Have a Good Funeral, My Friends! Sartana is Paying!

Our final Spagetti Western drawing for this week is a quiet moment out on the porch with Sartana, one of Euro-cinema's gunslinging legends.  The character originated with and was played four out of five times in the official canon by the great Gianni Garko (and once by smiling George Hilton...who's still not my favorite, but for whom my opinion has softened over time).  While he started out as a more standard hero, Sartana soon became a seemingly omniscient angel of vengeance as the films rolled out, and his arsenal of bizarre weaponry developed with him. (Some genre critics claim similarity to Bond, but I saw it more like the makeshift weaponry of the Lone Wolf and Cub series.)  Naturally, like Django, Sartana was also featured in a host of knock-offs and the usual character dub-jobs (ie. since all Spaghettis were shot without sound, when they dubbed in the voice, they'd just call the lead "Django" or "Sartana" whether they had any similarity to Nero or Garko or not).  If you can track them down, the series is an awfully good time...though don't save George's lone outing for last...stick with Garko.

The Many B-List Sartanas...

Many spaghetti westerns had their titles and dialogue re-dubbed to turn their heroes into so many Djangos and Sartanas. This quickie was from a screen-grab I made from the '71 entry Django Defies Sartana, which was perhaps the weakest title of the knock-offs though a slightly better movie than many of them. There's simply no beating One Damned Day at Dawn...Django meets Sartana for title umph. Much like there's no beating Gianni Garko, the original and best Sartana. Perhaps I should be drawing him instead...

...Pray for Your Death."

Another drawing derived from the first Sartana film, If You Meet Sartant, Pray for Your Death (1968. d. Gianfranco Parolini). This time it's of one of my favorite Euro character actors, William Berger. If you've ever seen a photo of Berger back in his prime, he would've had, in my mind, the perfect look for Jonah Hex. Oddly enough, the original Weird Western Tales of Hex had a far more spaghetti feel to them compared to the other western comics of the time. Anyhow, this was the result of having too much time on my hand over a vacation day...

"If you meet Sartana..."

Today's quickie was brought to you by the Italian genre cinema industry of the 60's and 70's. Gianni Garko starred as the James Bond of gun slingers in a series of films dealing with the enigmatic Sartana. Maybe second only to Django in knock-offs, this drawing is a knock-off from the original film. Or as Jason properly called it, "that's a bunch of lines."