Django (1966)

By the mid-1960s, the Italian western had already announced itself to the world, largely on the back of Sergio Leone's work with Clint Eastwood. Into that fertile but crowded territory stepped director Sergio Corbucci, whose 1966 film Django arrived as something rawer, muddier, and more brutal than much of what had come before. Co-produced between Italy and Spain under the Tecisa Film and B.R.C. Produzione Film banners, the film follows a lone, coffin-dragging gunslinger who rides into a frontier town caught between a vicious, masked American gang and a faction of Mexican revolutionaries, with a young woman named Maria caught in the crossfire. It is not a pretty world. The setting is all churned-up mud and grey skies rather than the sun-bleached vistas of Leone's pictures, and Corbucci leans hard into that grime. The film runs a tight 93 minutes and wastes very little of them. It would go on to inspire a wave of unofficial sequels and imitations (most of which simply borrowed the Django name without any formal connection), and its reputation has only grown in the decades since, helped in no small part by Quentin Tarantino's open admiration for it.

Corbucci was already a working director in the Italian genre scene before Django, but this is the film that cemented his standing. He had a gift for staging violence with a kind of operatic, almost choreographed quality that feels distinct from his peers, and this film is a strong example of that approach. The screenplay, credited to Corbucci and Bruno Corbucci among others, keeps the plotting efficient without being thin. The score, composed by Luis Bacalov, became one of the more recognisable pieces of music to come out of the entire spaghetti western cycle, with the title song in particular taking on a life well beyond the film itself. It is the kind of music that lodges somewhere in the back of your head and refuses to leave. For fans of Italian genre cinema from this era, it sits comfortably alongside other home-grown efforts reviewed on this site, including Nightmare City and Cemetery Man, though it predates both and occupies quite different ground.

The cast is relatively lean in terms of recognisable names outside of Italy and Spain, but Franco Nero, in only his second major film role, is the whole centre of gravity here. He brings a watchful, coiled quality to the part, letting silence do a lot of the work and never tipping into self-parody even when the material edges towards the theatrical. Nero would go on to a long career in European cinema (you can find him considerably later in his career in the site's review of The Last Alchemist), but this remains the role he is most readily associated with. Loredana Nusciak provides solid support as Maria, and the villains, particularly José Bódalo's Major Jackson, are painted in broad but effective strokes. Fans of westerns, whether Hollywood or otherwise, will find this worth comparing to Westworld, another genre piece from a similar orbit reviewed here, even if the two films are doing rather different things.

A movie that spawned an entire sub-genre. Django is one of the greatest westerns ever made. Franco Nero is a fantastic lead in this as the title character. The soundtrack is absolutely blistering. I found myself humming it after. Django dragging a coffin full of guns absolutely HAS to be the inspiration for the guns in the guitarcase in Desperado. It's very gory for the time but it's not gratuitous.

For me, that point about the coffin and the guitar case in Desperado is one of those connections that, once you see it, you genuinely cannot unsee it. Whether or not it was a conscious lift, it speaks to just how much Django seeped into the bloodstream of action cinema in the years that followed. The gore surprised me a little on this watch, if I'm honest, but it earns its place rather than feeling like showboating. It is a film that knows exactly what it is and commits to it without apology. Sometimes that is all you need.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 1966  | Watched: 2025-04-13

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More with Franco Nero: The Last Alchemist (2012)
More from Italy: Nightmare City (1980) · Cemetery Man (1994) · One Way or Another (1975) · Chicken for Linda! (2023)
More from the 1960s: Viy (1967) · Persona (1966) · Carnival of Souls (1962) · Daisies (1966)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More western: The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Rio Bravo (1959) · Ride Lonesome (1959) · The Great Train Robbery (1903)