I guess if you copy something (more or less),you can and should copy from the best. So this can be seen as an homage to Leone. Although the character of Sartana seems to have gone through quite something before emerging in his first official outing. The same actor (who got his name "englified", played Sartana, based on a Santana, not the Carlos Santana musician of later fame) in most of this officials outings and in one unofficial one, which unfortunately was not in the Arrow box set I purchased.

Now if you feel that I rated this too low and you had much more fun with it, I did not mean to offend you. I quite enjoyed it too. Yet it does not hold a candle to the few Dollars movie, which in itself was a masterpiece of course, in many regards. One of them being the charisma and stoic face of Clint. Garko is good, but he also is no Clint. Motivations are "unclear" apart from everyone being after the money/gold. The bodycount stacks and the twists keep on ... twisting. Doesn't matter if it makes sense or not, if it can "surprise" the viewer.

Good set design and costume department. Even if some things may have been borrowed from other ... "venues". They do fit into this world of cowboys going rogue ...

Crooked bankers plan an insurance swindle and hire a Mexican gang to steal the bank's gold but they also pay Lasky's gang to kill the Mexicans.

Shrewd and lethal ace gunslinger Sartana (a fine and commanding performance by Gianni Garko) goes after the dangerous band of thieves who held up a stagecoach for a fortune in gold. Sartana engages in a deadly battle of its with the equally crafty and ruthless Lasky (splendidly played to the wicked hilt by William Berger),a total bastard who's willing to do anything necessary (including killing his own men!) to have exclusive dibs on the booty. Director Gianfranco Paulini, who also co-wrote the convoluted script with Werner Hauff and Renato Izzo, relates the complex and compelling story of greed, deceit, and treachery at a constant snappy pace, stages the plentiful thrilling shoot-outs with considerable skill and brio, maintains an appropriately tough and gritty tone throughout, and tops everything off with a nice sense of amusingly sardonic humor. Moreover, there's a marvelously grotesque rogues' gallery of no-count villains: the always terrific Fernando Sancho as wicked bandit Jose Manuel Mendoza, Sydney Chaplin as shifty banker Jeff Stewal, Gianni Rizzo as gross fat creep Alman, Heidi Fischer as the fetching, but duplicitous Evelyn, and, in a regrettably brief role, the immortal Klaus Kinski as Lasky's icy henchman Morgan. Frank Pesce delivers a delightfully spry turn as rascally old coot undertaker Dusty. The tricky narrative keeps you on your toes with all its surprising twists and turns and culminates in a tense and exciting final confrontation between Sartana and Lasky. Both Sandro Mancori's expansive widescreen cinematography and Piero Piccioni's jaunty'n'groovy score are up to speed. An enjoyable film.