Sartana's Here... Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin

Sartana's Here.. Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin starts well enough, the first act detailing the gunslinger's efforts to free a mother and her child from the grip of an overbearing bandit. This vignette, knowingly replaying beats from A Fistful of Dollars (and Yojimbo before that), represents a simplicity of purpose and morality largely absent in this series' sequels. Sartana is briefly allowed to torment and tighten the noose, again a phantom that operates slightly out of step with reality. Original Sartana actor Gianni Garko is replaced by George Hilton for this instalment, the new actor bringing an ironic, detached energy to the incessant betrayals. Hilton's face is gaunt and sunburnt, closer to a Carlos Ezquerra drawing of Walton Goggins than Garko's Eastwood by way of Iain Glen.

This substitution helps massage the decision to move the series away from an Old Testament haunting to conniving, invincible nonsense; Hilton much more able to traverse the farcical twists (including several clashes with the competitor brand that poached If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death director, Gianfranco Parolini) that Trade Your Pistol throws his way. Although Tito Carpi's leisurely screenplay lets him down, director Giuliano Carnimeo again proves himself adept at manufacturing up stress situations. Conspiring with editor Ornella Micheli and cinematographer Stelvio Massi, Carnimeo uses the brief moments where Sartana isn't present to press in on the vulnerable. Nosing into their hopeless scuffles with gold rush heavies - the camera rocking nervously in the face of advancing cruelty.