Django (1966)

Dir: SERGIO CORBUCCI
Country: ITALY/SPAIN

Although Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) became the pin up poster boy of the spaghetti western cycle, it is arguably Sergio Corbucci’s Django which wielded the greatest influence on European westerns. The central character went on to feature in well over fifty spin offs, the vast majority of which, were unofficial. The success of the film in West Germany led too Italian actor Franco Nero forever being associated with the role, and almost every western he appeared in thereafter was promoted in West Germany as a Django picture. The reason its vast influence remains largely unrecognised, is that unlike Leone’s ‘Dollars’ trilogy, Django was not a commercial success in the United States. The influence of A Fistful of Dollars was not immediate; indeed most of the Euro-westerns released in the wake of Leone’s film were actually quite traditional. It is conceivable that this might have remained the case were it not for Sergio Corbucci who had clearly paid attention to the exaggerated style, cynicism, revisionism, and mythical anti-heroism that formed the basis of Leone’s westerns. Corbucci’s major innovation was to take these elements (minus the exaggerated stylisations) and push them to the extreme. If A Fistful of Dollars was pessimistic then Django had to be nihilistic. If the landscape seen in A Fistful of Dollars was dusty, dry, and sun baked then the landscape in Django had to be wet, muddy, and grey. The influence of A Fistful of Dollars can be felt in Django, yet at the same time Django is everything that A Fistful of Dollars is not.



The film signifies its offbeat and surrealist intent instantly with a credits sequence that sees the titular gunslinger dragging a coffin through an inhospitably barren landscape. The rain lashes down incessantly and the oozing muddy terrain provides a further obstacle to this horseless stranger; this grim vista is lessened somewhat however by the strident beauty of Luis Bacalov’s unforgettable theme song. The exteriors were all shot in Madrid, and the expert eye of cinematographer Enzo Barboni imbues the locations with a threatening bleakness. The first indication we get of Django’s almost supernatural ability to deal death is when he saves Maria (Loredana Nusciak) from the prospect of being burned alive by a group of red-hooded cutthroats in the employ of Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo). Though it has to be noted that while Django acts with customary cold bloodedness in the elimination of Jackson’s men, he stands idly by and watches from a distance as, just a few minutes before, Maria is subjected to a brutal whipping at the hands of a trio of sadistic Mexicans. This gives us our first indication of Django’s sympathies and his attitude to women. He makes it clear to the thankful Maria that his actions were entirely selfish, and develops a thread which runs throughout the film about challenges to conceptions of morality, ideals and beliefs. In the midst of this debate Django stands as a somewhat contradictory figure. His quest is purely one of revenge, but this doesn’t stop him from trying to become rich for example, or from callously using people who show sympathy to his cause. This builds a high degree of uncertainty; at no point in the proceedings does Django become a trustworthy protagonist.



The emotionless and implacable performance of Franco Nero only adds to this; the screenplay by Sergio and Bruno Corbucci is particularly evasive with regard to Django’s past, he fought in the Civil War, but this devastating conflict remains something of a vague backdrop, never referred to by Django, but utilised by the evil Major Jackson in order to continue his own personal war, and to facilitate his racial and class prejudices. A scene in which he and his grinning cohorts use a group of Hispanic peasants as target practice is emblematic of his attitude. Unfortunately he has even less character development than Django, and such moments of empty sadism render his character absurd. His red-hooded Klan-like followers contribute to an effective statement on racial prejudice, but for a Corbucci film Django is unusually light on political allegory. What it does have though is an unusual amount of imaginative and graphic violence. The keynote sequence sees Django open his coffin to reveal a huge machine gun, with which he lays waste to Jackson’s men amid the mud and decay of an unnamed border town. A duplicitous padre has his ear cut off and fed to him, and most painfully Django has his hands pulped for deceiving the Mexican bandits out of their gold; speaking of which the subplot involving Django teaming up with the Mexican’s and raiding a nearby military base for a huge cache of gold doesn’t quite fit the material. This plot development undoes the carefully constructed brooding intensity of the opening third of the film, and is a concession to the generic conventions of the traditional western that I found most unwelcome.



Although Django borrows the hackneyed narrative device of Yojimbo (1961) in which a man finds himself at the centre of two feuding factions, it is always made abundantly clear that Django exists in total opposition to Major Jackson. The town that forms the locus of these events is a remarkably downtrodden, desperate and desolate space; it is populated almost exclusively by prostitutes, and they are as clapped out and decaying as the rotting timbers of the saloon building. The filmmakers create a wasteland that might seem more at a home in a post-apocalyptic science-fiction film, and it’s only appropriate that the enigmatic figure of Django has an almost mythical quality about him. His dark heart, which beats only to exact revenge for the murder of his wife, matches the harsh and avaricious cynicism that lurks in every corner of this iniquitous world. Django is the first Euro-Western that contains no hope, no mercy, no trust, and no aspiration. It is the films attitude to humanity that wielded the greatest influence on the genre, and it is entirely appropriate that the film ends in a cemetery with Django achieving that for which he lives for.

© Shaun Anderson 2012