Often considered a second-rate Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci made some of the finest Italian Westerns of the 1960s, including this cult classic. While not possessing the grandiose widescreen beauty of the Dollars trilogy (1964-66) or Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Django is a smaller and much grungier affair.
With its laconic anti-hero and central plot of a gunfighter caught between two warring factions, Django obviously owes much to A Fistful of Dollars (1964). However, Django makes the violence of that film seem relatively tame: in this movie we see a woman being stripped and viciously flogged, as well as the infamous moment where a curate has his ear cut off and is forced to eat it. (Even Tarantino didn't go that far thirty years later...) Corbucci also outdoes Clint Eastwood's beating in Fistful by having his hero's hands bashed to a bloody pulp by the end of a rifle. (This moment may or may not be the origin of the film's title, in which case it would be a fairly sick joke.)
Sporting stunning production design by Carlo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) Simi, Django takes place in a sea of mud, an adequate setting for the film's villains: a gang of hood-wearing sadists whose appearance and behaviour recall the Klu-Klux Klan.
Corbucci would go on to direct the even more impressive The Big Silence (1967), although he would always live under Leone's shadow and remain a director of cheap Italian exploitation.
With its laconic anti-hero and central plot of a gunfighter caught between two warring factions, Django obviously owes much to A Fistful of Dollars (1964). However, Django makes the violence of that film seem relatively tame: in this movie we see a woman being stripped and viciously flogged, as well as the infamous moment where a curate has his ear cut off and is forced to eat it. (Even Tarantino didn't go that far thirty years later...) Corbucci also outdoes Clint Eastwood's beating in Fistful by having his hero's hands bashed to a bloody pulp by the end of a rifle. (This moment may or may not be the origin of the film's title, in which case it would be a fairly sick joke.)
Sporting stunning production design by Carlo (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) Simi, Django takes place in a sea of mud, an adequate setting for the film's villains: a gang of hood-wearing sadists whose appearance and behaviour recall the Klu-Klux Klan.
Corbucci would go on to direct the even more impressive The Big Silence (1967), although he would always live under Leone's shadow and remain a director of cheap Italian exploitation.