Rent Django (1966)

Cult Spaghetti Western - Django review by GI

A big cult spaghetti western that gained a lot of quite unfair and frankly ridiculous controversy over violence resulting in its being banned in many countries. Viewed today it's clearly a ludicrous imitation of Sergio Leone's far superior A Fistful Of Dollars (1964), with a clumsy script, often identical characters, set pieces and story and Franco Nero barely containing his Clint Eastwood impersonation especially in the film's first half. A mysterious gunfighter arrives in a squalid US/Mexico border town pulling a coffin behind him. He's lightening fast with his gun and has an agenda involving the two warring factions that use the town. With it's whipcrack gunshots, comic book deaths and torture this is the ultimate example of the extreme spaghetti western. This is simply cinema exploiting cinema, Leone did it far more subtly but here it's just done for laughs and style. Yet it has it's big fans and of course its the inspiration of Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012), and it's an interesting example of how the Italian western changed. Audiences of the day loved this and yet it took directors like Sam Peckinpah and even Clint Eastwood to channel the feel of the Italian western and remould it back into the genre in their revisionist yet grounded vision of the west. It's quite fun to watch Django today, there's nothing to think about, it's offers nothing new to the western other than pushing a new film movement just a little bit too far.