God Will Forgive My Pistol / Dio perdoni la mia pistola (Mario Gariazzo, Leopoldo Savona, 1969)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2025 thread:

@Mickey13

The movie basically boils down to the detective being tasked with clarifying the circumstances behind the death of a certain land owner whose property was later arrogated by his neighbor. Long story short, it is a project which was kicked off and terminated by Leopoldo Savona in 1966 and then in 1969, was finished off by Mario Gariazzo, who availed himself of some additional footage so as to patch this mess together. Production’s primary issue consists in that its storyline feels extremely underdeveloped and realistically could amount to about 50 minutes worth of running time at best, yet it is stretched out here to almost an hour and a half with Gariazzo padding out Savona’s leftovers with putatively amusing buffoonery so as to achieve full-feature length. The first half an hour comes out after a fashion with Preston’s character mindfully gleaning information, generally going through the motions, yet in a largely digestible fashion. Nonetheless, following the first half, the flick prolongs film’s duration way beyond its expiry time, ceaselessly protracting the trite story by means of the repetitious cat-and-mouse game between the villain and the protagonist, who resorts to employing chicanery in the form of disguise and concealed weapons in order to confuse or eliminate his adversaries. Needless to say, not only does the final outcome feel disjointed by reason of having been helmed by two directors on two different occasions, but also most situations in it simply verge on the absurd, sporadically appearing outright desultory. Other than those thousands of fans of spaghetti western composites, who crave for yet another choice morsel, few viewers will be able to get their kicks from this arrantly picayune dross.