Il Ritorno di Ringo (The Return of Ringo)(The Angry Gun)(Blood at Sundown) (1965)

An ambitious sequel, if you can call it a sequel that is, based on Homer's Oddysey. Ringo drops the smile, and the glass of milk, to pass himself for a mexican peasant in order to get back his wife and town kidnapped by mexican bandits. He now has a facial tick very similar to Takeshi Kitano's trademark tick. The cast of the original is back, but in different roles, or similar roles but with strong differences. Fernando Sancho drops the comic relief of his usual mexican bad guy character and becomes a truly menacing figure. Along with George Martin they are real ruthless bastards that you wish to see death as soon as possible. It's a sequel that takes risks, with great rewards. Just like Keoma, the movie understands that a hero taking all the bad guys by himself is not as exciting as it can be sometimes. Ringo recruits the help of other people, and as he very well says: "living with fear is like dying everyday, a man with no fear can only die once". An essential italo-western.