God Forgives... His Life Is Mine (1968)

An example of the Spaghetti Western Private Investigator sub-genre – a string of films that typically aren't fantastic. Dean Reed plays a hired-gun and ladies' man (Slim Corbett) called into town to find out who's been robbing the local bank. The answer turns out to be "pretty much all of the respected citizens, except the judge". Corbett then has to finish them off.

I wasn't a huge fan of this: to its credit it's straightforward, and doesn't suffer from the plot convolutions that these films often suffer from. It's also fairly dull: apart from the villain's midget henchmen, there nothing that really stands out of gives it a Spaghetti Western atmosphere of any sort. It isn't terrible, but that mostly means it doesn't achieve the "so bad it's good" fun that some of the objectively-worse Spaghetti Westerns achieve. Dean Reed isn't terrible, but seems slightly wooden, as does his lavishly combed hair. The best thing about the film—and actually this bit is pretty good—is the cheesy Western ballad that summaries the entire plot sung by Reed over the ending credits.

While I don't think anyone's arguing that this is a classic, some Spaghetti Western fans (see Shobary and assorted discussion at the Spaghetti Western Database) seem to be more positive than me, so perhaps I'm being unfair.

The Koch Media DVD—part of their Italowestern Encyclopedia Volume 2—looks much better than it deserves to. The audio is in English (and the dubbing is pretty reasonably), with a short section in Italian which reveals that some of the character names are different in Italian (the villain is no-longer Mexican, for example).

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