Review: ‘Django’ The Movie Melting Pot … (Italy, 1966)

If Sergio Leone is considered the Godfather of Spaghetti Westerns, than Sergio Corbucci has to be the Tattaglia.   The man is a pimp.   Leone is head and shoulders above other filmmakers when it comes to the Spaghetti Western.   Other directors like Corbucci, Enzo Castellari, and Lucio Fulci made lesser known examples of the genre.   Many consider Leone’s ‘Man With No Name’ films to be the best of the genre.   However, others consider Corbucci’s ‘Django’, one of the earliest films to spin out of the Leone successes, to be the best.

Franco Nero plays Django, a lone gunslinger who drags behind him a mysterious coffin.   He walks through the desert.   That’s right.   This guy is so tough, he doesn’t even need a horse.

The film opens with Django rescuing a woman from a murderous band of KKK members.   The members of the group are former Confederate soldiers who are now led by a Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo).   Soon after rescuing the woman, Django finds himself in the middle of a war between the KKK and a group of Mexican gangsters.   Also stuck between these two warring factions is a town full of innocent people and mass of Mexican gold.

‘Django’ is essentially a retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s film, ‘Yojimbo’.   The story is of a lone stranger entering a town where two groups are fighting with one another.   The stranger basically plays the two groups against each other, selling his skills to one or the other for sheer profit.   The story was also retold in Leone’s ‘Fistful of Dollars’ and Walter Hill’s ‘Last Man Standing’.

Corbucci’s film is a great example of the Spaghetti Westerns, and it is required viewing for anyone who is looking to get into the genre.   It has all the key elements that should be found in any Spaghetti Western.   The lone gunslinger.   The realistically created run-down town.   The gritty violence.   ‘Django’ has all of these.   In fact, between Leone and Corbucci, the genre is pretty well defined.   It should be.   The original idea to use European landscapes to make Western films came from these two men, as they were working together on the set of ‘The Last Days of Pompei’.

‘Django’ is a much grittier film than anything Leone put to celluloid.   It didn’t seem possible, but this film proves it is possible.   The film is loaded with so much violence and blood that it was banned in several countries.   In fact, ‘Django’ was so successful, the violence became a standard in the genre, causing many shining examples to rarely be seen outside of their native countries.

‘Django’ spawned a countless number of unofficial sequels.   The actual number of films that lifted the title for their own use is unknown.   It is rumored there are over a hundred, but only 31 of these are on record.   The film influenced many a filmmaker in generations to come including Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and Takashi Miike.   The ear-slicing scene in ‘Reservoir Dogs’ is a direct lift from this film, and Rodriguez’s notion of a gunslinger carrying guns in a guitar case is also an idea inspired by ‘Django’.

The film only had one official sequel, ‘Django 2’, in 1987, and has recently been remade by Miike with ‘Sukiyaki Western Django’.

‘Django’ remains at the top of the Spaghetti Western genre.   It is considered by many to be the best film in the group.   Leone’s films garnared too much recognition, according to many fans of the genre.   To them, the real Spaghetti Westerns are the ones that few have heard of and even fewere have seen.   Among these, ‘Django’ is the most popular.   It is the figurehead of the B-level Spaghetti Westerns that really gives the genre its cult status.

(Rating: 4 out of 5 stars)