Django – Unmerciful as the Sun / Sentenza di morte / Death Sentence

Nischekino

By Bluntwolf

July 19, 2024

It is four men who brutally murdered Django's brother a long time ago. Four men who are ambushed by the ice-cold, inhuman avenger, whose weaknesses he exploits in a heated game of cat and mouse to send them to the afterlife. Diaz, who leads a reclusive life as a rancher – Montero, a gambler who rules a small town with an iron fist – O'Hara, a white albino from trousers to hair, and Brother Baldwin, a religious fanatic who tortures the rural population in the garb of a priest. None of them stand a chance against Django! (Explosive Media)

Django is Mario Lanfranchi's only Italo Western, as he has made a name for himself with the direction of operas and his work for sophisticated television. According to Lanfranchi, Tomas Milian describes the film as one of the highlights of his career, but Milian stated in an interview with Nocturno magazine that his performance was the only highlight of the film, which is definitely due to Lanfranchi's statement and possibly represent a devaluation of the finished product. With an avenger who is after the four men who killed his brother, Django – Merciless as the Sun reels off one of the most ordinary of all Italo-Western plots. What clearly distinguishes the film from others of its kind, however, is its structure (with four separate acts), which makes it come across as a stage play or an anthology film. American actor Robin Clarke plays our avenger Cash (Django), whose brother was murdered while he was unable to prevent it due to his drunkenness.

In the first act, Cash pursues a rancher named Diaz (Richard Conte) through a desert landscape. Diaz has two pistols at his disposal, but no water, although Cash has water with him, but no weapon, which is why he holds back at first and provokes the dehydrating Diaz with his water supply and finally outplays him. This first act has two flashbacks, one per character: Cash's flashback shows how his brother was practically executed, while Diaz's tells how Cash arrives at his ranch and shoots all his men. Afterwards, the audience is thrown back to the present, where Cash builds a false well out of desert rock at night, which will eventually become Diaz's grave. This first episode represents a wonderful piece of work that proves to be very well told, neatly constructed and very densely laid out, thus representing the best part of the film. Richard Conte actually embodies a quite sympathetic villain who has probably worked hard after his crimes and led an honest life, so that the audience almost feels sorry for him when he is finally sent across the Tiber.

The villain of the second act, Montero (Enrico Maria Salerno), on the other hand, can be described as a contemptible person, because the professional card player likes to rob his opponents and enjoys being able to humiliate them. Cash uses the man's obsession to his advantage to engage him in a card game where it's literally all or nothing, namely life or death. This second part of the film is not as lively as the first episode, but Salerno embodies the compulsive gambler almost perfectly, while Lanfranchi came up with some remarkable camera angles and movements to keep the viewers interested. He also offers us a rather astonishing jump-cut of the bloodied corpse of a murdered young woman (Eleonora Brown, listed as Eleonor Brown) who had warned Cash about Mendoza's tricks. The director uses the technique of the jump cut more often and not always effectively, but in this scene the whole thing works wonderfully.

There is also nothing wrong with the third act – which is about the pious enforcer Brother Baldwin (Adolfo Celi), who terrorizes the surroundings with his private militia in the name of God – but it differs significantly from the other three, in which Cash exploits the weaknesses of his respective opponents to bring them down. Here he only manages to survive by cutting out the bullet that Brother Baldwin shot him in the leg and loading his empty revolver with it. In addition, the allegorical imagery and the Gothic atmosphere mark a clear change in tone and style. Adolfo Celi represents a Mussolini-like, grotesquely religious maniac, whose black-clad militia most likely alludes to Mussolini's Blackshirts (as do the black-clad homosexual cowboys from Kill, Django, 1967). This divergent, but visually quite convincing episode should work better if you look at it independently of the rest of the film. Perhaps this third act could even have been turned into a stand-alone, feature-length film...

In the fourth act, Tomas Milian plays a character who seems to be the opposite of Brother Baldwin, because it is the albino O'Hara, dressed completely in white, who is not interested in God at all, but only in the vile mammon, money and gold. In fact, he is so obsessed with gold that he can only fall in love with blonde women and freaks out when he spies her Goldilocks even from afar. This last episode is somehow difficult to enjoy. Milian's albino, who is plagued by epileptic seizures, has become too much of a caricature and to make matters worse, the actor also delivers the most exaggerated and outrageous performance of his career. His hydrogen blonde hair and his small nickel sunglasses are reminiscent of the German pop singer Heino, which is not exactly advantageous either. However, there are also people who are more positive about Tomas Milian's appearance in this film.

Django – Merciless as the Sun ultimately proves to be a rather interesting Italo Western, which was excellently filmed by Toni Secchi and can come up with a wonderful costume design as well as some surprising theatrical lighting effects. However, the flick is also quite long-winded at times, whereby the narrative structure of four separate acts doesn't always work to its advantage. In addition, Lanfranchi misses some opportunities regarding the character of the avenger: In the first episode, Diaz comes across with the surprising information that Cash's brother was not an innocent victim but was involved in a bank robbery and was then shot for trying to cheat on his four partners. This could have been the starting point for an exploration of both the revenge theme and Cash's character, but this point is never mentioned again in the further course of the film. Gianni Ferrios Music is very unusually jazzy, atmospheric, with a title song (The Last Game sung by Nevil Cameron), which is also out of the ordinary, but knows how to please.