Under the Influence: Django Unchained

It was the fag end of the sepia seventies and, after two decades in the sun, the Italian Western genre was staggering, gut shot and waiting to die. Then along came Enzo G. Castellari’s Keoma, a moody, wind-whipped masterpiece of operatic violence and beauty. It was the last great Spaghetti Western, a sub-genre born when Leone’s Dollars Trilogy blazed a trail through the early sixties, followed by Sergio Corbucci’s original Django (1966) and The Great Silence (1968). This year we have Tarantino’s Django Unchained and you can be sure that Italian blood runs through its veins. Quentin is a very big fan you see. And perhaps in those thirty years since, the scorched earth left by those Latin mavericks is finally ready to yield again.

The joy in Tarantino movies is often in the spotting of his obscure genre references. This time the fun begins with the poster artwork, which tips its hat to a cult western – in this case not Django but Red Sun, a Wild West samurai, blades and bullets mash-up starring international all-stars Toshiro Mifune, Charles Bronson and Alain Delon. The film itself will surely see regurgitated dialogue and camera angles alongside scenes cannibalised wholesale from the classics Quentin covets. With Tarantino cinema chases its tail. The Italians, by contrast, looked both further afield and deeper within themselves. Leone took much aesthetic influence from fine art while Corbucci delivered delicious visual symbolism, such as Django’s title character's ferocious gatling gun dragged along in his coffin; death wrapped in death. Many were obviously influenced by Italian opera’s violent melodrama and exaggerated grotesques. All tied together of course by the sweeping emotive music of Morricone and others.

Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde and those other easy riders and raging bulls of the Hollywood revolution take much credit for the slow-mo tango of extreme heroic bloodshed, but the Italians beat them to it with films oozing more claret than a cornerman’s sponge. They would nonchalantly fill a man with bullets and, in the case of Django Kill!, garishly rip them back out. This violent cynicism was so intrinsic to their art, whether feeding from post war pessimism or reflecting on Europe’s bubbling political tensions. If Eskimos have 21 words for snow then why can’t exploitation directors give us, what Alex Cox numbers, 10,000 ways for a man to die? 

American directors were keen to sanitise the West; the Italians cynically dragged it through the mud and shit. Each nation projected an equally mythic representation at opposite ends of the scale. Perhaps there was a deeper pessimism in the Italian psyche, or perhaps it’s just easier to denigrate another land’s past (even as a metaphor for your own present). The American classics of John Ford and Howard Hawks were literally clean cut interpretations, favouring clean-shaven, morally straightforward heroes played by the likes of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. The Latin films played more rough and ready. A bristly Franco Nero was the dark antihero in Django, and as a positively bear-like Keoma even more so. I often think that a study of western cynicism in relation to facial hair would be time well spent. Only Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West frustratingly disproves my theory: he was clean as a whistle and bad as a motherfucker. Hopefully Christophe Waltz’s bushy chops and DiCaprio’s sneering facial fuzz herald Django Unchained as a pitiless bloodbath.

Those two stars, alongside Jamie Foxx and Kerry Washington, have much to live up to. The Dollars Trilogy featured a TV co-star who ‘felt lucky’ and went on to become a legend. Django made Franco Nero an international star, one which would perhaps have shone brighter had he been American. For Keoma, Castellari surrounded himself with tough, seasoned veterans of the genre: the blue-eyed Nero and Woody Strode, one third of Leone’s patient, doomed assassins at the beginning of his magnum opus Once Upon a Time in the West. Tarantino gives Nero a momentary cameo but mostly casts newcomers to the genre – thankfully names you would expect to be more than up to the job.

Tarantino himself may be climbing into the saddle in the near future, if rumours are to be believed. Enzo Castellari has grand plans for a new Western and Quentin and friends are earmarked as the villains. Until then we’ll make do with Django Unchained, what may be his great Western (and I had thought that was Inglorious Basterds – his remake of a sort of Castellari’s original warsploitation). So, expect zooming, personal close-ups of narrowed eyes breaking dramatically through into dreams and memories. Expect dark flashbacks lingering around characters like purgatory. But most of all, expect blood and bullets.

Those who judge Tarantino as a magpie must remember that Leone, the master, took his influence from Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo – Kurosawa in turn borrowing from Dashiell Hammett’s 1929 novel Red Harvest. It’s all a merry-go-round you see, a cross pollination of ideas and border spanning influences. Nothing exists in a vacuum and so Tarantino is but one more link in the Django chain.