An obscure and unknown oddity among spaghetti westerns in that The Price of Death a.k.a. Il venditore di morte is, in its heart, a detective film dressed up as a mildly dirty spaghetti western — and by "mildly dirty" we mean that most characters, with the possible exception of the eternally brawling miners of a waterfront mine, are pretty well-groomed and cleanly clothed. Including Klaus Kinski (18 Oct 1926 – 23 Nov 1991), the headlining star, who plays a typically narcissistic asshole named Chester Conway and spends roughly 90% of his on-screen time in a jail cell: though he might look lightly rough and tumble and mildly grimy with his slightly long hair and earth-colored clothing, his character never indicates any true need of a shave or shower. Visually and personality-wise, however, he is the opposite of the film's true lead and hero, the genre stalwart Gianni Garko* as Silver — or, as he likes to be called, "Mr. Silver" — a clean, suave and perfectly groomed and handsome manly man who, though a perfect shot, comes across as less a gun for hire than as a poor man's Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade in spiffy western clothing.
* Of Lamberto Bava's Body Puzzle (1992 / trailer) & Devil Fish (1984 / trailer), Luigi Cozzi's Hercules (1983 / trailer), Alfonso Brescia's Star Odyssey (1979 / trailer), the psychotronic nudie-cutie Dracula Blows His Cool (1979 / trailer), Lucio Fulci's The Psychic (1977 / trailer), Enzo G. Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear (1971 / trailer), Night of the Devils (1972 / trailer), the psychotronic sword-and-sandal film Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (1961 / full movie), and countless spaghetti westerns, including the first non-official Sartana film, Blood at Sundown (1966 / trailer); the first official Sartana film, If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968 / trailer); diverse Sartana sequels and imitations; the unofficial Django flick $10,000 Blood Money (1967 / trailer) and a lot more fun stuff.
The Price of Death opens, pre-credits, with a rather uncomfortable murder of a young Mexican woman named Carmen (Franca De Stratis [23 Apr 1939 – 9 Mar 2021]). Alone at home and preparing dinner for her parents, she inadvertently lets in her murderer and we, the viewer, in good old-fashioned horror- and porn-film fashion, witness the event from a point-of-view perspective as we (i.e., the murderer) kill her for no apparent reason — as she isn't even raped, it would seem the kicks were gotten in the act itself. It is an uncomfortable scene that makes one expect a violent revenge film typical of the Italo genre, but The Price of Death is anything but. Indeed, though Carmen's elderly and impoverished parents are later shown attempting to hire Mr. Silver (Garko) to find and kill her murderer, they are unable to meet his $1000 minimum: he turns them down, amidst the luxury of his sumptuous villa adorned with a duet of sexy senoritas, with the flippant observation that revenge won't bring their daughter back. Leaving in tears, they accidentally leave behind the only clue to the killer's identity, a distinctive medallion apparently ripped from a belt or gun holster...
After the murder and the rather out-of-place, almost played for laughs scenes at Mr. Silver's villa, the movie moves onward to an apparently botched robbery of a bordello saloon at a nearby town run by the sovereign and attractive Polly (Mimma Biscardi, credited as "Gely Genka", of The Return of the Exorcist [1975 / trailer] and Seven Men and One Brain [1968 / full movie]). The shootout results in the deaths of two of the robbers as well as some innocents, and the townspeople use the event as an expeditious manner to get rid of the local troublemaker, Chester (Kinski): they convict him to die by hanging for the crimes during what is basically a laughable and fixed trial.
Almost everyone in the town seems to have a hidden agenda, and Polly is no different: although she deeply hates Chester, her ex-boyfriend, she pays his lawyer Jeff Plummer (Franco Abbina) to prove Chester innocent — which lays the groundwork for Mr. Silver's arrival in town. And as he pursues his investigation, he brings a virtual red harvest with him: in their desperation to keep the investigation from being successful, the real killer, obviously too stupid to realize that the best way to stop the investigation would be to kill Mr. Silver, instead starts killing people to left and right of him, including a few one might not expect to die...
* That said, fans of "incredibly strange music" or odd easy listening tunes should like the music. It just doesn't work with the film itself...
