Spaghetti Westerns by Howard Hughes Page B

pen with a wild bull, Walter Barnes as the disingenuous Brokston, a man prepared to twist the law to protect his family (and a forthcoming land deal), and Fernando Sancho, usually cast as a swaggering bandit, here portraying a Mexican officer who hates Mexican peasants and interfering Americans with equal relish. Sollima also includes some very interesting characters. Look out for an ex-gunslinger turned monk who is christened ‘Brother Smith and Wesson’ by his brethren, and the Austrian Baron, complete with monocle and no sense of humour, who has a specially designed, quick-draw holster, reinforcing his credo of ‘speed over accuracy’. Although these characters seem to be self-conscious attempts by Sollima to make his movie different from run-of-the-mill Spaghettis, the authenticity of the settings and costumes makes this one of the most convincing portrayals of the West on celluloid. Ennio Morricone’s music (including the title song ‘Run Man Run’) is a classic and is among his most popular scores. The final chase through the cane fields is one of the great Spaghetti Western set pieces, as the hounds are unleashed and Cuchillo runs for his life. After the heights of The Big Gundown , Sollima made an inferior sequel with Milian called Run Man Run (1968).

The Verdict
     
    As good as Spaghettis get. Though a decent print is as difficult to track down as Cuchillo himself, it’s well worth the effort.
Django Kill – If You Live, Shoot! (1967)
     
    Directed by: Giulio Questi
    Music by: Ivan Vandor
    Cast: Tomas Milian (The Stranger), Piero Lulli (Oaks), Roberto Camardiel (Zorro), Paco Sanz (Hagerman), Milo Quesada (Tembler)
115 minutes
     
Story
     
    Two Indian mystics find a half-dying stranger in the desert and nurse him back to health. He has been left for dead by his comrades, a bandit gang led by Oaks, who have stolen a Union gold shipment. Oaks and his men arrive in a violent town and are attacked and killed by the locals, led by Tembler the saloon-keeper and Hagerman the storekeeper. The pair then split the gold between them. The Stranger and the Indians arrive and decide to track down the haul, while a Mexican rancher named Zorro and his gang are also after the cache. The violence escalates until Hagerman kills Tembler and blames it on the Stranger, after the storekeeper has buried the gold in the cemetery. Zorro captures and crucifies the Stranger (in a cell full of vampire bats), but the Stranger frees himself and defeats Zorro and his gang. Hagerman now has all the gold and hides it in a beam in his house, but the building catches fire and he dies, gilded in molten gold, leaving the Stranger to ride out with nothing.

Background
     
    Over the years Django Kill has gained a reputation as the most violent Spaghetti Western and, though the film has tempered with age, it’s still one of the oddest genre contributions. Several filmmakers in the sixties and seventies experimented with the form of the Western, with varying degrees of success. Maverick artist Andy Warhol made Lonesome Cowboys (1968), predictably with the emphasis on transvestites, bisexuality and camp parody; Dennis Hopper made The Last Movie (1971), a loose, improvisational film deconstructing the mythology of Westerns; and Alejandro Jodorowsky made the strangest ‘Western’ of all time, El Topo (1971) – a rambling, Biblical odyssey that lampooned John Wayne, religion, mysticism and Sergio Leone in the name of ‘head-movie’ entertainment.
    Questi’s Django Kill is the most recognisably Western of the bunch, though the extreme violence, mystical waffle and bizarre characters still set the film apart from Leone, Tessari et al, and even from the excesses of Sergio Corbucci.
    The film is loosely based on A Fistful of Dollars (two gangs, a cache of gold, a lone stranger), but it also wanders into Edgar Allan Poe horror, Jane Eyre -inspired melodrama and dark, twisted sexuality. Like Corbucci’s Django , the two gangs in town are not your