Django 2: il grande ritorno (Django Strikes Again) (1987)

As I mentioned in my review of Sergio Corbucci's original Django (1966), the release (and success) of that film was followed - in usual Italian fashion - by dozens of tributes, rip-offs and imitations with names like Django, Prepare a Coffin (with future Trinity star Terrence Hill), Django the Bastard, and Django the Last Killer. Oddly, while original star Franco Nero appeared in a number of westerns - sometimes retitled to take advantage of his Django fame - neither Corbucci nor Nero made an official sequel to their film for another twenty years - long after the popularity of Spaghetti Westerns had faded. Even odder, this sequel abandons the muddy Spanish locations of the original for the jungles of Colombia and trades in Corbucci (who died a few years later) for the bland direction of Nello Rossati, who needlessly reinvents Django as an 80s action hero.

Following the events of the first film, Django has abandoned his life as a gunfighter for a quiet, peaceful life as a monk until he's visited by an unnamed woman (possibly Maria from the original film?) who tells him that she's dying, and that they have a young daughter named Marisol. However, by the time he decides to visit her, his wife has died and Marisol has been kidnapped by an evil Hungarian riverboat enthusiast (Christopher Connelly from Manhattan Baby (1982)) who is both forcing (really) young women to work in his bordellos while simultaneously forcing male slaves to work in his silver mine. Yeah, this guy is a real slime-ball. This time Django takes his licks very early, getting horribly beaten and enslaved during a weak attempt to rescue Marisol, but after an escape (aided by Donald Pleasance in a small role) he retrieves a familiar weapon from a gravesite (marked Django) and decides - with the help of a young villager - to get some revenge.

Despite the formidable presence of Nero, Django Strikes Again feels - literally - a world away from the Western environment of its predecessor. Indeed, not only has the location changed to boats, silver mines and jungles, but aside from the brief graveyard scene (which brings some welcome nostalgia for the original film) and the character of Django himself, there's very little that would mark this as a sequel. Even Nero, with his beard and slicked back long hair, looks little like the blue-eyed anti-hero that made him famous. He's been white-washed as a sort of low-rent Chuck Norris, with his final scene (where he basically devotes himself to fighting injustice wherever he can) feeling particularly removed from what we know of the character. We don't even get an echo of the famous Django theme music which was used to such great effect in the original film.

However, when removed from the context of the original film, there are a few things to enjoy here. While (badly) post-synced, it at least appears that we finally get to hear Nero's voice as the character, and he has a charisma that makes him significantly more appealing than the film that surrounds him. While the photography is quite flat - despite some impressive locations - there are a few interesting action scenes, and it's fun to watch Django trade a few quips as he does away with dozens of interchangeable baddies. Connelly is particularly demented as the "El Diablo" Hungarian leader, and is given a few odd quirks that at least make his eventual comeuppance feel earned, and they give him an edge of racism that at least ties him to the plot of the first film. These are all rather cheap thrills, however, and while some of the performances have inspiring moments, the accents on display are occasionally impenetrable.

Packaged on DVD with the original Django, Django Strikes Again makes for an interesting curio for fans of the character, but can only be seen as a rather massive missed opportunity. The decision to abandon much of what defined the character, as well as the Western setting, feels like it has much to do with the popularity of Jungle action films of the time (and the availability of the Colombian setting) and the whole thing ends up feeling painfully generic. In the end, it's sad to think that even the numerous films which borrowed and stole from Django paid more tribute to its influence than its own sequel.

Django (1966)

Spaghetti Westerns have been defined by Sergio Leone's 60s output which focused on demystifying the American west while paying tribute to the films that inspired him as a youth - but while A Fistful of Dollars (1964) was the match strike for the genre, it wasn't the only film that captured international imaginations. Perhaps equally as influential, at least for the Italian film industry which went on to create dozens of unofficial sequels, was Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) which is filled with iconic imagery and features an enduring performance from Franco Nero in the titular lead. While lacking Leone's stylistic close-ups (for the most part), Corbucci brings his own style to a surprisingly filthy (with mud) and brutal take on the "man with no name" antihero.

A civil war veteran with a mysterious past, Django wanders into a mud-soaked, isolated border town dragging a coffin behind himself. Stopping into a near-deserted bar/brothel, he discovers a local war between mexican bandits and former confederate officer racists - led by the steely Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo) - who clothe themselves with red scarves and KKK-like masks. After rescuing an escaped prostitute (Loredana Nusciak) who finds herself at odds with both groups, Django reveals a past with the Mexican general as well as the contents of his coffin: a machine gun with which he slaughters nearly all of Jackson's men. The two conspire to rob a nearby Mexican army fort to fund the bandits return to Mexico, and to help Django start a new life away from bloodshed - though things don't exactly work out as planned.

