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return false;" st_processed="no" style="float:left"></span> <span class="st_email" st_title="In honor of ‘Django Unchained,’ a look at a dozen spaghetti Westerns worth your time" st_url="http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/" id="top" displaytext="" style="float:left"></span> <span style="padding:5px 0px 17px 5px; border-left:1px solid #CCCCCC;"></span> <span class="st_facebook_hcount" st_title="In honor of ‘Django Unchained,’ a look at a dozen spaghetti Westerns worth your time" st_url="http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/" id="top" displaytext="" style="float:left;"></span> <span class="st_twitter_hcount" st_title="In honor of ‘Django Unchained,’ a look at a dozen spaghetti Westerns worth your time" st_url="http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/" id="top" displaytext="" style="float:left;" st_via="dallasnews"></span> <span class="st_plusone_hcount" st_title="In honor of ‘Django Unchained,’ a look at a dozen spaghetti Westerns worth your time" st_url="http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/" id="top" displaytext="" style="float:left;"></span> <span style="padding:5px 0px 17px 5px; border-left:1px solid #CCCCCC;"></span> <span class="st_sharethis" st_title="In honor of ‘Django Unchained,’ a look at a dozen spaghetti Westerns worth your time" st_url="http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/" id="top" displaytext="" style="float:left"></span> <span style="float:right;"><a href="#commentzone">comments (<fb:comments-count href="http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/"></fb:comments-count>)</a></span> </div> <div class="entry-meta"> <div style="float:left; margin-right:10px;"><img alt="" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309im_/http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/298d96ed487ff1307ba29d4b91f601fd?s=52&d=http%3A%2F%2Fres.dallasnews.com%2Fresources%2Fimages%2Fdmn.jpg%3Fs%3D52&r=G" class="avatar avatar-52 photo" height="52" width="52"/></div><div style="float:left;"><span class="sep">By </span><span class="by-author"><span class="author vcard"><a class="url fn n" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/author/entweb/" title="View all posts by Guide Live Group" rel="author">Guide Live Group</a></span></span><br><span class="author email"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/mailto:"entweb@dallasnews.com"">entweb@dallasnews.com</a></span><br><span class="sep"></span><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/" title="3:11 pm" rel="bookmark"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2012-12-26T15:11:01+00:00" pubdate>3:11 pm on December 26, 2012 </time></a><span class="sep"> | </span><span class="author permalink"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/">Permalink</a></span></div> </div> </header> <div class="entry-content"> <p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/django1966/" rel="attachment wp-att-19489"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-19489" title="django1966" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309im_/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2012/12/django1966.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="444"/></a><em>By Howery Pack, Special Contributor</em></p> <p>Quentin Tarantino once said in a 1994 interview with Britain’s <em>Empire</em> magazine: “I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don’t do homages.”</p> <p>If Tarantino is a favorite of yours, you may want to check out some of the innumerable movies from which he has stolen. The title character in <em>Django Unchained</em> is rooted in a 1966 Italian-made Western, starring Franco Nero, who makes a cameo appearance in the new film. But Tarantino has repeatedly referenced European or “spaghetti” Westerns in his work.</p> <p><span id="more-19488"></span></p> <p>This is not your grandfather’s horse opera. The spaghetti Western subgenre supplanted the “peplum,” or sword-and-sandal, movies (such as 1959’s <em>Hercules Unchained</em>) that had been all the rage in Italy. European Westerns had existed for years, but the genre was kick-started by Sergio Leone’s <em>A Fistful of Dollars</em> (1964) — the first film in the director’s Man With No Name trilogy, starring Clint Eastwood. <em>A Fistful of Dollars</em> earned so much money in Italy that everyone wanted to get into the spaghetti.</p> <p>Hundreds of Italian Westerns were made between the mid-’60s and mid-’70s, the era in which they flourished. Imitation was the sincerest form of profit. Author Sir Christopher Frayling says there were 20 Djangos between 1966 and 1974; if movies that were retitled to cash in on the vogue are included, there were more than 30. Some examples: <em>Django Shoots First</em>; <em>Django, the Last Killer</em>; <em>Hanging for Django</em>; and <em>Django … Adios!