Go with God, Gringo (1966) (orig. Vayas con Dios, gringo) - Director: Edoardo Mulargia - 4/10.
On the one hand, Mulargia sporadically exhibits a solid sense of style with some tasteful tracking and low-angle shots as well as some atmospheric lighting in addition to snappy editing energizing the composition. On the other hand, the production evidently displays a plagiaristic streak, what with its soundtrack being almost a direct copy of Morricone’s composing style and the whole story being fashioned here so as to resemble works of higher quality, yet without the nicety of rendering consequential details along the line. In other words, the project at hand is a simple-minded imitation aimed at capturing genre’s stylistic essence minus the effort of actually producing novel plot devices and fresh ideas to juice it all up.
For want of three-dimensional characters and a meaningfully elaborated intrigue of some kind, the plot boils down to a simplistic narration about a pack of convicts breaking out of jail and then having various adventures whilst en route to Mexico, absent any real attempts at genuinely substantiating the characterization here. Glenn Saxson’s character represents the good-natured outlaw, who antagonizes gang’s other members while trying to exonerate himself and to avenge his brother’s death. As opposed to Lupo’s Arizona Colt or Tessari’s A Pistol for Ringo, whose protagonists would differentiate themselves by virtue of their self-interestedness or cynicism, the male lead here proves to be a cookie-cutter gunfighter of the unequivocally good kind, meaning his redemption arc comes out extremely perfunctory in terms of general narrative progression; all the consecutive plot points consequently hinge upon this basic, schmaltzy characterological outline, becoming an extension and a function of the premise which does not feel all that substantial to begin with and comes to be so soporifically developed as to barely register in the end.