As Frontierado fast approaches – Friday, August 7th this year – Balladeer’s Blog is here with another seasonal post. The Frontierado holiday is about the myth of the old west, not the grinding reality.
SARTANA: For the record, the Sartana movies starring Gianni Garko as the gambler-gunslinger are my favorites. His personality is a bit lighter than that of my top favorite Spaghetti Western gunslinger – Franco Nero in the original 1960s Django and its only official sequel, Django Strikes Again.
In addition, Sartana’s films generally stay away from negative emotions like the original Django carried around with him. Sartana’s world is filled mostly with gunmen as cold-blooded and professional as himself. They deserve to be killed and Sartana recognizes that he deserves it, too, it’s just that he proves harder to kill than his enemies ever do.
The Sartana movies start out pretty grounded (for Spaghetti Westerns) but as the franchise goes along the installments grow closer to Robert Conrad’s Wild, Wild West series and our hero’s trick guns almost equal James Bond’s gadgets. Sartana himself stops just short of being a swashbuckler as he boldly tweaks the villains with more and more audacity.
In this post I will first review the movies in which Gianni Garko played this unusual hero, then George Hilton’s “official” Sartana sequel, then touch on a few of the oddities. Like Django, Sartana inspired many, many “unofficial” sequels – several of which bear the name of the character in the title but not in the actual movie.
IF YOU MEET SARTANA … PRAY FOR YOUR DEATH (1968) – Sartana shadows a gold shipment being handled by stagecoach across the desert in one of the most distinctive Spaghetti Western entrances this side of Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West. From there, the double-crosses fly like shrapnel among the main characters.
Lasky (William Berger) and his outlaw gang ultimately succeed in robbing the shipment, but our snuff-sniffing villain slaughters his gang members when betrayal seems to be in the air. The only one he lets live is his buddy Morgan (THE Klaus Kinski) and the pair decide to try adding to their haul by blackmailing the banker and other supposedly “respectable” citizens who wanted the gold stolen. Continue reading
BLINDMAN (1971) – Richard Starkey aka Ringo Starr turns 86 years old today. In his younger years he was affiliated with some musical group, but REAL Ringo fans know him as a Master Thespian who appeared in plenty of memorable movies. 
Balladeer’s Blog takes a look at some neglected westerns. And when it comes to neglected it’s tough to top the tiny sub-genre of what is already a sub-genre: Spaghetti Westerns. I’m talking about Llama Westerns, the microscopic fraction of Italo-Westerns that deals with gunslingers in Peru shooting it out over Inca treasure instead of the usual gold or revenge. 
GARTER COLT (1968) – Previously, I reviewed the Spaghetti Western 
And naturally the low-cut outfits worn by Lulu and supporting character Rosy (Marisa Solinas) allow for additional alluring shots. 
Our story is set in 1867 as Mexican rebels are on the verge of overthrowing and executing Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian dictator imposed on them by Napoleon the Third while America was too busy with its Civil War to be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. Other Spaghetti Westerns, like 
THE BELLE STARR STORY (1968) – (Original title Il Mio Corpo per un Poker) This movie was directed by Lina Wertmuller, making it the only Spaghetti Western directed by a woman. It has nothing to do with the real Belle Starr, but for name recognition you can’t beat that title!
With Frontierado rapidly approaching on August 5th – or for those of us who kick things off the night before – August 4th – let’s take a look at some of the most obscure but laughably weird Italian westerns. And what better way to start that list than with one of the countless Spaghetti Westerns with phony Django titles? 
1. DJANGO KILL (1967) – Originally titled If You Live, Shoot!, this was one of the many Eurowesterns to be re-released to theaters years later as a phony Django movie just so it could clean up on the guaranteed cash cow of the Django name. 
When our hero’s home hamlet of Jaspen, Arizona becomes a Boom Town after copper is discovered, the place turns into a proverbial web of sin and vale of tears. Michael Culligan (Louis Hayward), the greedy town boss, builds an empire for himself out of crime and greed as the copper rush continues. 
GET MEAN (1975)- One of the weirdest Spaghetti Westerns ever made and that’s saying something! Get Mean stars Tony Anthony and was also released under the title The Stranger Gets Mean, making it the final movie in Anthony’s series of Italo-Westerns as the enigmatic gunslinger known only as the Stranger. 
DJANGO: AN OPERA – Here at Balladeer’s Blog I love sharing my enthusiasms. My blog posts where I provide contemporary slants to Ancient Greek Comedies to make them more accessible have been big hits over the years, so now I’m trying it with operas. A little while back I wrote about how Philip Wylie’s science fiction novel Gladiator could be done as an opera. This time I’m addressing the 1966 original version of the Spaghetti Western titled Django. 
LANGUAGE: Spanish. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that most of my fellow English-speakers find English-language operas to be silly. The prosaic nature of the forced rhymes in a language we are well-versed in does seem to rob opera of its mystique and its grandeur. 
Scene One: The opera would open with a stage version of one of the most iconic visuals from the 1966 film. Our title character, DJANGO, clad in his long blue jacket with his well-worn Union Army uniform underneath it, slowly, wearily drags a coffin behind him as he walks along singing his mournful song. He pulls the coffin via a rope slung across one shoulder. 
COMIN’ AT YA! (1981) – Directed by Ferdinando Baldi, Comin’ At Ya! is often credited with starting the pointless and bizarre 1980s revival of 1950s-style 3D movies. The film stars Tony Anthony, famous to us Spaghetti Western fans for the movie series in which he played a gunslinger called the Stranger. He appeared in others, as well, some reasonably good and others, like Blindman, so bad as to be virtually unwatchable. 
Our main character, Triple H, ain’t havin’ it and sets out to recover his new bride and set free the other unfortunate women seized by the Thompson Gang. Needless to say he’ll also kill every member of the gang as well as some of the snobbish, upper-class Mexican aristos – male and female – who buy the ladies at an elegantly-appointed mansion/ former convent now used for slave auctions. 
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