</em></p> <p>Oft-repeated mini-franchise protagonists besides Django included Ringo, Sabata, Sartana and Trinity.</p> <p>Many of the pictures were filmed in Almeria in southern Spain. The movies are typically marked by obvious low budgets, mindless violence, outlandish plots centered on greed and revenge, a paradoxical mix of anti-clericalism and Christian symbolism and (in the English-language versions) poor dubbing.</p> <p>Titles, as well as the plots, could get monotonous: <em>Blood for a Silver Dollar</em>; <em>Coffin Full of Dollars</em>; <em>A Dollar Between the Teeth; A Few Dollars for Django; A Fistful of Dynamite; A Fistful of Lead</em>; and so on.</p> <p>In 2007, fan-boy Tarantino presented a retrospective of 32 spaghetti Westerns at the Venice Film Festival. Following is a look at a dozen of the best — or at least the weirdest — among the 32. Hints of several of these pictures can be found in <em>Django Unchained</em>.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/" target="_blank">DJANGO</a></strong> (1966, dir. Sergio Corbucci): Corbucci is perhaps second only to Leone as a master of the genre. (The title character was apparently named after jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt.) Union veteran Django is a horseless hero who drags a coffin behind him, like a travois. This casket is a box of tricks. In an opening scene that mirrors a Gospel story (mass killings, notwithstanding), Django encounters members of two opposing groups: the cross-burning “racists,” red-hooded minions of Maj. Jackson, an extortionist who kills Mexicans for sport; and the revolutionary soldiers of Gen. Rodriguez. Much of the action takes place in a tiny, mud-laden town whose sole inhabitants work at a saloon/brothel. The story ends with a prayer, a cross and a shootout in a cemetery. (One of the extras on the Blue Underground DVD, an interview with Franco Nero and <em>Django</em> assistant director Ruggero Deodato, is a laugh a minute.)</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/djangokill/" rel="attachment wp-att-19490"><img class="wp-image-19490 alignright" title="djangokill" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309im_/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2012/12/djangokill.jpg" alt="" width="214" height="317"/></a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062082/" target="_blank">DJANGO KILL</a></strong> (1967, dir. Giulio Questi): This much-censored movie has been called by <em>Entertainment Weekly</em> “one of the bloodiest and most bizarre” spaghetti Westerns. The original title of this surreal tale was <em>If You Live, Shoot</em>, but it was renamed to take advantage of the Django craze. A “half-breed” Hispanic criminal, simply called the Stranger, and his Mexican allies are double-crossed by Anglo cohorts, and he trails his enemies to a town that Indians call the Unhappy Place, all of whose citizens are apparently insane. Two scenes — of multiple slayings at a mass grave, and of bullet-ridden corpses hanging upside down — surely stirred bitter memories of Italy’s Fascist past. (Questi was a World War II resistance fighter.) Among the other Grand Guignol highlights: Golden bullets are extracted in close-up from a dying crook’s body; an old Native American is scalped by whites in front of a group of white children; the hero is bound in a cruciform position in a cell filled with bats and other critters. (Another of the gruesome sequences is alluded to in <em>Cowboys & Aliens</em>.) There are touches of <em>Macbeth</em> and <em>Jane Eyre</em>. A gang of ambiguously gay outlaws dresses alike in Fascist black. One Indian uses a blowgun! The action also closes in a cemetery. Franco Arcalli, the writer-editor, worked on <em>Last Tango in Paris</em>. In a Blue Underground DVD extra, Cuban-born American star Tomas Milian calls this film “the cult of cult.”</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062151/" target="_blank">VIVA DJANGO</a></strong> (1968, dir. Ferdinando Baldi; aka <em>Django, Prepare a Coffin</em>, and not to be confused with 1971′s <em>Viva! Django</em>): In this prequel, our hero (Terence Hill) is a hangman who fakes the executions of wrongfully accused men. His scheme is for these “ghosts” to exact revenge upon those who framed them for murder, and upon a crooked politician and his accomplice, who were responsible for the death of Mrs. Django five years earlier. But the ghosts, most of whom aren’t exactly solid citizens, have some ideas of their own. Co-starring another cemetery.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064273/" target="_blank">AND GOD SAID TO CAIN</a></strong> (1970, dir. Antonio Margheriti): His life sentence commuted after he has served 10 years on a false charge, Gary Hamilton (Klaus Kinski, later world-renowned for this work with director Werner Herzog) vows revenge on Acombar, the now-wealthy man who not only framed him but also stole his home and his woman. Margheriti was known for his horror movies, and that propensity shows here. In the lengthy, eerie nighttime sequence of this Western, as a tornado approaches, Hamilton lures Acombar’s army of henchmen, his would-be killers, by ringing a doleful church bell. Hamilton isn’t a man, one of the gunmen says, he’s “a monster from hell.” Acombar has one redeeming quality: his love for his son, a visiting West Point cadet. There is a nod to Orson Welles’ <em>The Lady From Shanghai</em>.