| Sartana | |
|---|---|
 Cover of the 2018 The Complete Sartana box set by Arrow Video | |
| Original work | If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death |
| Years | 1968 - 1970 |
| Films and television | |
| Film(s) |
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Sartana is a series of Spaghetti Western films which follows the adventures of the title character, a gunfighter and gambler who uses mechanical gadgets and seemingly supernatural powers to trick his rivals. The series features five official entries: If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968), I am Sartana, Your Angel of Death (1969), Sartana's Here… Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin, Have a Good Funeral, My Friend... Sartana Will Pay and Light the Fuse... Sartana Is Coming (all 1970). The first film was directed by Gianfranco Parolini, with the remaining four directed by Giuliano Carnimeo. Sartana is portrayed by Gianni Garko in all films in the series except for Sartana's Here… Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin, in which he was portrayed by George Hilton.
The name "Sartana" was first used for Garko's character in the film Blood at Sundown (1966), which proved very popular on its release in Italy and Germany, leading to producers to develop a new series around the Sartana character. Garko took creative control of the character, and gave him unique abilities to differentiate him from other spaghetti Western characters such as Django and the Man with No Name. If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death was a financial success; aside from its four sequels, it inspired a host of unofficial films made throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as One Damned Day at Dawn… Django Meets Sartana!, Sartana Kills Them All (both 1970) and Alleluja & Sartana are Sons... Sons of God (1972). The unofficial films bear little resemblance to the original character and occasionally do not even feature a character named Sartana, such as Sartana Kills Them All.
In Film Comment, Bert Fridlund described the financial performance of the Sartana films as "fairly successful, with an Italian box office reception well above the average for spaghetti Westerns", although they did not match the success of Parolini's rival Sabata trilogy or Enzo Barboni's Trinity duology.[1]