Title track to
The Price of Death:
The performances, in turn, are mostly serviceable, but at least none are truly embarrassing: Kinski, as always, is simply Kinski, while Gianni Garko, whose initial scenes of training with a karate expert are jarringly out of place, grows into his role over the course of the movie and often even achieves a level of credibility. Abbina, as the lawyer, is an obvious laughing-stock character, but he manages — like Luciano Catenacci ([15 Apr 1933 – 4 Oct 1990] of In the Folds of the Flesh [1970 / trailer], Short Night of Glass Dolls [1971 / trailer], Umberto Lenzi's Almost Human [1974 / trailer] and Mario Bava's classic Kill, Baby... Kill! [1966 / trailer]), who plays the town's sheriff, Tom Stanton — to occasionally accomplish conveying a sense of sincerity and moral rectitude. Mimma Biscardi offers perhaps the best performance of the film, often segueing nicely between controlled indifference and the expression of sudden indignity or anger at obvious hypocrisy — but in a movie like The Price of Death, "best" is of course highly relative.
Once The Price of Death becomes an amalgamation of detective film and western, it also becomes far more intriguing and fun, but it nevertheless remains sorely hampered by the excessively long and repetitious courtroom scenes; here, as with most scenes involving the town's middle class and community leaders, Palli is definitely out to caricaturize and criticize the moral and general hypocrisy of society and its moral crusaders. Equally trying are the interminable and repetitive chase scenes (which sometimes look like the same shots are simply re-used) in which Mr. Silver is continually hampered by a deputy that is either incompetent or more interested in saving the town's desires than real justice, or both. Had all such scenes been trimmed or more tightly executed, the movie would have been notably better.
As in most detective films, nearly all the featured citizens of the town in The Price of Death have ulterior motives and secrets they would prefer to keep hidden. And if the lower-class denizens are mostly characterized by low intellect or base desires, none are as conniving or calculating as their "betters" — even the killer of Carmen, as repulsive as he is, is less of a hypocrite than he is simply a sexual psychopath. The two final twists of the movie — who the killer in town is, and who killed Carmen — are relatively easy to see coming in advance, one more so than the other. The first, possibly the more unusual unmasking, allows for a further underscoring of Vincenzo Gicca Palli's criticism of social and moral hypocrisy, while the latter definitely feeds into the viewers' desire for punishment and revenge (or, as some like to call it, "justice").
Without doubt, The Price of Death is a flawed (possibly even fumbled) movie, but it does stand out as an interesting anomaly: detective western flicks are even rarer than western horrors. As such, it remains, despite its unevenness and flaws, mildly intriguing and enjoyable. While hardly imperative viewing, fans of the genre could do far worse...
And it does also make one interested to see The Price of Death's unknown predecessor, Alfonso Brescia's 32 Caliber Killer [1967 / trailer below], if only to see how much more or less successful that film might be. That spaghetti western, as equally obscure as The Price of Death, is the first movie to feature the character of Mr. Silver, and was likewise written by the director and screenwriter of The Price of Death, Vincenzo Gicca Palli (1929 – 1997). Unlike The Price of Death, however, it features the handsome Peter Lee Lawrence (21 Feb 1944 – 20 Apr 1974) as the coolly suave and sharp-shooting Mr. Silver.
Trailer to
32 Caliber Killer:
Addendum: According to the Spaghetti Western Database, between 32 Caliber Killer and The Price of Death, Peter Lee Lawrence more or less played a version of Mr Silver in Primo Zeglio's Killer Adios a.k.a. Killer Goodbye (1968 / trailer below) — or at least a similar quick-shot character doing detective work, this time around called Jess Bryan. Whether or not the three movies can truly be called a trilogy, as some do, is open to argument. Seeing that the "creator" of Mr Silver, director/scriptwriter Vincenzo Gicca Palli was in no involved in Zegio's movie, we tend towards seeing an imitation and/or homage, not a trilogy...
Trailer to
Killer Adios a.k.a. Killer Goodbye:
More interesting, however, is the additional information the SWD offers, gleaned from the book Wild West Gals (by Stefano Piselli, Antonio Bruschini & Frederico De Zigno).
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