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/big-gundown/" rel="attachment wp-att-19491"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-19491" title="big-gundown" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309im_/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2012/12/big-gundown.jpg" alt="" width="198" height="312"/></a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063501/" target="_blank">THE BIG GUNDOWN</a></strong> (1966, dir. Sergio Sollima): The action is almost nonstop in this “political Western,” another of Tarantino’s absolute favorites, according to a list he made for the website Spaghetti Western Database. A bounty hunter (Lee Van Cleef, he of the keen, human-snake features) is urged by an ambitious wealthy Texan to seek fame by capturing a fugitive peon (Milian), a former Juarez supporter aptly named Cuchillo. (The latter can handle bolas as well as a knife.) Cuchillo has allegedly raped and killed a 12-year-old girl. It is no spoiler to say that things aren’t what they seem.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066612/" target="_blank">COMPAÑEROS</a></strong> (1970, dir. Corbucci): Another fine example of the political Western, albeit a comic one. The plot commingles an arms dealer called the Swede (Nero); Vasco (Milian), a Che-like, Basque-born peon with a Mastroianni facial tic who has revolution thrust upon him; John (Jack Palance), a roach-smoking American baddie with a falcon and a wooden right hand; a pacifist professor (Buñuel favorite Fernando Rey); and Gen. Mongo (José Bódalo, playing essentially the same demagogic role he had played in <em>Django</em>). One trifling criticism might be that Palance’s overdubbed American immigrant accent jumps all over the map. Aficionados will spot allusions to <em>Django</em> and Leone’s <em>For a Few Dollars More</em> and <em>The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</em>. Ennio Morricone’s marvelous score blends Gregorian chant and reggae.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061563/" target="_blank">THE DIRTY OUTLAWS</a></strong> (1967; dir. Franco Rossetti): The director of this fascinating adventure was the co-writer of <em>Django</em> and <em>Viva Django</em>. In the waning days of the Civil War, Steve, or “Desperado” (“the terror of Texas”), steals the identity of a dying Confederate officer, in order to deceive and rob the Reb’s blind father (Piero Lulli, also in <em>Django Kill</em> and <em>Shanghai Joe</em>), who hasn’t been in contact with the son for three years. Steve arrives in a dreary town that is deserted (due to a cholera epidemic) except for the father and his pretty care-giver. But Steve is surprised by the appearance of an old associate, a beautiful outlaw whose menacing gang has its eyes on a different, more ambitious target. Could be time for a change of plan. The Confederate good guys in this film are a rarity. This one is also highly rated by Tarantino.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/keoma/" rel="attachment wp-att-19492"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-19492" title="keoma" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309im_/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2012/12/keoma.jpg" alt="" width="214" height="317"/></a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074740/" target="_blank">KEOMA</a></strong> (1976, dir. Enzo G. Castellari): The sun was setting on the Italian Western by the time this flashback-heavy movie was released. The main villain here, an ex-Confederate mine owner, has a novel way of taking over the town: He and his private army of Rebs lay siege to it during a “plague,” so that sick citizens can’t get food or medicine. Keoma (Franco Nero), a “half-breed” Indian and adopted son of a legendary gunslinger, returns from the Union army to find that his three white adoptive brothers are complicit in the scheme. He is aided against the bad guys by the former family slave (Woody Strode), an archer-banjoist-alcoholic. In one scene, Keoma, like the main character in <em>Django Kill</em>, is bound in a cruciform position. But here Keoma’s Indian mother-figure joins him in a rainy Stabat Mater tableau. The other main female character, the beautiful heroine, is pregnant, and the final shoot-’em-up scene gives new meaning to the term “difficult birth.” The soundtrack, in which singers attempt in vain to imitate Buffy Sainte-Marie and Leonard Cohen, may be intolerable for some.