Fans of Quentin Tarantino’s violence-laced film about slavery in America, Django Unchained, may wonder about the 1966 Django, its illustrious Italian predecessor drawn from the annals of classic Spaghetti Westerns. It was directed by Sergio Corbucci and starred a 24-year-old Franco Nero in his first leading role as a former Union soldier who fought in the American Civil War. In Django & Django, written by Italian B-movie experts Luca Rea and Steve Della Casa, much light is shed (and in passing, much laughter provoked) concerning the history and significance of this more famous than remembered sub-genre.
Tarantino is the main interviewee (the others are Django’s assistent director Ruggero Deodato and Franco Nero himself), and he proves to be an authoritative analyst who holds strong opinions. An important one that gets the film revving is that Sergio Corbucci was “the second best director of Italian westerns” after Sergio Leone. Director Rea would seem to support this weighting as he reevaluates Corbucci’s career in 80 minutes of amusing film excerpts that will delight film buffs of any persuasion.
The documentary’s main problem is finding a way to order the wealth of material and surplus of ideas flying around. Editor Stuart Mabey, a veteran of docs about Fellini and Marco Ferreri, finds a simple solution in dividing the film into numbered chapters, a strategy that works well until the final sequences, which seem weak as end pieces. But alert: don’t miss the end credits, in which Tarantino poses a question and answers it with the gravity of a film historian: who is the Mercedes whose grave Django visits in Corbucci’s film?
Tarantino’s films are also generously excerpted, notably the sequence in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in which cowboy actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo Di Caprio) is sent to Italy by his agent (Al Pacino) to meet Corbucci, who wants to cast him in a movie. To everyone’s embarrassment, Rick mixes up Corbucci and Leone and puts his foot in his mouth big-time, but still gets cast in the (fake but plausible) films Nebraska Jim and Operation Dyn-o-mite!
Corbucci’s early westerns were no-holds-barred vengeance stories whose over-the-top violence (much more graphic than in Leone’s highly stylized films) gave them an operatic quality, a “cinema of cruelty.” The director brags he “killed more people than Nero and Caligula”, two of the bloodiest Roman emperors. Minnesota Clay, Navajo Joe, Django, The Great Silence, The Specialists, The Mercenary, Vamos a matar companeros and Sonny and Jed are his best-known westerns.
Among the most striking of Tarantino’s ideas is his thesis that with all their guts and gore, Corbucci’s films are really talking about fascism. As a child he sang in a Fascist boys’ choir for Hitler and Mussolini (it was during a parade celebrating Hitler’s visit to Italy in 1938); as an adult living in the liberal and liberated 1960s, he made several statements on camera against Fascism and Nazism. Tarantino finds more evidence in The Great Silence, part of the director’s Mexican revolution trilogy. It is a political allegory pitting mute gunslinger Jean Louis Trintignant against bounty hunter Klaus Kinski, and makes the case that Corbucci’s ultra-violent westerns are anti-fascist metaphors.
Consider this line from The Mercenary: “When you fight for a just idea, you can win without violence.” But it’s also true that violence is what sells movie tickets, and Corbucci’s exchange with a bunch of excited young boys is very pertinent here. The innocents gleefully acknowledge they adore his movies because they like seeing blood and people being killed. How much more direct can you be?
As Tarantino puts it, the villain tells the story and runs the show, and there’s no guarantee the hero won’t be mowed down in the last reel. In reality, there aren’t any heroes in Corbucci’s universe, but a lot of avengers. Tarantino brands them “cool and sexy” anti-heroes, like Burt Reynolds’ Navajo Joe. He also makes the indisputable point that many of these characters were inspired by comic books, or by other movies (Sonny and Jed as Corbucci’s version of Bonnie and Clyde.)
Tarantino himself is quick to acknowledge the influence the master’s westerns had on his own oeuvre. When he studied the “grotesque, absolutely pitiless violence” in these stories that offered the hero no safe passage, it reminded him of America’s antebellum South with its slavery and KKK, “that grotesque world Sergio Corbucci drew on.”
Some final food for thought: If John Ford is the greatest American director of westerns, who is number 2? And didn’t Corbucci get it right when he turned Ford’s idyllic frontier communities into horrid towns where everybody is out to make a buck for him or herself? “They deserve all the bad things that happen to them,” concludes Quentin.
Director: Luca Rea
Screenplay: Steve Della Casa, Luca Rea
Cast: Quentin Tarantino, Franco Nero, Ruggero Deodato
Producers: Nico Marzano, Nicoletta Ercole, Gianni Romoli
Cinematography: Andrea Arnone
Editing: Stuart Mabey
Music: Andrea Guerra
Production companies: Nicomax Cinematografica, R&C Produzioni, Margutta Studios, Greater Fool Media, Istituto Luce Cinecittà
World sales: True Colours
Venue: Venice Film Festival (out of competition)
In English, Italian
80 minutes
