After
Italian master Sergio Leone remade Akira Kurosawa’s samurai-western epic Yojimbo
into the Clint Eastwood starring spaghetti western vehicle A Fistful of
Dollars, Italian producer Manolo Bolognini approached veteran director
Sergio Corbucci with the prospect of writing-directing a film that would
capitalize on the success of Leone’s remake.
The result was one of the most legendarily ultraviolent spaghetti western
epics ever made, the down-and-dirty rough-and-tough Django.
Made in
stark contrast to the wide-angled panoramic style of Leone, instead staged in
gritty close-ups of the actors faces interspersed by moments of startling
abrasive carnage and gruesome violence, Django while known to many
through Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained as well as the proliferation
of unofficial knockoffs remains curiously underseen by genre aficionados to
this day. The film’s level of violence kept
most US audiences from seeing it though in Europe the film became a smash hit
and cemented Franco Nero as a leading man in Italian action films.
Beginning
with a catchy theme song sung by Rocky Roberts set against images of a lone drifter
in a black coat and hat dragging a coffin through the mud in an old western
town, we meet Django (Franco Nero) who slaughters a group of bandits
before rescuing a mixed race prostitute from certain death. As she tags along, Django settles in a
ghost town brothel on the Mexican-US border where he finds himself caught in a
brutal war between a racist confederate gang and a group of Mexican
revolutionaries, setting the stage for unrelenting brutality and bloodshed with
more than a few from both sides wondering just what is in Django’s
ominous coffin.
Almost
more violent than some of Sam Peckinpah’s westerns including The Wild Bunch,
Django has lost none of its power to shock and enthrall with a
then-newfound level of sadism not seen in the western genre before. Though critically drubbed due to the nastiness
of the piece, seen now it is one of the quintessential spaghetti westerns and
as such may well be the pinnacle of the genre despite assailing it from a more
intimate and personal angle than Leone’s films.
Much of the film’s strengths come from the lead performance by Franco
Nero who makes the antihero of Django cool and formidable even when he
is put to a test even the most hardened spaghetti western fans won’t see
coming.
--Andrew Kotwicki