If You Meet Sartana... Pray for Your Death (1968)

Crooked bankers plan an insurance swindle and hire a Mexican gang to steal the bank's gold but they also pay Lasky's gang to kill the Mexicans.

Director:

Gianfranco Parolini (as Frank Kramer)

Writers:

Luigi De Santis (story), Fabio Piccioni (story)

Stars:

Gianni Garko, William Berger, Sydney Chaplin

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:
Gianni Garko	...	Sartana (as John Garko)
William Berger	...	Lasky
Sydney Chaplin	...	Jeff Stewal (as Sidney Chaplin)
Gianni Rizzo	...	Alman
Fernando Sancho	...	Jose Manuel Mendoza
Klaus Kinski	...	Morgan (as Klaus Kinsky)
Andrea Scotti	...	Perdido (as Andrew Scott)
Carlo Tamberlani	...	Reverend Logan
Franco Pesce	...	Dusty
Heidi Fischer	...	Evelyn
Gianfranco Parolini	...	Gambler (as J. Francis Littlewords)
Maria Pia Conte	...	Jane
Sabine Sun	...	Girl at the saloon
Sergio Jossa	...	(as Serge Jossa)
Antonietta Fiorito

Storyline

After a stagecoach is robbed and the passengers murdered, a long and tangled series of surprise attacks a murderous double-crosses leaves the coach's strongbox in the hands of the killer Lasky. It is up to the legendary hero Sartana to track down the missing money and determine just who is ultimately behind the grisly robberies and killings.

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Plot Keywords:

grindhouse film | mercilessness | surprise | money | stagecoach | 

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Taglines:

The gunman with the deadliest arsenal in the West

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Genres:

Western

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Certificate:

Not Rated

Details

Country:

Italy West Germany

Language:

Italian English

Release Date:

14 August 1968 (Italy)

Also Known As:

Gunfighters Die Harder

Filming Locations:

Manziana, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Company Credits

Production Co:

Paris Etolie Films,Parnass Film

Technical Specs

Runtime:

95 min

Sound Mix:

Mono

Color:

Color (Telecolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Did You Know?

Trivia

Italian censorship visa # 52140 delivered on 13-8-1968.

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Goofs

At the end of the film, large clouds of dust and hay billow in the street, yet the leaves on the tree in the foreground are perfectly still. The dust and hay are obviously being blown by large fans off-camera.

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Quotes

El moreno: You look just like a scarecrow.
Sartana: I am your pallbearer.

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Connections

Featured in Denn sie kennen kein Erbarmen - Der Italowestern (2006)

User Reviews

An Insult to the Spaghetti Western Genre.

"If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death" (1968), directed by Gianfranco Parolini and starring Gianni Garko, William Berger Fernando Sancho, Sidney Chaplin(!) and Klaus Kinski phoning in a cameo role, has only one great thing going for it, and that's its ridiculously over the top title. The rest is a banal Spaghetti Western that has no tension and no direction.

The script, such as it is, has a lot of incident and detail, none of which is interesting, as it is completely convoluted and very hard to care what happens to whom. Still, the plot is something like this: Sartana (Garko) gets involved with an insurance swindle run by several dignitaries, who hire a Mexican gang to steal a strong-box, and an American gang, led by Lasky (Berger), to kill the Mexicans.

It takes a very long time, too long, to find all this out, and by that point, I ceased to care. Berger is a good actor, one that fits very well into the greed-fill world of Spaghetti's, but isn't given anything interesting to do and is wasted completely. Kinski obviously was doing his role for the money, which is a shame, as his is, career wise the best actor in the film. Garko has a good opening line ("I am your pallbearer."), but not much else, and doesn't have the same magnetic presence as Clint Eastwood or Lee Van Cleef.

The director made "Sartana" and other "Circus" Westerns like this. They're called "Circus" Westerns because there is so much jumping around and choreographed back-flips that you might be watching a kung-fu movie and not a Spaghetti. The sets here aren't so much grand as big, to accommodate all the acrobatics; it has a hefty budget, but the desert scenes are shot in some quarry. Why? I suspect because Parolini was more interest in making an action film that just happened to be set in the West than creating a Western. These types of Spaghetti's were certainly very popular in their day, and they gave a lifeline to an ailing genre a few years later. I just wish the lifeline had been better. Maybe saying this movie is an insult to the genre is too strong, but when you see progressive and transcendent Spaghetti Westerns like "Black Jack" and "Once Upon a Time in the West" that were made in the same year, you realise how lazy this film is.