I’ll Sell My Skin Dearly (1968)

Original title: Vendo cara la pelle

The Italian American West. Years ago, local sadist black hat boss Ralph Magdalena (Dane Savours) and his henchmen led by sadist gunman Benson (Spartaco Conversi) murdered most of a family whose name I never managed to catch – father, mother and kid daughter – to get at their land, where the father had just found gold. Only teenage son Shane was away, working in another state to keep the family fed. Now, a decade or so later, he has grown up to be played by Mike Marshall, and returns to his old home to slowly shoot and stab his way through Magdalena’s henchmen. He’s frightfully good at killing, though, clearly relishing every man he murders with uncomfortable intensity.

Despite being really rather great at murdering people, Shane is eventually wounded by one of his enemies, finding himself saved and taken in by young, pretty widow Georgiana Bennett (Michèle Girardon) and her son Christian (Valerio Bartoleschi). These two manage to remind Shane of his humanity, but will of course be in danger when he still can’t stop his vengeful ways.

Depending on the cut you see, Ettore Maria Fizzarotti’s I’ll Sell My Skin Dearly shows a stronger influence of the sentimental parts of traditional American western movies than is typical for the often rather more cold-blooded Italian version of the genre; as a matter of fact, the film gets the kind of full-bodied Hollywood happy end quite a few American westerns concerned with vengeance deny their characters.

This results in something of an awkward contrast with Marshall’s portrayal of Shane with the kind of full-on crazy eyes you usually see from serial killers and the henchmen of the bad guys in the movies (indeed, Conversi seems to have a bit of a competition going on with Marshall who can outcrazy the other), smiling coldly about his body count. That’s not exactly the kind of behaviour that’s going to sell a redemption arc, scenes of Shane bonding with sugary sweet Christian and falling for Georgiana notwithstanding. On the more positive side, all of this is certainly not what one expects from a Spaghetti Western, and I’m not one to complain too loudly about a film trying to do things differently, even if it doesn’t work out quite as well as one would wish for.

In general, Fizzarotti seems to have understood the Italian western wisdom that, if you can’t hire a great actor, then hire one with interesting eyes, so while Marshall’s certainly not a master thespian in anybody’s book, he – and quite a few other cast members – do that staring into the camera in close-up thing so important to Italian westerns very well.

Their director provides them with quite a few opportunities for this sort of thing, too, for while Fizzarotti certainly isn’t a great stylist, he has at least studied the Corbucci rule book of Italian western filmmaking, going for the tight close-ups, the occasional use of a handheld camera, and an aura of grime and mud you’d expect or hope for in a film like this.


Obviously, this is not a top tier Spaghetti Western, in part because it doesn’t really have much of a handle on how to integrate the hero’s nihilist vengeance and his redemptive arc on more than the most obvious level of plotting; in part because Fizzarotti is a decent imitator instead of someone bringing much of his own to the table. However, for a film from the lower rung of the Italian western ladder, it’s a perfectly fine time, at least ticking a lot of the boxes you want to have ticked by a film if you simply enjoy genre tropes for what they are, as I often do.