Review of Django (1966) by John M — 23 Mar 2012

Great, but with a caveat. Django (Franco Nero) is a mysterious cowboy with a muddy coffin in tow. He comes to a town that is about ten corpses away from being a ghost town, and opportunistically gets involved with the surrounding groups, one being a variant of Klansmen and the other some Mexican Revolutionaries, all while trying to make a profit for himself.

I watched this years ago, and the one thing I could never get past is some of the worst dubbing I've ever seen in a Spaghetti Western; everybody's passable, but the guy they got to dub over Franco Nero is incredibly wimpy and inappropriate, which is an unforgivable sin.

If you don't know who Nero is, he's like Clint Eastwood's The Man with No Name's long lost brother: just as badass with an aura of mystery around him, but arguably more so because you've never seen him before.

So this time around, instead of suffering through that jarring flaw, I decides to just bite the bullet and watch it in Italian with English subtitles, and it's an entirely different experience. I love Spaghetti Westerns, and if you do too, you should go out of your way to check this out (without the dubbing, you'll thank me later).

It's not as high in quality as the Sergio Leone classics, as some of the suspense building and action scenes aren't as cleanly put together, but there's so many great moments, you'll be glad you watched it.

If you love Leone's films and are sad because you thought that was the end of the Golden age of Westerns, may I highly recommend you check out the library of Sergio Corbucci.