A Coffin For The Sheriff (1965)

Nobody is claiming that Anthony Steffan was a particularly good actor – he was obviously cast mainly because he looks like Clint Eastwood – however he can be entertaining in the right film. A Coffin For The Sheriff is a fairly generic Spaghetti Western, but one that I enjoyed more than I expected to. Essentially the story has Steffan infiltrating a gang Fistful of Dollars style (without the complications of two rival gangs or anything similar).

Being a relatively simple story there’s little time for the complicated diversions that sometimes spoil Spaghetti Westerns (i.e. the stuff that if you stop to think about makes little sense). There’s some nice locations – there’s a section of desert with a lake in the background that I don’t think I’d seen before. The ending gunfight in particular is shot in a stylish Spaghetti Western-style. Aspects of the story-telling feel slightly 50s American (notably the whore with the heart of gold who has to sacrifice herself to save the hero), the revenge theme and level of violence definitely place it as a 60s Italian Western.

There’s nothing hugely ground-breaking here, but it falls firmly into the “enjoyable B-Movie with no glaring flaws” category. (For a more negative option see this review at the Spaghetti Western Database). The version shown in the UK on Movies For Men looked decent although the English audio was a little muffled in places.