Django: The “D” is silent; the movie is not.
Sergio Corbucci’s answer to Sergio Leone’s masterful Dollars trilogy helped entwine the spaghetti Western further into the DNA of world cinema. Starring as the title traveler is Franco Nero, the scruffy Civil War vet who pulls a coffin behind him as he drifts from town to town. As the film opens, he saves a perfectly lovely woman strung up for a good whippin’ from bandits.
She’s Maria (Loredana Nusciak, Gladiators 7), a prostitute fleeing from Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo, a fun name to say) and his band of red-hooded executioners who collect “protection money” from uncommonly muddy ghost towns that don’t need protecting from anything but more rain. Jackson follows her and Django to one of the saloons on his racketeering list.
Jackson finds out the hard way what’s in Django’s coffin: a Gatling gun, with which our protagonist easily kills all the baddies but Jackson himself, and that’s only because he has designs on Jackson’s bonanza of bullion. Only through joining forces with Mexican Gen. Rodriguez (José Bódalo, Companeros) can Django hope to snag it.
With more trigger pulls and resulting bullet wounds than the era was used to, Django shoots its way into your good graces. Corbucci (Super Fuzz) keeps the story going without losing steam, proving that an epic feel can be attained minus an epic length. Naturally, Nero is the big (and quick) draw as Django, a Western antihero who could use a good antidepressant. Often imitated, never duplicated, this is one quicksand-sinkin’, cork-spittin’, mud-wrasslin’, ear-shavin’, bottle-shootin’, hand-breaking good time! —Rod Lott
Djangoooooo…. DJANGO!