Pistol for a Hundred Coffins (1968)

Peter Lee Lawrence is Jim Slade, a Jehovah’s Witness who refuses to take up a gun for the Confederate cause during the Civil War. As a result, he’s sentenced to two and a half years of hard labor in prison.

He’s paroled early when the war ends, but returns home to find that his parents have been murdered. Religious views be damned, he sets out to kill the four men responsible. He finds three in quick order; that leaves J. Texas Corbett (Piero Lulli).

Settling the score with him might not be so easy. He has a gang of gunmen doing his bidding and has been terrorizing the Galveston, Texas, area, where they’re awaiting a $200,000 infusion of cash to help farmers through the growing season.

The mayor offers Slade a lucrative sum to help protect that money. And he might get some assistance from another fast gun, Douglas (John Ireland), who shows up in a local saloon toting a Bible and claiming that he too prefers to save souls rather than sending them to hell with his six-gun.

Review:

A decent Spaghetti with a pair of famliar leads, Franco Pesce providing the comic relief as an aging undertaker and a couple of unexpected plot twists near the end.

For an ill-fitting sideshow, we have a jail full of madmen — including Eduardo Fajardo — put there because the insane asylum was destroyed in a fire.

For some reason, Douglas thinks this is cruel treatment for a sex maniac, a man who loves to chop folks up with an axe and other assorted troublemakers. So he sets one free.

Naturally, that madmen set all the others free, leading to a night of terror in Galveston.

Gloria Osuna has the lead female role of a saloon entertainer named Marjorie. Shame she’s not allowed to smile. Her role is pretty simple: A pessimistic soul looking to get out of Galveston as soon as possible. Which mean whenever the shooting dies down.

Directed by:
Umberto Lenzi

Cast:
Peter Lee Lawrence … Jim Slade
John Ireland … Douglas
Piero Lulli … J. Texas Corbett
Gloria Osuna … Marjorie
as Gloria Ocana
Franco Pesce … Old Ben
Eduardo Fajardo … Chavel, Madman
Victor Israel … Barrett
Julio Pena … Mayor
Raf Baldassarre … Verdugo
Andrea Scotti … Blacksmith
Calisto Calisti … Cassidy
Francesco Narducci … Bartender
Paola Natale … Elizabeth

Runtime: 85 min.

aka:
Una pistola per cento bare
A Gun for One Hundred Graves

Score: Angelo Francesco Lavagnino

Memorable lines:

Jim Slade: “I want a gun.”
General store owner: “A gun? What type would you like?”
Slade: “Just a gun.”
Store owner: “When you go looking for a gun, it’s best to know what you want. There are colts, Smith and Wessons, derringers. You can buy a gun just the same as you can buy an animal. But what kind? A cat? A small dog?”
Slade, losing his patience: “Any kind, mister!”

Logan, one of the killers of Slade’s parents, after being ordered to dig: “What do you plan to do with me.”
Slade: “Bury you, like a Christian.”

Corbett: “You shot one of my men this morning.”
Slade: “Well, they provoked me.”

Corbett to one of his men: “Your fool brother was always shootin’ off his mouth. Always sayin’ how fast with a gun he was. So what happens? He’s killed by an idiot who only drinks water.”

Verdugo: “What a pest-hole of a town. Even the whiskey stinks.”

Corbett to Verdugo: “Your fool brother was always shooting off his mouth. Always saying how fast with a gun he was. So what happens? He’s killed by an idiot who only drinks water.”

Trivia:

Director Umberto Lenzi got his start as a writer and film critic. He made three Spaghetti Westerns among his 60 or so films. Those include some late 1970s and early 1980s cannibal films, including “Make Them Die Slowly,” which was banned in 31 countries.