"Got a Light, Friend?"
Garko...without all the plot holes...

(This review was started some time ago...I'm just getting the chance to finish it up....Sorry bout that. I think this'll ultimately be a short one. Read on, there's another one beneath this one.)

So after night before last's "huh?" experience with Blood at Sundown (see yesterday's post), I decided it was time to finally watch the Spaghetti that's been sitting on my shelf for the past three months now. So with the next few minutes, let's discuss the Spaghetti Western known as:

Have a Good Funeral, Amigos!...Sartana is Paying (1970, d. Giuliano Carnimeo)

The Story: Sartana comes between a crooked banker, a Chinese gambler, and the niece of a dead man to settle accounts on a piece of land that might contain vast underground riches or merely sand.

The Review: Well, this one had a whole lot headscratching than yesterday's movie.

This is the third Sartana movie I've seen, this one being the fourth of five. The other two were the final film, Light the Fuse, Sartana is Coming! (1971) and the terrible mid-season replacement George Hilton as Sartana vehicle, It's Sartana! Sell Your Pistols and Buy Your Coffins (1970). For those of you keeping count: I still have to see the original If You Encounter Sartana, Pray for Your Death (1968, d. Gianfranco Parolini) and I Am Sartana, Your Angel of Death (1969, d. G. Carnimeo).

Now how about them Sartana titles. And yes, I am wathching them sort of bass ackwards...but nothing has led me to believe that was a mistake of any sort.

Essentially, Gianni Garko just radiates cool in a good way as Sartana just like George Hilton exudes smiley-ness in a bad way as....well, in anything essentially. (Maybe I should change this whole thing into a stop George Hilton campaign...but seeing as how these movies are all 30-40 years old, it seems a touch tardy.) Impressively, the Chinese casino owner, Lee Tse Tung, was a whole lot less offensive than I was expecting. That's not to say his character wasn't stereotypically offensive, just not as bad as it could have been. He did after all dish up all kinds of "Confucius say..." type hocky. M ost of the rest of the cast was pretty stock spaghetti (ie. the crooked banker, the crooked sheriff, etc.). But that's not all together bad.

Sartana is essentially the Spaghetti fan's Columbo...only with that archetypal avenging angel thing working for him. He always shows up in the right place at the wrong time for the bad guys. He can always sense a trap. He plays everyone against everyone else. And he's always asking those pesky questions that inevitably start getting people killed left and right.

The mystery in this one wasn't quite as strong as Light the Fuse... You can pretty well figure out who orchestrated the crime occuring here right from the get-go. I won't try to ascribe a Hitchcock-like way of showing you the villain to heighten the suspense theory simply because...well, it isn't there. Still, the fun in the story is mostly generated by watching how it all falls out, and trying to figure out when and how Sartana will solve it all (although he has that Columbo-like quality of already seeming to know everything all the time.)

The action is crisp and fun. There's some decent slight of hand in some of the gun fights. The movie maintains a fun sense of humor that borders on nodding and winking, but never goes full blown. The pace moves at a fairly brisk clip with only a few slower moments.

Overall, I'd have to say that while this isn't my favorite spaghetti, it is, nonetheless, a solid and well made example of the genre. If anything, it should be appreciated for the sense of fun and adventure that it maintains, a facet so obviously missing from so much cinema today. Finally, it provided further encouragement to track down and take a gander at the other two Sartana films.

Garko is beyond a reasonable doubt The Man.

Cheers.