"A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die" is a quality spaghetti western with a solid cast and an interesting storyline. It is filmed beautifully, with a relatively high production value for a film in this genre.

Alex Cord does a terrific job portraying Clay McCord, an outlaw who is suffering from increasingly debilitating seizures. He is seeking amnesty before his enemies close in on him, but is being too cocky for his own good when he asks for it. Robert Ryan delivers the best performance in the film as the governor of New Mexico. Mario Brega and Arthur Kennedy are also great here.

This movie is very good, but it doesn't stand out to me as being one of the best spaghetti westerns out there. It's lacking too much in style to be in the same league as any of the great ones. It does have some cool spaghetti overtones, but overall it's a bit too much like an American western. This is especially evident in the music score, which is OK as movies go in general, but pretty dull by euro-western standards. The soundtrack kind of reminds me of the music from "The Unforgiven." Although there is an interesting story here, it is told in a manner which is a bit too conventional for my tastes. If a spaghetti western fan and a Hollywood western fan had to watch a movie together, this one would be the perfect compromise.

All of this is not to say that anyone should avoid this film. I did enjoy watching it very much. As I said, it is a very well-done film and I recommend it to anyone who likes westerns, spaghetti or otherwise.

I found this to be an underrated, quietly compelling Spaghetti Western (also known as DEAD OR ALIVE). Despite modest credentials (apart from multi-purpose co-writer/producer Albert Band, the only notable crew member is composer Carlo Rustichelli), the film clearly benefits from the presence of its three American stars (newcomer Alex Cord is an ambiguous anti-hero, while veterans Arthur Kennedy and Robert Ryan lend a mythic quality to the proceedings) as well as the unusual plot (involving a crippled protagonist, an amnesty ruse covering a strategic clean-up of the town, and which has the law finally siding with the gunfighter against a horde of Mexican bandits).

There are several tough action scenes on hand – the film is capped by a terrific climax in which the star trio is besieged inside a blazing cabin – plus a couple of outrageous moments which are something of a Spaghetti Western trademark: from the middle of the street, Cord sees a hidden gunman at a window reflected in a whiskey bottle; a man who helps Cord escape is repeatedly immersed in a pool of oil by the villains. Nicoletta Machiavelli also makes a nice impression as a village girl with whom Cord lodges; the supporting cast, then, is peppered with familiar (if largely anonymous) faces – all of them essentially genre fixtures.

I wasn't aware of the fact that the English-dubbed version of the film on MGM/UA's R1 DVD was cut: I was fooled by the wrong running-time being listed on the back-cover; the film was only 99 minutes long and not 118 – apparently, Cord's character is killed in the longer Italian version!

"Sugar Colt" director Franco Giraldi's splendid Spaghetti western "A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die" is grim and cynical, featuring a trio of Americans: Alex Cord, Arthur Kennedy, and Robert Ryan. Composer Carlo Rustichelli contributes an atmospheric score, and "Keoma" lenser Aiace Parolin makes everything look Euro-western cool. All the shots are perfectly composed with regard to the players on camera and the arena of action. Louis Garfinkle, who later provided the story for the Oscar-winning Vietnam epic "The Deer Hunter," Ugo Liberatore of "The Tramplers," and Albert Band of "The Hellbenders" have written an exciting and insightful sagebrusher about an outlaw, Clay McCord (Alex Cord), on the dodge. Bounty hunters flock after McCord and his partner Fred Duskin (Giampiero Albertini of "Commandos") and arrive ahead of them at a mission. McCord knows Father Santana, and he is bringing him a bottle of whiskey. Two bounty hunters, Jesús María (Aldo Sambrell of "Navajo Joe") and Sein (Antonio Molino Rojo of "A Bullet for Sandoval"), kill the monk in cold blood. These villains are so despicable that they remove the body from the head and stuff it into a bag rather than drag an entire corpse around with them. Afterward, they try to ambush them. Sein masquerades as a priest, but Clay is too quick for them. He guns down Sein, and Fred takes care of Jesús. The fly in the ointment is that Clay suffers from tremors in the right arm, like the John Wayne character Cole Thornton in Howard Hawks' "El Dorado." Clay takes refuge in the border town of Escondido. Incidentally, Escondido is run an imposing hombre named Krant (Mario Brega of "A Fistful of Dollars"), and he has no sympathy for McCord. The scene where Clay is walking with a bottle in his hand that casts the reflection of a desperado posed to shoot him in the back with a rifle is neat! The story is peppered with flashbacks, and we learn how Clay turned into a swift-shooting, crack-shot of a gunslinger. Clay's poor ailing father is ridiculed and dragged unceremoniously through the streets while suffering an epileptic seizure. Clay snatches a six-gun and blasts away at the bastards.