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069159/" target="_blank">A REASON TO LIVE, A REASON TO DIE</a></strong> (1972, dir. Tonino Valerii; aka <em>Massacre at Fort Holman</em>): Mediocre <em>Dirty Dozen</em> imitation with James Coburn as disgraced Union Col. Pembroke, who has inexplicably surrendered a New Mexico fort — without firing a shot — to Telly Savalas, the world’s only skinhead Confederate officer. A small group of men is saved from the Union gallows by Pembroke, in exchange for their going on a commando mission to retake the fort. The true motives for Pembroke’s actions are eventually revealed. Bud Spencer co-stars in a film that begins after it ends, with an intriguing prologue. Savalas’ screen time is a mere few minutes. Valerii had worked as Leone’s assistant director.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060777/" target="_blank">THE RUTHLESS FOUR</a></strong> (1968, dir. Giorgio Capitani): A gold miner (Van Heflin), who has been betrayed by a partner, seeks another he can trust (George Hilton) – but unexpectedly winds up with two more (Kinski and Gilbert Roland) and guides the others to a rich, secret vein that he’s struck. Nobody trusts anybody in a story that brings to mind <em>The Treasure of the Sierra Madre</em>, which was in turn inspired by a Chaucerian tale. Kinski portrays a milk-drinking phony preacher. (A 1985 <em>Playboy</em> interview with Kinski bore the headline: “Is this man of strange and explosive power really the world’s greatest actor?” A pity we hear voice-over actors, and not Kinski himself, in these pictures.) Masterful performances by old pros Heflin and Roland distinguish this film.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068954/" target="_blank">SHANGHAI JOE</a></strong> (1973, dir. Mario Caiano): A weak rip-off of the <em>Kung Fu</em> TV series, right down to the flashback sequence and the rogue-monk villain. But this is far more graphic. A Chinese immigrant and martial-arts master (Chen Lee) dreams of becoming a Texas cowboy, faces racism and danger at every turn and finds himself unwillingly asked to help transport Mexican slaves. The English dialogue contains more racial slurs than … well, than a Quentin Tarantino movie. Among other colorful antagonists are Kinski as the fetishistic Scalper Jack, and former bodybuilder Gordon Mitchell as Buryin’ Sam (as opposed to Marryin’ Sam, who was in an earlier Mitchell picture). Listen carefully for a line from Leone’s <em>A Fistful of Dollars</em>.</p> <p><strong><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/2012/12/in-honor-of-django-unchained-a-look-at-a-dozen-spaghetti-westerns-worth-your-time.html/theycallmetrinity/" rel="attachment wp-att-19493"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-19493" title="theycallmetrinity" src="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309im_/http://popcultureblog.dallasnews.com/files/2012/12/theycallmetrinity.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="284"/></a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20130105120309/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067355/" target="_blank">THEY CALL ME TRINITY</a></strong> (1970, dir. Enzo Barboni; aka <em>My Name is Trinity</em>): This disheveled and durable character makes his grand entrance lying on a travois, asleep. (Critics have noticed the similarity between this opening scene and one from Laurel and Hardy’s <em>Way Out West</em>.) In this comedy-Western hit, criminal half brothers Bambino (Bud Spencer), who has stolen the identity of a sheriff, and Trinity (Terence Hill) — for decidedly non-altruistic reasons — aid a group of incongruously pacifistic “Mormons” against an evil rancher (Farley Granger) and a bandido leader named Mezcal. Writer-director Barboni served as cinematographer for <em>Django</em>. Both Leone and Corbucci criticized this farce. But for decades Hill and Spencer have ridden high on the success of this film and its even more lucrative sequel, <em>Trinity Is Still My Name</em>. (By the way, Franco Nero look-alike Hill was born Mario Girotti, and former Olympic swimmer Spencer used to be Carlo Pedersoli.) <em>Django Unchained</em> uses the theme song from this movie.</p> <p style="text-align: center;"><strong>* * *</strong></p> <p>To profit from an unsolicited tie-in to <em>Django Unchained</em>, an inevitable flood of new Django releases has already started. Spaghetti Western DVDs, boxed sets and videocassettes are generally priced to move. (But things change: One set that contains 10 films, including two featuring Django, was selling for $5 at Amazon.com in August and is now going for $44.98.) Before buying, be sure to read the online user reviews, wherever possible, to ascertain the picture and sound quality of the movie you’re after — and, of course, whether it’s a bomb. There may be a better or longer (which usually means better) print available. Keep in mind that the same film may be for sale under different titles. 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