an allegiance in a hot minute if it means he’ll be the one who ends up with the riches.
The wild card in all this is Sartana, a gun totting stranger who wanders into town who figures he can play all the players and iron our this mystery once and for all – but as the location of the gold starts to get ever closer, everyone’s tolerance of their various partners starts to get worryingly thin.
With its endless amounts of double crosses and a leading man so cartoonishly enigmatic he makes Eastwood’s Man With No Name seem as stoic as Ace Ventura, it’s obvious that director Gianfranco Parolini is shamelessly cribbing from Sergio Leone’s playbook even more than he would go on to do with the even more exagerated Sabata that he made a year later. The problem with this is the movie thinks that if you want to match, or even exceed, the unpredictable nature of the likes of A Fistful Of Dollars or The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, you don’t have to worry about the quality of your twists as long as there’s fucking tons of them happening every minute. The result is something of a sandstorm of confusion for large patches of the film where you’ll likely won’t have a single clue what the hell is going on probably because the film has managed to keep track of who is actually screwing who over at any given point. Another issue with Sartana proves to come from the lead character himself who is less of a main lead, than a living, breathing plot device with corse, perpetual five o’clock shadow who literally wanders into various scenes to outwit his confounded foes. While this kind of character who remains slightly above or apart from an adventure that technically doesn’t even concern him is the norm for such movies (take Mad Max in Fury Road for example), Sartana doesn’t seem to be a character at all who has no past, no future and most importantly of all, no real personality to speak off. An argument could be made that Sartana is some sort of agent of righteousness who only arrives to fuck with the heads of evil men, either outwitting them in duels with a nifty, four barreled derringer or spooking them by playing a musical watch at opportune moments to give them the willies, but aside from his token friendship with eccentric coffin maker, Gianni Garko is decidedly lacking the charisma needed to stand out from an increasingly crowded market of iconic guns for hire.
However, just because Parolini is very much in a derivative mood, it doesn’t mean he’s incapable of turning in an enjoyable adventure that has just the right amount of quirks to barely give it its own identity. For a start, all that chaotic changing of sides means that even though Sartana’s maiden ride is tougher to follow than a sat nav with a Glaswegian accent, it also moves as fast as a ricocheting bullet, utterly disinterested in letting the audience catch up in case they have the ample time to realise that it doesn’t make that much sense. Another plus point is that the film boasts some interesting supporting cast members such as the maniacal entity known as Klaus Kinski as a murderous knife flinger and William Berger, whose sweaty, frantic chancer, Lasky, not only proves to be a more villainous prototype to the banjo playing gun slinger he later portrayed in Parolini’s Sabata, but thanks to the fact that he’d seemingly sell his own mother down the river for a buy in at a game of high stakes poker, he’s probably the most interesting character here.
Like the majority of other Spagetti Westerns, the cinematography is lush, the score is eccentric, the background actors are ugly as sin and the title is as needlessly descriptive as any other western I’ve ever seen (admit it, it’s a great fuckin’ title) and thanks to Parolini’s deft – if overexcited – hand, Sartana managed to gallop off into a franchise that had four more official entries; which isn’t bad when you consider that the title character doesn’t have much to add to the genre aside from some nifty gadgets to get him out of the many scrapes the movie puts him in.
However, while there’s a feeling that Parolini may have stolen a bunch of his own ideas to put into the vastly more strange Sabata (a duplicitous William Berger, James Bondian gadgets, absurdly infallible hero), there’s still enough grit, blood and sweat here to fulfill the needs of any avid Western fan that prefers a dollop of pasta and an awesomely lurid title to go with their mysterious heroes.
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