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Film / Django

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"Django, have you always been alone? Django, have you never loved again? Love will live on, oh-oh, life must go on, oh-oh, for you cannot spend your life regretting. Django, you must face another day. Django, now your love has gone away. Once you loved her, oh-oh, now you've lost her, oh-oh, but you lost her, forever Django."

A Spaghetti Western from 1966 directed by Sergio Corbucci starring Franco Nero as Django (the D is silent), an Old West gunfighter who drags a coffin behind him wherever he goes. Pretty standard set-up: mysterious, badass stranger comes to town, shoots a lot of bad guys, and plays two groups of outlaws against each other, all in search of revenge and/or money. It had a reputation at the time for being one of the most violent movies ever, though by modern standards it's nowhere close.

It inspired a number of other Spaghetti Westerns that also used the word "Django" in their titles, Italian copyright law being pretty lax on stuff like that. It had one proper sequel, Django Strikes Again, starring Nero and directed by Nello Rossati. Another, Django Lives! directed by John Sayles, is perpetually rumoured to be in production. And much later, it inspired both Sukiyaki Western Django and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained, which featured a cameo by Franco Nero. Django even had a Crossover with Sartana in 1970's Django Defies Sartana.


Examples:

  • Advertising by Association: Hilariously, the DVD cases have the director's name in tiny font, but say "The film that inspired Quentin Tarantino" - for unrelated Django Unchained - in massive letters, given how successful he and that film are now.
  • Arch-Enemy: Django has Major Jackson, the Confederate guerrilla who killed his wife.
  • Badass Longcoat: Django has one.
  • Banditos: Rodriguez's men.
  • Bar Slide: When Django arrives into the saloon.
  • Big Bad: Major Jackson and General Hugo Rodriguez are the leaders of the gangs at war with each other. Jackson wins.
  • Bittersweet Ending: Django wins the fight, but most of his allies are dead and Django himself is severely injured.
  • Black-and-Gray Morality: Django is willing to kill innocent soldiers to destroy the gangs he's after, but said gangs hunt people for sport and make them eat their own ears.
  • Bloodless Carnage: Except for a couple of isolated gore shots (including the infamous ear slicing scene), there's almost no blood in the movie. Literally dozens of people get gunned down, but there is no blood.
  • Cavalier Consumption: Eating food is given as a textbook example of villainy. Watch and learn.
  • Chekhov's Gun: That coffin Django's always carrying around, and that quicksand at the start of the movie.
  • Coffin Contraband: Django drags a coffin with a machine gun hidden inside behind him wherever he goes. Halfway through the movie he switches it up to use the coffin to smuggle out the Big Bad's stash of gold.
  • Contrived Coincidence: Considering how the Big Bad has a literal army at his command at the beginning of the film, it’s somewhat of an unusual (if not symbolic) coincidence that by the final scene there’s only six of them left, and Django can’t reload his six-shooter due to his injuries, meaning he has exactly one bullet left for each of his remaining foes.
  • Crippling the Competition: Bandits ride over Django's hands with horses in retaliation for stealing gold from them.
  • Cultural Translation: A minor case occurs in the last scene. In the Italian version, Major Jackson tells Django to pray, and then shoots at the four points of a cruciform tombstone while saying "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." In the English version, he still tells Django to pray, but the rest of his dialogue consists of him repeating things like "I can't hear you yet." This may be because the translators had a keener sense of religious differences among Americans: a Southerner (especially one affiliated with the pseudo-KKK) is not likely to use a Catholic formula like the Sign of the Cross.
  • Distracted by the Sexy: Django has a prostitute take off her clothes in front of a window which distracts the bandits guarding the stable where they're keeping the stolen gold. Django is then able to sneak in there taking along his coffin.
  • The Drifter: Django.
  • Ear Ache: See Gorn below.
  • Evil Plan: Major Jackson and General Ramirez have separate plans to take over the same small Western town. The ensuing Mob War drives the conflict.
  • Fanservice: Three words: hooker mud wrestling. Also, that one prostitute doing a forced striptease not even knowing she's being watched.
  • Fingore: Part of the Cold-Blooded Torture inflicted on Django by Hugo and his mooks, as punishment for betrayal, where his fingers (all of them) ends up being crushed by the butt of a rifle. It ends up becoming a plot point in the final duel where Django needs to figure out a way to gun down Jackson and his remaining mooks without using his fingers.
  • A Fistful of Rehashes: Loosely follows the basic Yojimbo plotline of a lone fighter pitting two warring gangs against each other.
  • Gorn: When some outlaws cut off a man's ear and make him eat it. That scene got the movie (which is otherwise no more violent than the average Spaghetti Western) banned in several countries. It's probably the most sadistic scene in the entire Western genre. It makes the violence in Sergio Leone's movies look tame.
  • Grievous Bottley Harm: Ricardo during his Bar Brawl with Django.
  • The Gunslinger: Django, of the Quick Draw and Trick Shot variety. Also acts as a Vaporizer when he pulls the machine gun out of his coffin.
  • Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Maria and a couple of the other prostitutes are quite loyal and compassionate.
  • Handicapped Badass: Django, after his hands are broken.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Django. Even when his hands are broken, he manages to kill six men using six bullets in far less than six seconds.
  • In Harm's Way: Surprisingly subverted. At first it may seem that Django is a typical The Drifter who will leave the town once he deals with all the bad guys, but then it becomes clear that his real goal is to settle down with a beloved woman.
  • Kick the Dog:
    • Major Jackson hunting a Mexican youth for sport.
    • General Rodriguez dragging a guy into the street, cutting his ear off, and shooting him In the Back. Later, he retaliates against Django betraying him by having his horse crush his hands.
  • No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: Django gets one at the hands of Hugo's men and the hooves of Hugo's horses.
  • No Woman's Land: All the women in the movie are prostitutes, and the outlaws work very hard to keep it that way.
  • Old Friend: General Hugo Rodriguez, the leader of the Mexican bandits, turns out to be an old friend of Django's.
  • One-Man Army: It helps that Django is the only person with a machine gun.
  • Perma-Stubble: Django
  • Protagonist Title: Django, the lone gunslinger who drags a coffin around behind him wherever he goes.
  • Quicksand Sucks: As Django learns, after losing the coffin and almost his life to it.
  • Roaring Rampage of Revenge: It's unclear how much of Django's violence is this and how much is his quest for gold.
  • Spaghetti Western: One of the most famous non-Leone examples of the Sub-Genre.
  • Super-Strength: The weight of machine guns from the 1880s was in the 60-lbs range. There was a serious reason they were fired from tripods. In the scene where he shoots the bottles at the bar, Django cradles it in his arms, without even flinching.

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