(this review is taken and translated from the Italian newspaper Unita)
An Italo-Spanish western, as according to custom, Sergio Corbucci’s Django rebuilds – with some major adjustments – a familiar story. The protagonist is a lonely gunman out for revenge, sullen and taciturn, a stranger to barbers and to soap: what’s new is that he drags a coffin behind him, in which resides not a corpse but a machine gun which is used at opportune moments with immediate dexterity, so much so that, at times, you can’t even count the dead.
And that, essentially, is the heart of the story. The way his enemies come to be killed by him, and the exceptional number of them that there are makes the film, in its very seriousness, truly bloodcurdling. It’s a level of atrocity that is dismayingly justified in the emotions of the audience. But this repetition of excessive cruelty, in it’s sheer extent and verisimilitude, transfers the film from a realistic plane to the grotesque, with the result that here and there it is possible to find, among the emotions, a certain healthy amount of humour.