Far away from the pristine landscapes of the classic American westerns, Django takes place in one of the filthiest western towns imaginable, and the character of Django himself - who proves to be far more complex than his initial appearance suggests - starts out dirty and gets progressively moreso as the film progresses. This is a film that literally wallows in mud, and is all the better because of its embracing of this unique and hellish landscape. Corbucci lingers on the lone figure of Django from afar as he drags his coffin through the mud, to the point where he seems iconic before he's said a word. His first interaction with characters - watching the Mexican bandits whip Nusciak's Maria before then killing a group of Jackson's men who intend to murder her - show him to be quiet and brutal, while Nero's trademark blue eyes tell a different tale.

While notable at the time for its gruesome violence - this is still a couple of years before Sam Peckinpah re-wrote the rules with The Wild Bunch - it's Gatling gun massacres are fairly tame compared to the climax of that later film. Generally it's just characters clutching their chest and falling, with occasionally a spot of bright-red blood to accentuate things. However, a few scenes: the Mexican banditos severing the ear of one of Jackson's men and feeding it to him, Django's fate at the hands of the bandits, as well as the sheer body count, led to the film existing in numerous cut and truncated forms.

Corbucci never received the respect that Italian directors like Leone got, but his later output - particularly  The Great Silence (1969) - shows an intelligence and eye for detail that raises his work above many of his contemporaries. Franco Nero has continued to have an eclectic and consistent career, appearing in a number of other westerns before managing to break into the U.S. as Lancelot in Joshua Logan's Camelot (1967). Since then he's worked internationally, as well as making appearances in U.S. films like Force 10 from Navarone (1978) and Die Hard 2 (1990). Notably, second-unit director Ruggero Deodato went on to have a notable career in his own right, particularly in exploitation films like the legendary Cannibal Holocaust (1980).

As is per usual in Italian cinema, the resounding success of Django led to dozens of rip-off, tributes and copies, often featuring the Django name in the title. Some of these are actually quite good, like Django, Kill! (If You Live Shoot!) (1967), but most are only tangentially related to the film if at all. I've yet to see the only official sequel Django 2: il grande ritorno (1987), which is the only film to return Nero to the role which made him famous.

Not quite reaching the artistic and stylistic heights of Leone's Spaghetti Westerns, Django remains a tightly plotted and violent piece of pulp cinema. The grim spectre of death which seems to lurk outside every frame, represented by the coffin which the film revolves around, can also be seen in later westerns like Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter (1973), while echoes and references can be seen in many facets of pop culture - from the notable ear-slicing scene in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) to Takeshi Miike's bizarre tribute (also featuring Tarantino) Sukiyaki Western Django (2007). A great piece of genre entertainment, and a terrific entering point for those interested in Spaghetti Westerns.

A Bullet for the General (1966)

PLOT:

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Set during the Mexican Revolution, Damiano Damiani’s A Bullet for the General follows the bandit leader El Chucho (Gian Maria Volonte, best known as the bad guy from a couple of Leone Westerns) and his gang of thieves, as they raid trains and government facilities for guns and ammunition to sell to General Elias, who is either a Zapatista rebel or a stand-in for Zapata himself (I’m not sure which). Chucho allows a gringo named Bill Tate (whom Chucho dubs “Niño”) to join the gang, unaware that Tate is actually an assassin hired by the Mexican government to take out General Elias with a golden bullet.

REVIEW:

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Without meaning to be reductive, the most important parts of a film are probably the beginning and the end. If you can catch people’s attention at the start, and wow them at the finish, you’ve probably got a good movie on your hands, unless you really duff it in the middle. Damiani’s political Western A Bullet for the General has one of the best first 20 minutes in film history.

It begins with four men, in close up, walking along a plain white wall. They are outside, and seem to be in a bit of a hurry. They stop, and two of them hug. And then the camera cuts away, revealing that these four are bracketed by soldiers, and that a row of men are aiming their rifles. It’s an execution by firing squad, and as Tate (Lou Castel) looks on, the four are gunned down. Tate is obviously out of place--he is pale and fair-haired, clean and well-dressed. He doesn’t belong.

Unfazed by the execution, Tate walks over to the train station to buy a ticket. A small Mexican boy asks him if he’s an American, and then asks him if he likes Mexico.

“Not very much,” Tate responds.


