My favorite spaghetti western character
Kami asks for this month’s Bear Blog Carnival to write about a favourite in our niche hobby, and I went for my favourite spaghetti western character. It is a genre filled with iconic characters bought to life by great actors. There is of course Clint Eastwood’s so called Man With No Name from the three Leone films. There is Django from Corbucci’s film of the same name that came so popular that a plethora of cheap knock off films included Django in the title or named characters without being in any way related to the original. We have the McGyver type weapons expert in the Sabata films, and several films with a man named Ringo - bit of the same phenomenon as with Django.
However, my personal favourite is Sartana. Five official Sartana-films were made in the span of 2 years. Gianni Garko played Sartana in four of them and four of them directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. What was clear to me from the first scene in the first film, If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, was that they wanted to establish Sartana as a mythic character. While westerns have always been filled with unnaturally fast gunslingers with a mysterious background, here it is taken a step further. There is almost a superhero aesthetic to him. Dressed in a long black coat with deep red inner linings, and he utilises various mechanical gadgets against his opponents in addition to being a fast draw. While never fully shown, Sartana sometimes embodies seemingly supernatural powers - or at least framed in the realm of impossibility.
Compared to the big spaghetti western characters like Franco Nero’s Django or Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, there is simply just more character to Sartana. Especially Eastwood made his character well known for being stoic and anonymous, Sartana is flashy, flamboyant and really just cooler. First of all, leave it to the Italians to give dashing fashionable clothing to a stylish character.
The five films are also mostly just pure stylish fun, and less interested in political allegories than some of the more serious westerns from the likes of Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Sollima. At least on the surface, because there are still traces of a grittyness where life has little value, yet Sartana insists on paying the undertaker for nice funerals and good coffins for his victims. And the final film goes pretty far into grim territory with some cruel depictions of acid torture and people stuck in open pit prisons. The general atmosphere of the series is still on the playfull crazy style, with unforgettable scenes such as Sartana driving into town playing a gigantic church organ, which does resemble Django and his coffin, but everything is taken up a notch giving it a very different style.
While the films are uneven as those things are, what stayed with me was the character of Sartana. Always well dressed, always stylish and cool. And really just full of character - a bit of a rare thing in the genre filled with stoic restrained weather beaten men.
