Sartana’s Here… Trade Your Pistol For A Coffin (1970) – Review

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By greigzilla

January 15, 2025

During his second movie, the extravagantly titled I Am Sartana, Your Angel Of Death, the titular gunslinger enigmatically announced that “Anyone could be Sartana”; but in an irony worthy of the Spaghetti Western itself, this proved to be strangely prophetic when, in his third outing, lead character found himself being played by a completely different actor.

Yup, for a sole entry in the Sartana saga, Gianni Garko found himself temporarily replaced by George Hilton (no relation to Paris) but while the cult franchise found itself with a new face, you could rest assured that the titles continued to be as absurdly badass than ever; hell, they’re practically bordering on entire paragraphs at this point. But before I get too carried away coming up with fake ones (“Sartana Just Arrived… Quick, Look Busy” or “Beware! Sartanas In Rear View Mirrors Can Look Closer Than They Appear”), let’s get down to the business of slinging some guns.

We rejoin a slightly different looking Sartana as he lurks on a trail awaiting the arrival of a transportation of gold, but for once he’s not looking to pull off some grand scheme to steal it. No, rather he’s waiting to shoot a man riding shotgun on the wagon as he’s actually a wanted felon with a healthy bounty on his head; but proving that weird shenanigans still to the enigmatic gunslinger like shit to a blanket, he soon finds himself embroiled in yet another conspiracy with gold at its center. While Sartana watches, the transport is attacked by a gang of Mexican bandidos led by the ferocious Mantas and everyone is killed, but instead of making off with the gold, the gang disperse, leaving dynamite in their wake to destroy everything. However, after putting out the fuse with some textbook sharpshooting, Sartana discovers that there is no gold and the lock boxes are only filled with sand.

Smelling a conspiracy with a payday at the end, Sartana disguises himself as a peasant and infiltrates the gang to not only discover what is going on, but quickly accepts a side mission to help Mantas’ abused wife and child escape to safety and after shooting a few of his goons for good measure, he discovers that the whole ambush was a smokescreen to hide the fact that the unscrupulous owner of a nearby mine has organized the ruse in order to keep most of the gold for himself.

Taking from the Man With No Name playbook, Sartana soon is playing off Spencer and the Mexicans against each other in order to eventually steal the already stolen gold, but matters get even more complicated when Trixie, the owner of an impoverished saloon, gets involved. However, the biggest threat to Sartana’s plan (not to mention his health) is the arrival of parasol carrying dandy, Sabbath, a rival of our anti-hero who just may be faster on the draw than he is…

Curiously for a film with such a weighty title, Sartana’s Here… Trade Your Pistol For A Coffin carries around a few confusing alternate monikers thanks to alternate dubs that prove to be rather interesting. But while the first replacement title, A Fistful Of Lead, is obviously shamelessly riffing on Sergio Leone (why not just go the whole hog and call it The Hero, The Villain And The Aesthetically Challenged), the really confounding version is a German one that seems to palm it off as a Django/Sabata movie. Exactly why you would take a movie that’s already part of an established series and then suddenly link it with two others I have no idea (and I’m not planning on going down that rabbit hole anytime soon, either), but in many versions, Charles Southwood’s character switches from Sabbath to Sabata and I guess we’re just all going to have to deal with it.

The actual movie on the other hand is actually a fairly straightforward Sartana adventure filled with the usual hunt-the-gold plot that requires a metric ton of double crosses and farfetched twists to get it through to the end. Once again, as all the characters get in a confounded muddle about who can trust who and where the gold is, Sartana simply walks through the engineered chaos like the human cheat code that he is.

So once again, returning director Giuliano Carnimeo stages a bunch of sequences where our hero effortlessly outwits everyone with a hundred foot radius that sees Sartana obsessively hide his gun in things so he can shoot his unsuspecting foes through them (loaves of bread, a boot, a hanging holster) or pull off laughable trick shots like flinging a dagger at the trigger of a well discarded rifle to shoot a dude. However, at this point in the franchise that Sartana’s true superpower is less in having omnipotent skills a preparation more like being smart enough to pick complete morons for enemies. George Hilton does a fine job of slipping into Gianni Garko’s boots; although one could argue that Garko played Sartana so enigmatic, Leslie Nielsen could probably do a better than average job of filling in if needs be. Elsewhere, Charles Southwood’s Sabbath/Sabata is given a gimmick that’s as frilly as the little white parasol he carries around with him everywhere that’s either supposed to be a distraction or an effete lifestyle choice, but either way he’s every bit of a crack shot than his rival and we even get a classic, femme fatal bar owner thanks to a flame haired Erika Blanc.

Of course, the real stars here are the endless quirks that have absolutely nothing to do with the actual story but instead give the style of the flick a sense of character itself. There is absolutely no reason for Sartana to be so obsessed with hard boiled eggs any more than Sabbath chooses to spend his down time reading the poetry, but it adds eccentric layers to personas that don’t actually exist other than all the fancy shooting. Everyone here is so in love with their own prowess with a gun, they would probably shoot a remote control to turn a TV on if they had existed yet and I’m wondering how cheap ammunition must have been if Mantas can afford to shoot the individual petals of a flower when mulling over who is a faster shot. Of course, it’s all part of the game and in this world of pinpoint accuracy and triple crosses, the only thing more inevitable than Sartana’s ultimate victory is that you’ll barely be able to follow how the fuck he got there.

However, while the previous film complicated matters by having Sarbata fingered for a crime he didn’t commit, Sartana’s Here… Trade Your Pistol For A Coffin keeps things – well, I don’t want to say simple, but certainly more straightforward and the whole plot of missing gold is getting incredibly old now too – especially considering that the Sabata series pretty much did the exact same thing despite being camper than Sabbath’s parasol.

Still plenty of fun and absolutely jam packed full of exagerated incident that’s will either make you cheer, scoff, or some throat wracking mixture of both, this third outing of the West’s trickiest trickster is nevertheless starting to feel a little samey. However, if you’ve never seen a Sartana movie before (or a Sabata one too for that matter) its eccentricities should prove that the film is as fun as the title, but nowhere near as unwieldy.