SARTANA WEEK: Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay (1970)

Deadly playing cards. A Confucius quoting casino owner. And every man and woman out for themselves. Yep, it’s time for another Sartana movie.

Sartana (the returning Gianni Garko) sees several gold prospectors get killed, then kills their killers. Soon, he meets Abigail Benson (Daniela Giordano, Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key), who has paperwork claiming she owns a parcel of land. Everyone tries to get her to sell the land — which is said to be worthless — and she even gets kidnapped by Hoffman, an evil banker. But, of course, this being a Sartana movie, nothing is as it seems.

The second Sartana film to be directed by Giuliano Carnimeo (The Case of the Bloody Iris), filled with plenty of action and great lines, like when Sartana tells a gang of men that he will “pray for them before he sends them to hell.” Or when he informs a gunman that “You don’t want to kill me, because I don’t allow myself to get killed.”

There are some sillier sequences, but Sartana has not become fully camp. That would come soon enough. This is closer to a cowboy procedural drama and a pretty interesting one at that.