Over the last few installments I’ve brought up the obvious influence that Sergio Leone and Kurosawa had on Quentin Tarantino.
This week I use those observations—as well as the all the talk about his next film—as a springboard to watch the 1966 Spaghetti Western, Django.
The movie opens with the anti-hero Django dragging a coffin slowly through the mud while a loud, jangling pop song plays over the scene and it instantly reminds me of the intro to my favorite Tarantino flick, Jackie Brown.
What plays out is a story not all too different from Fistful of Dollars/Yojimbo—our gunslinger wanders into the middle of a heated war between a former, Confederate major and a pack of Mexican banditos. Caught in the middle is an innkeeper and his small, helpless group of prostitutes. Django doesn’t really seem to pick one side, at least not for very long, and proves to be as untrusting as the films bad guys. Like a lot of anti-heroes it’s all about the big payday until the last act when something (usually a woman) brings out the good in him.
Where this movie takes a sharp turn away from Fistful/Yojimbo is in its characters. Leone and Kurosawa filled those films with some larger than life characters but were, for the most part, grounded in some semblance of reality. Django side steps reality, even skips over an amped up hyper-reality and goes straight for batshit, comic book levels of spectacle.
Take Django for example. He’s a silent, brooding cowboy in the Man With No Name mold. What sets him apart is the coffin he drags around with him because, oh yeah, that’s where he keeps his friggin’ gatling gun!
The villains also range from cartoonish stereotypes (observe the bandito, complete with bushy mustache and crossed bullet bandoliers) to downright sinister. The latter distinction is held by the Confederate Major Jackson likes skeet shooting…with Mexican peasants.
Jackson and his thugs also amplified the racism that’s implied in a lot of bad, Southern men in fiction set around or during the Civil War. They march through the town to kill Django with their red, Ku Klux Klan-like masks and their crosses all ablaze.
The scene is at once haunting and a dazzling bit of pulp excess. The rules of the typical shoot-out are thrown out the door because, oh yeah, he’s got a friggin’ gatling gun in his coffin!
Jackson and his men, as far as I can tell, is where Tarantino’s inspiration for the plot of his next film begins and ends, that is to say, he plans on having a character named Django put lots of bullet holes in a bunch of racist Southerners.
Though his hero will be a freed slave and the plot will involve a German bounty hunter and a slaver-owner who uses slaves for death matches and prostitution, Tarantino is also borrowing—apparently—from an old Spaghetti Western tradition of just using the name Django in the title. Wikipedia tells me that there are loads of “sequels” to Django that aren’t actually sequels at all. Basically filmmakers used the name to cash in on the success of the original, just like in New York there are, like, a million Ray’s Pizza’s, all with slightly different names.
The rest of the movie, which follows a typical steal gold from the bad guys with some other bad guys and than steal it from those bad guys also plot. While on the whole the story isn’t anything too imaginative after Jackson’s legion of Mexican-hating crusaders are turned into Swiss cheese, the flick has its fair share of crazy cool pulp moments—especially the finale—that make it a lot more fun to watch than it probably would have been if it was played straight.
Also: A dude gets his ear cut off. Then they put the ear in his mouth. Then they shoot him in the back.
Take that, Mr. Blonde!
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