“Django, Kill” (1967)
This surreal, not-quite-sequel to Corbucci’s original “Django” is part of a series of films that unofficially continue the legacy/capitalize on the success of Nero’s coffin-carrying antihero. Giulio Questi (“Death Laid an Egg”) directs this especially surreal follow-up, and Tomas Milian plays Django’s stand-in, “The Stranger.” Questi’s film is distinct from Corbucci’s insofar as it’s more excessive. As in Corbucci’s film, “Django, Kill” follows an amoral wanderer whose presence in a small town is the active catalyst for two local gangs to go after each other. But in “Kill,” the Stranger is fleeing from men that seek to kill him. Questi takes great pains to establish that Milian’s character is escaping one ordeal for a greater one: the men that are trying to kill him are brutally dispatched as soon as they arrive in town. In fact, Questi’s zeal for establishing the vicious nature of his gangs is apparent where one gang shows one of the Stranger’s pursuers ripped apart (by hand!) after he’s been shot up. They do this because they think the dying man’s been shot with gold bullets. Questi’s thugs are more decadent and more voraciously bankrupt than most others, as is shown/implied when one gang-rapes a young boy. After being forcibly recruited by the gang in question, the boy is surrounded by guffawing, drunken men (whose unbuttoned black shirts make them look like Billy Jack-themed male strippers), and then savagely taken. “Django, Kill” is in that sense indicative of the spaghetti western’s tendency towards creating monsters that are often more memorable than their counter-balancing (anti-)heroes.
“The Great Silence” (1968)
Sergio Corbucci pops up on this list twice because, with the exception of Sergio Leone, few other filmmakers pushed the limits of the spaghetti western as far. While Corbucci’s “Django” is about a gun-fighting stranger’s interactions with a town with no sense of community, “The Great Silence” only seems more traditional in that it follows an endangered community in need of a champion/defender. Beyond that set-up, “The Great Silence” is one of the most bleak spaghetti westerns, a film where the Law is protected by a cabal of bounty hunters led by Klaus Kinski. Set in Utah during the Great Blizzard of 1899, “The Great Silence” follows a legendary killer (Jean-Louis Trintignant, recently in “Amour”) that’s hired to avenge the death of one woman’s husband. Trintignant’s Silence is already a victim of the Law, having watched his parents legally murdered. So he’s automatically sympathetic to the widow’s request. Bear in mind: Mormons are, as an opening intertitle says, outlaws according to national law. So the real villain in the film isn’t Kinski’s leering villain but rather the implacable Law that says that a peaceful community can be murdered with impunity. Corbucci is, however, also fascinated by the idea that Kinski’s character, like Trintignant, who only shoots after provoking people to draw on him, can be a deputized lawman. That essentially amoral, and potentially vile aspect of bounty-hunting is also one of Tarantino’s thematic concerns in “Django Unchained.”
“Tepepa” (1969)
“Tepepa” is not only a superior Zapata spaghetti westerns, but also the rare western that stars Orson Welles. A slant-eyed and Fu Manchu-mustachioed Welles plays an oafishly evil aristocrat to counter Tomas Milian’s wiley scavenger hero. As with many Zapata westerns, a sub-genre named after real-life revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, “Tepepa” cynically concludes that any position of power is inherently corrupting. Milian’s character becomes disillusioned when he realizes that he’s only overthrown one tyrant for the sake of instating a new one. And yet, while everybody betrays Milian’s character, including Henry Price (John Steiner), a stoic, and seemingly upstanding German doctor, nobody comes out of the film looking good. Even Milian’s character is revealed to be, after a fashion, corrupt, leaving the film’s concluding ra ra go revolutionary scene much more ambivalent than it seems. To start over again, and really become revolutionary, everybody has to die, and the only surviving thing left has to be rhetoric. So the film ends with an image of a cavalcade of revolutionaries, led by a fanatic little boy, charging into the sunset. It’s a weirdly hopeful image for one of the most bitterly cynical, and radical spaghetti westerns.Quentin Tarantino’s recent comments about John Ford, and his post-Newtown comments about how “Django Unchained” follows in a “Shakespearean” tradition of represented violence, have predictably gotten a lot of people grumbling. Then again, Tarantino’s never been as articulate a defender of his movies as his fans would like him to be (hearing Tarantino splutter about “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” in “A Decade Under the Influence” or rant about “Chungking Express” for his Rolling Thunder introduction is especially hard if you even like some of his movies). But Tarantino’s latest is also understandably attracting a lot of attention because it’s indebted to both spaghetti westerns and “slavesploitation” films. Unlike respectable, and respectful, movies about slavery, like “Roots,” slavesploitation films are by definition movies that offer crassly exploitative representations of oppressed slave protagonists. Tarantino’s revisionist action-comedy is inspired by such movies as “Mandingo,” which became controversial because of its titillating fixation with savage over-seers, over-sexed plantation owners, and nigh-superheroic field hands.
This list is not intended to reflect the “best” of the slavesploitation genre for a couple of reasons. Practically speaking, it’s hard to track down copies of films like “Slaves,” a now-impossible-to-find 1969 drama starring and scored by Dionne Warwick. It’s harder still to qualitatively evaluate many of these films since they are all to some extent hard to watch. Still, since slavesploitation narratives are a primary source of inspiration of Tarantino, here are a couple of noteworthy examples. They are organized chronologically.
