Django

Director: Sergio Corbucci

1966 / 91min / DCP

After cutting his teeth on sword-and-sandals péplum, Corbucci—widely considered second only to Sergio Leone in the canon of Spaghetti Western auteurs—had his commercial breakthrough with this stark, brutal horse opera set on the Mexico-US border, where Franco Nero’s blue-eyed drifter, introduced mysteriously dragging a coffin behind him, is caught up in clashes between ex-Confederate “Red Shirts” and Mexican revolutionaries. Produced in response to the success of Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars and, like that film, heavily inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Django nevertheless stands outside the shadow of its predecessors thanks to the whip-crack energy of Corbucci’s camera, Nero’s icy intensity, and Luis Bacalov’s eclectic, omnipresent soundtrack.