Fistful of Lead (1970)

Cast

• George Hilton
• Charles Southwood
• Erika Blanc
• Nello Pazzafini

Inventory

• Hard boiled eggs
• A pepperpot pistol
• Whiskey checkers
• Trick #1
• An ex-rooster
• A parasol
• A well-armed horse

Summary

Our hero, the bounty hunter Sartana, is enjoying a picnic lunch and watching his prey cross the prairie, when they are ambushed by a group of Mexicans popping up out of the ground. They kill all of the wanted men and then flee after tossing a lit bundle of dynamite into the wagon. Sartana throws his canteen down from the hilltop where he is dining and, with a single shot, puts a bullet into it, which douses the fuse. Investigating the wagon, he discovers that it is loaded with lockboxes filled with moneybags, which in turn are filled with dirt. Shades of The Road Warrior.

At this point, I wish to digress. If the real history of the West had been anything like the movie version, the bandit would have gone the way of the buffalo or passenger pigeon, given the number of bounty hunters that were indiscriminately shooting them. Our time should be a crime-free era, with banditry either extinct or dwelling in protected wildlife parks. Clearly one-third of the population west of the Mississippi served as bounty hunters, with the rest evenly distributed between outlaws and townspeople. Had I been governor, I would have mandated that civilians wear blaze orange vests to minimize the number accidentally plugged by undisciplined bounty hunters.

To return to this movie, we find Sartana, with a somewhat different look, still with a nasty habit of offending people. This time around, most of the people he offends don't have much time to nurse a grudge before he ventilates them.

The plot involves shipments of gold that keep getting stolen, or do they? There are double, triple, and quadruple crosses until it's impossible to guess who has what and who plans to take it. And then, when a gunfighter named Sabbath who reads Shakespeare's sonnets shows up, things get really confusing.

As bad as Fistful of Lead is as a title, it beats the original English title, I Am Sartana, Trade Your Guns for a Coffin. That, I'm afraid to say, is the translation of the Italian, C'è Sartana... vendi la pistola e comprati la bara.

Dialogue

"Damn this gringo, he killed seven of us. And my woman got away. He fooled Mantas. He's one clever hombre. Si, this gringo, he thinks with his head."

Story

Well, it's all stolen from something or another, but at least the writers put the pieces together in a new and interesting manner. On the whole, about as good as it gets for one of these.

Music

The soundtrack benefits greatly from a lack of a theme song. The background music has a surf guitar meets men's choir vibe going that works pretty well all around.

Acting

George Hilton, who was originally from Uruguay, does a more than acceptable job as a low-rent Clint Eastwood. This would be his only time playing Sartana. Charles Southwood, who plays Sabbath, is a good-looking SoCal actor who spent a few years bouncing around the European movie circuit before fading away. The supporting cast was surprisingly good, especially Nello Pazzafini, who played Mantas, and who appears to have been in in half of the movies and television shows filmed in Italy from 1959 through 1989.