The film jumps straight into the action when the train is attacked by Chucho’s gang. The setup is clever: they’ve basically crucified a captain of the army, placing him on the tracks. When the train stops, unwilling to crush the still-living officer, the bandits attack. A lieutenant on the train shouts at the captain, asking for orders. The captain lets it be known that the train should just move forward. The lieutenant, unwilling to let the captain die by his command, instead drops down between the tracks and tries to crawl up to the officer, hoping to free him without bloodshed. Chucho shoots the lieutenant in the guts. Then the train rolls forward, crushing the captain.

Tate, seeing his opportunity, kills the engineer, stopping the train for the bandits. He tells Chucho that he’s an outlaw, and that he was being extradited to the US to face trial. He asks if he can join Chucho’s band. Chucho agrees, giving Tate a new name, Niño (“boy”).

The opening scenes, then, go a long way to set up the movie in a concise and powerful manner. Chucho and Niño are obviously both ruthless individuals; they share a love of money and of violence that unites them, even though they are completely dissimilar in every other way. It’s clearly not going to be a story about heroes.


Now a part of the gang--including Chucho’s obsessively religious brother, El Santo (Klaus Kinski) and the charming bandita Adelita (Martine Beswick)--Niño aids the bandits as they raid government buildings in search of guns. Niño is willing to help, but he’s impatient, always pestering Chucho about meeting the General. Chucho, not the brightest bandito around, seems to take it in stride, and is only angered when Niño convinces the other men to abandon Chucho and his brother when the two of them are more interested in helping poor villagers than making money. Still, Chucho’s noble streak doesn’t last long--he, too, is in it for the pesos--and soon the gang is back together again, in time for the film’s climax.

Volonte’s Chucho is fascinating to watch; he’s wild and charismatic, and defies easy explanation, probably because Chucho himself is quite a conflicted character. There’s something inside of him--probably his background as a poor peasant--that connects him with the people, but any sort of kindness or generosity of his character is often obfuscated by his greed and rude manners. He distrusts wealth and learning and yet clearly envies it. He has to tell his brother Santo that they are giving the guns to General Elias, too embarrassed to admit that he’s selling them. That Niño is an assassin should be obvious to Chucho, and so it’s easy not to feel sorry for him, but his genuine humanity, no matter how disfigured, makes you side with the bandit against the cold, professional gringo.

Against the expectations of the genre, A Bullet for the General features a couple of strong female characters. Little is made of the fact that the first of these, Adelita, fights side-by-side with the rest of the bandits, just as though she were a man. She is clearly attracted to Niño, but her relationship with one of the other bandits keeps them apart, for a time. Adelita makes it known that she has suffered at the hands of the government and the wealthy landowners; she, more than any of the other bandits, is motivated by hatred.


The role of Rosario is much smaller, but is a vital part of the story. When the bandits and a handful of poor, angry townsfolk come to the home of the wealthy landowner Don Feliciano, it is his wife, Rosario (Carla Gravina) who tries to deal with the situation. We watch, uncomfortably, as she tries to reason with bandits, and then moves on to threats, before breaking down completely when it’s clear that her husband will be killed. While Chucho and his men have hardly been forgiving of their military targets, this is the first time that they victimize the unarmed and the helpless. Our sympathy for Chucho is tested when he even agrees to let his men rape Rosario--an action which Niño puts a stop to.

The man who adapted the screenplay for A Bullet for the General, Franco Solinas, was a politically-interested writer with leftist sympathies. This is obviously most evident in his interest in the Mexican Revolution, which is not a neutral setting for the story, but an integral one. Clearly this is a man who sides with the Revolution. Though quick to show the ugliness of the bandits and revolutionaries, he and the director are at their most heavy-handed with the repeated use of gold as a symbol for capital and wealth. It is not a simple affectation, that Niño must shoot the General with a golden bullet--but at least that bit of imagery is acceptable. Harder to swallow is the existence, and importance, of a golden machine gun, a mechanized weapon capable of unlimited slaughter and linked to wealth and privilege by its ostentatious decoration. Even if there were some historic truth to it--even if there is documentation proving the existence of a golden machine gun during the Revolution--it’s simply too hard to swallow as a practical or realistic detail. It takes you out of the film, smacking you in the face with its inauthenticity.

That said, A Bullet for the General is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever seen, a real gem, and I’d encourage anyone to track it down and give it a try. While I’m not familiar with Damiani’s other films, this one certainly gives Leone a run for his money.

