If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death opens with a rash of betrayals - double-crosses quickly become triple-crosses before ballooning into quadruple and quintuple-crosses. This breathless, action-packed duplicity culminates with William Berger's wild, sun-burnt gringo hand-cranking a Gatling gun at a posse of assembled turncoats - his allies only moments earlier. Co-writer-director Gianfranco Parolini, working with fellow screenwriters Theo Maria Werner and Renato Izzo, use their characters, and the society they inhabit, purely as mechanisms for communicating treachery. A typical scene within the film will work to establish an implied or explicit connection between two parties before one, or even both, quietly reveal some level of deception. All in the service of securing a hoard of gold.
Every character is running an angle, teasing out information on a luxuriously furnished set then scurrying away to plot in another, well-appointed room. All, that is, except Sartana. In contrast to a town lousy with sweating, greedy conspirators (many of which already occupy privileged positions within the settlement's ruling class, it has to be said), Gianni Garko's drifter is cool and elegantly dressed. He's an unflappable expert, loaded down with trick pistols and mocking inaction. Rather than simply manipulate desperate criminals to his own advantage, Sartana actively harasses and ridicules his quarry. Initially it seems that he just wants the gold all for himself but, as the film rolls on, Sartana's derision takes on a ghostly, supernatural quality. As well as disappearing and reappearing in ways that are not humanly possible, the cocksure cowboy also survives fatal gunshots wounds - stepping out of swirling smoke, only moments later, to judge and punish those that would murder for personal gain. As its name implies, If You Meet Sartana Pray for Death is positively biblical.
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