The spaghetti western masterpiece to which Tarantino paid tribute: "It blew my mind"

With it, Sergio Corbucci became one of the leading filmmakers of the genre, to whom he dedicated almost a dozen titles

El Debate

Belén Ester

July 27, 2025

When Sergio Corbucci directed Django he was 40 years old. He was not one of those child prodigies who were emerging throughout Italy with a new way of making films. No. He had directed with the comedian Totó half a dozen simple comedies such as Toto, Peppino y la dolce vita or The Two Officers, resounding dramas such as Supreme Confession and sandals and sand films such as Romulus and Remus or The Son of Spartacus, Steve Reeves' pure testosterone in loincloths. He had even directed horror and musicals.

That is why, when after the successful premiere in Italy and half of Europe of A Fistful of Dollars in 1964 and Death Had a Price in 1965 by Sergio Leone, Corbucci did not hesitate and joined the bandwagon of what would later be called spaghetti western and that for them was, without further ado, Another cowboy movie. What the Roman director did not imagine is that after his very modest foray into the genre with Massacre at the Grand Canyon and Minnesota Clay a couple of years earlier, with Django he would sign his definitive masterpiece and one of the most representative and magnificent films of that bastard and spurious genre that took years to be repaired.

In 1966, Corbucci released three films: Django, Joe, the Relentless and Johnny Oro which, on the one hand, was a turning point in his career and, on the other, further underlined the irregularity of his works, since the first is a jewel and the other two are only correct. Django tells the story of an enigmatic gunslinger who wanders aimlessly in the West dragging a no less enigmatic coffin and who arrives at a semi-abandoned town on the border. There he will face two violent factions and clashes for control of the place: the southerners of Colonel Jackson and the revolutionaries of General Rodríguez.

The first thing that caught the attention – and continues to attract – attention was the aesthetics of the film, devoid of all the epic of the western that had already been seen in Leone's films, but which here was much dustier and dirtier. More filthy. The characters are the antithesis of the hero, they are all violent and selfish. The violence itself is emphatic and stark, to such an extent that it seemed that, with Django, Corbucci was stripping the western of all its mythological epic to turn it into the purest epic of nihilism where the bad guys were bad, simply because they were.

The film unleashed a huge wave of followers and it did not take long to become iconic. Not surprisingly, this was the first title in a series of thirty titles around the main character played by Franco Nero. But many, of course, found it a sadistic and disgusting film that, without going any further, was banned in England for years. The scene in which General Rodríguez, played by the great José Bódalo, cuts off a prisoner's ear and forces him to eat it before killing him with a shot at point-blank range was too terrible for the narrative codes of the time.

However, there were those who always defended the violent and emphatic aesthetics of the filmmaker who was present in most of the spagehtti westerns he made later, such as The Merciless (1967), The Great Silence (1970), Wages to Kill (1968), The Specialist (1969) or The Companions (1970). One of its biggest defenders was always Quentin Tarantino who, to begin with, paid homage to the ear scene in his 1992 film, Reservoir Dogs and, of course, to the character of the disturbing gunslinger himself with the 2012 film, Django Unchained. Of this one he would say: "I wanted to make my own version of Django, not as a remake, but in spirit".

The filmmaker whom Tarantino defined as "the second best director of spaghetti westerns, after Leone", took years to be repaired and it was surely not until Django's rescue from a certain ostracism that Corbucci's name was not recognized as one of the best directors of the genre.

Because what Corbucci achieves with Django through the apparently simple story of a lonely and lethal vigilante, is the recreation of a crude and unjustified violence that exposes, without ambiguity, all the cruelty of the human being. And about this Tarantino would say again: "Corbucci's Django is so nihilistic, so violent, so murky and so politically committed that it blew my mind".

And it is that few films like Django achieved that aesthetic and formal madness that spaghetti western achieved: to show a certain beauty, a certain fatalistic and profoundly beautiful epic of violence. That continues to worry us. That we can't stop looking at.