The Great Silence (1968)

PLOT:

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A young boy watches, powerless, as his parents are murdered by bounty hunters. The leader of the killers, Pollicutt--perhaps unable to kill a child--slits the boy’s throat, severing his vocal chords, so he’ll never tell the tale. That boy grows up to become a bounty hunter himself. Known only as “Silence” (guess why), he specializes in tracking down those bounty hunters who subvert the law and kill innocents in the name of justice, cashing in on their illicit and immoral behaviour. Silence’s main trick is to lure his opponents into drawing first, so he can gun them down with his Mauser in “self defence,” (ironically) subverting the law in the process.

Sergio Corbucci’s The Great Silence takes place in the fictional town of Snow Hill, Utah, during the great blizzard of 1899. There, due to the unseasonable weather, the starving townsfolk have had to fall into banditry to survive (though this isn’t very well explained). A general amnesty is expected from the governor, but until then Pollicutt, Snow Hill’s Justice of the Peace, is paying $1000 a head for these outlaws. This offer attracts to Snow Hill large groups of bounty hunters (called “bounty killers” in the film); chief among them is Loco (Klaus Kinski), a dangerous and sadistic man looking to cash in on the townsfolk’s desperate situation. Only Silence, famed for his antagonism towards bounty hunters, can possibly save the town.

REVIEW:

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There’s a lot you have to accept if you want to get into a Spaghetti Western, especially a Spaghetti Western that isn’t helmed by Sergio Leone. Like most of its kind, The Great Silence is badly dubbed, so that the words you hear never match the movement of the actors’ lips; furthermore, the words you hear are badly mixed in, so that they always come out as an audio close-up. All of the costumes look newly made, no matter how worn they should be, and most of the extras can only be counted on to ham it up in the worst fashion imaginable. But if you go into the film knowing this, you can soon accept it, and you should, since The Great Silence is one of the most original and rewarding Westerns out there.

The film stands out for various reasons. First is its setting; most of us are used to seeing cowboys in dusty Frontier or mining towns, or perhaps in lush green fields in places like Montana. The Great Silence takes place in snow-covered Utah; everyone is bundled up, everything is frozen (not unlike McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Robert Altman’s 1972 Western film that seems to be the spiritual partner of Corbucci’s film). Then there’s Loco, played by the infamous Klaus Kinski. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what makes Loco so much different from so many other villains. He seems practical (he asks for help hoisting frozen corpses onto a carriage, so he can collect the bounty), and almost polite. He also looks fucking insane. Then there’s the overall mood of the film, which is gloomier even than Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.


There isn’t much to say about Silence, played by French actor Jean-Louis Trintignant. There are different theories, or rumours, surrounding the reasoning behind the protagonist's muteness. Some say that this is Corbucci playing with the trope of the laconic cowboy; if Eastwood or John Wayne, for instance, are curt, than Corbucci’s hero is going to be downright dumb. The other popular belief is that Trintignant only accepted the role on the grounds that he didn’t have to learn any lines. Either way, Silence is pretty uninteresting; not only does he not talk, he has seemingly no facial expressions whatsoever. All of his character seems to be expressed in his unique choice of gun. Unlike most cowboys, who carry some sort of six-shooter, Silence carries an automatic handgun, an 1896 7.63 mm Mauser Broomhandle. It’s his gun, rather than his silence, which sets him apart.

The last character worth mentioning is the Sheriff, played by Frank Wolff. (The love interest, played by Vonetta McGee, doesn’t do much but bring Silence to Snow Hill, before quickly falling love with him.) While the Sheriff is clearly meant to be comic relief, he’s rarely as buffoonish or clownish as some of his comedic counterparts. On the whole, he is well-meaning, but ignorant of his own situation and naïve in believing that he can make a difference. He is, on the whole, fairly noble, and one can’t help but feel that he’s the most sympathetic character in the whole film.


As unique as The Great Silence is, it’s not without its faults. Little explanation is offered for what’s happening--the reason that so many people are outlawed, and exactly how Pollicutt is supposedly profiting, is hard to grasp. In one instance, Loco digs a gun out of the snow and uses it to great effect; though we’ve seen him hide weapons in the snow before, it’s incredibly convenient (and incredibly hard to believe) that he had one in exactly that spot, and knew exactly where to look, exactly when he needed to. Some extra bounty hunters show up at near the end, and while their presence is mentioned it isn’t really explained. If you’re a stickler for a tight script, parts of the film can be irritating.

That said, anyone who’s a fan of the genre should check out the movie. It features a great villain, and while I’m not sold that Corbucci is the peer of that other, more famous Sergio (I found Django, for instance, pretty bad), he is a stylish director with a flair for filming violence. The Great Silence is a dour, nihilistic Western that is well worth tracking down.