The last time we laid eyes on the notoriously tricksy, gadget laden Sartana, he was going through some sort of identity crisis. Not only had original Sartana actor, Gianni Garko, been temporarily replaced by George Hilton, but returning director Giuliano Carnimeo had opted to give the gunslinger’s third outing a decidedly more camp edge as our hero managed to avoid death by pulling ever more outlandish bullshit out of his ass at a moments notice – after all, Clint Eastwood never shot a man with a gun hidden in a sandwich as far as I recall.
However, with a typicaly dramatic title in place (all Sartana title kick serious amounts of ass, to be fair), Have A Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay not only brought back Garko complete with a questionable moustache, but also returned the series to a noticeably more gritter edge despite featuring playing cards used as throwing knives and a ledger containing a pop up pistol.
It’s time for Sartana to put the “fun” in funeral.
A band of merciless killers target gold hunter Joe Benson and his fellow prospectors and promptly send them up to the big gold mine in the sky before burning their cabin to the ground. However, while this band of cold-blooded bush whackers mull over a nugget of gold found at the scene, they themselves are ambushed by Sartana, the sneakiest anti-hero in the West, who quickly makes human colanders of the murderers and then decides for reasons only known to himself to investigate the killing.
Riding into the nearby town of Indian Creek, he soon ascertains that the murder was ordered by someone desperate to get their hands on Benson’s mine in order to lay claim to the nuggets of gold that undoubtedly lay within – however, his list of suspects is somewhat robust as any number of them could be guilty of ordering the crime. High on his list is Lee Tse Tung, the owner of the local gambling house but matching him for shifty schemes is local banker Ronald Hoffman who seems to love money more than Scrooge McDuck and would do anything to get his well manicured mitts on some more. However, the longer he probes, the more pieces move onto the chess board. There’s Benson’s niece, Abigail; the local sheriff; a guilty looking card dealer; the female saloon owner and the more potential guilty parties there are, there seem to be double the amount of henchmen suddenly springing up to take Sartana out of the picture.
Of course, Sartana’s no slouch and every time he plugs a potential assassin, he stylishly puts the posthumous boot in by agreeing to pay for the funeral for every goon he eradicates from Indian Creek’s criminal population. Can our hero manage to uncover the culprit while simultaneously making a shit-ton of money for himself in the bargin?
Dude, come on. This is Sartana we’re talking about here.
For a lesser known cinematic gunslinger, I have to admit, Sartana’s grown on me quite substantially; however, there was a feeling that his last, non-Garko, adventure was starting to hint that the franchise was running out of steam a little. In fact, the Sabata franchise that was out round about the same time period had fallen into the same trap by making its titular hero so utterly infallible, the films had begun to more overtly satirical and mocking rather than walking that James Bond tightrope between cool and silly. However, in something of a smart course correct, Giuliano Carnimeo returned a slightly harder edge to Have A Good Funeral… and the result was one of the most satisfying Sartanas of all.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that the movie doesn’t go to some batshit places – I mean, this is a Sartana flick after all – but in returning to the pseudo-whodunit of the second movie, I Am Sartana, Your Angel Of Death and ditching the whole overused plot of missing gold, it gives the movie a solid bedrock of story to laugh the crazier aspects of the movie from. Thus we get Garko’s inscrutible hero routinely shaking down his suspects by either outwitting them financially or avoiding a string of ambushes so ridiculous, even Wile E. Coyote would second guess them. I don’t know who thought setting up a massive log pile on the side of a dusty cliff in order to drop them on a passing Sartana would be a feasible assassination attempt (something wrong with a simple sniper, fellas?), but the fact that it must have taken a day at least to chop all the wood, transport the huge logs and set up the drop mechanism makes the fact that they drop it on the wrong person even funnier.
Despite the fact that he’s now sporting an awful, peroxide blonde, cookie duster moustache, Garko looks pretty energised to be back and even plays Sartana as less of a blank-faced enigma as before (although I’ve no idea what accent the guy dubbing his voice is going for – is there a little bit of Irish in there?) and the film gives him plenty of gadgets to fuck about with such as flinging a playing card across the room to bookmark the exact place in a closed bible like he’s fucking Bullseye from Daredevil or something.
It also gives him a wealth of more varied villains to play off. Yes, António Vilar’s plotting banker may be a rather standard Sartana arch villain, but the addition of George Wang’s Chinese gambling boss may result in some highly questionable dubbing, it also gives us the rather original sight of a Western hero trying to fend off an attack from a sword wielding martial artist which only adds to the whole 007 with six shooters vibe that the franchise was seemingly trying to constantly achieve.
While Have A Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay may not be anywhere near the iconic, Spaghetti Western bar set by the works of Sergio Leone, not only is it a great, more relaxed, example of the genre before it started to go into decline during the 70s, but I’d argue that it’s probably one of the best Sartana movies by far as the unrepentant stupidity of some of the script is made weirdly acceptable by the fact that Carnimeo treats it all with a sense of respect that the previous film was lacking. The mystery aspect, while fairly obvious (of course it’s the banker!), is actually laid out pretty cleanly and for once is fairly easy to follow when other Sartana movies would have simply let their overcomplicated plot fly right off the tracks and becoming utterly unfollowable after barely five minutes.
While Sartana is more famous for his flamboyant acts of fuckery that bamboozle his enemies, the true mind boggling instance here is that the fourth installment of an Italian Spaghetti Western franchise is actually one of the best installments to date. Yup, for all your book shootin’, card flingin’, villain trickin’, cash grabbin’ good time, Sartana and his crazy, long-ass titles is still your man.
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