Django, Kill...If You Live Shoot! - Notes From The Unhappy Place

Back during the heyday of Euro Cult movies on DVD, I was lucky enough to write a bunch of liner notes for many of my favorite movies, and for various reasons some of them never made it to the final product. While we're leading up to the launch of our podcast, I thought it would be a good time to resurrect some of those unused essays and present them here. The Blue Underground release of Django, Kill featured a booklet with an essay by the far more accomplished and knowledgeable William Connolly of Spaghetti Cinema fame, so I didn't mind getting bumped from this one. I'm not sure if the blu ray upgrade (which looks miles better if you compare it to the DVD screenshots I posted here) contains this same booklet, but it isn't mentioned on the box or in any of the reviews I looked at.

Sergio Corbucci’s landmark Spaghetti Western, DJANGO (1966), inspired dozens of imitators seeking to cash in on the popularity of the title character, none of them more unusual than Giulio Questi’s DJANGO, KILL!…IF YOU LIVE SHOOT! (SE SEI VIVO SPARA, 1967). Some filmmakers and producers attempted unofficial sequels or fashioned quick knock-offs of the original Corbucci picture, while others simply incorporated the name “Django” into the title of their film and performed a quick character name change in the dubbing. Giulio Questi’s film belongs to the latter group, but he neglected the final step in the process (Tomas Milian’s character is only referred to as “The Stranger” in most versions), and aside from the expected nihilism and violence, his film actually has little in common with Corbucci’s picture. DJANGO, KILL! is perhaps the most excessively bizarre film in the entire genre, a wildly overwrought Gothic horror melodrama that earns its place alongside the classics for sheer audacity alone. The film’s combination of extreme violence, outrageous characters, stylized costumes, seizure-inducing edits and impressionistic storytelling was simply unprecedented in the Western genre.

Giulio Questi––who directed the mind-bending giallo DEATH LAID AN EGG (1968) the following year––was more concerned with subverting genre expectations than with simply retracing the footsteps of those who came before him, but it would be a mistake to deny the multitude of influences on this, his sole Western. In its opening moments, DJANGO, KILL! echoes the horror films of Mario Bava––specifically HERCULES IN THE HAUNTED WORLD (1961)––with rugged landscapes bathed in a supernatural green light and eerie visions of the dead rising from the grave (the fact that Bava repeated a sequence involving a shower of molten gold and an unfortunate victim in his 1968 film DIABOLIK is perhaps more than a coincidence). The influence of Luis Buñuel’s LOS OLVIDADOS (1950) can also be seen in the image of an outstretched hand reaching from the earth—an iconic moment that was recreated in the artwork for the film’s Italian ad campaign. After the supernatural overtones and horror film histrionics of the credit sequence comes a disorienting montage of flashbacks filled with Godardian edits and dizzying camerawork. The experimental editing of Questi’s longtime friend Franco (Kim) Arcalli is the driving force behind this striking sequence.  Arcalli co-wrote and edited both DEATH LAID AN EGG and DJANGO, KILL! and Questi has acknowledged his partner’s significant creative input in the films. Arcalli, who once commented that he did his best work after two bottles of vodka, would go on to collaborate with Louis Malle, Bernardo Bertolucci and Michelangelo Antonioni before his premature death in 1978.

Federico Fellini is another obvious influence on the film and it should come as no surprise that Questi cut his filmmaking teeth as an assistant for the great director on LA DOLCE VITA (1960). Fellini’s considerable skill at creating surrealist tableaux is emulated by Questi and cinematographer Franco Delli Colli, who began his career as a camera operator for Luchino Visconti and Pier Paolo Pasolini.  Delli Colli also brought to the picture the influence of Sidney J. Furie’s THE APPALOOSA (1966), a stylishly shot film that took a few visual cues from Leone, but in turn provided inspiration for many Italian Westerns to follow. Furie’s director of photography Russell Metty fashioned intricate compositions that employed various props and architectural details to create multiple frames within a single shot. Similarly, Delli Colli used wagon wheels, hanging laundry, hitching posts and various other props to frame his compositions, creating a sense of depth and infusing the film with its own unique visual poetry. One such image, of Milian’s Stranger peering through a broken wicker basket, was used for some of the film’s advertising materials.

In an interview with the excellent fanzine Westerns all'italiana (issue #25) Tomas Milian referred to Questi as “an intellectual revolutionary” and likened him to Antonioni because of his emphasis on imagery over acting. Milian is a performer who usually enjoys being left to his own devices, so that he may rework his characters to suit his own creative needs. Here, the Stranger is something of a cipher, a Wild West zombie with only a passing interest in the warm embrace of his pyromaniac lover and no need at all for the precious gold he uses to exact his cold vengeance. Milian used props and costume details, like his ever-present white headband, to enhance his character, but the actor eventually surrendered to the idea that Questi was more interested in the visual and symbolic value of his characters than he was in portraying real people with real motives and emotions.

Questi and Arcalli took the basic plot outline––which has a mysterious outsider positioning himself between two rival factions in a hostile town––from Sergio Leone’s seminal A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964) (itself of course derived from Akira Kurosawa’s YOJIMBO, 1961), but unlike Leone or Corbucci, they weren’t interested in creating a crowd-pleasing anti-hero like Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name or Franco Nero’s Django. This skeletal plot was only a framework used to hang a series of increasingly bizarre and violent episodes in which the Stranger would pass through, meting out punishment to the evildoers and providing comfort to the weak and deranged. For much of the film Milian’s Stranger is not even the focal point of the action, and the plot often finds the character reacting to or being victimized by the outlandish happenings rather than actually propelling the narrative forward himself. He may seem to be an ineffectual hero when compared to other Spaghetti Western protagonists, but the religious connotations hint at a greater depth to the character. The Stranger’s resurrection and crucifixion provide the most explicit Christian imagery, but many of his trials and tribulations result in violence of biblical proportions and every deadly sin seems to be accounted for in the circle of hell that his Native American spiritual guides call “The Unhappy Place.” Sin and temptation reign supreme in this turn-of-the-century Sodom and Gomorrah and the Stranger only moves on after everything has ended in a hail of fire and brimstone.

Possibly commenting on the regressed amorality they perceived in the genre, Questi and Arcalli populated their hellish town with characters that behave like cruel children. The film’s final moments, where a little girl and boy attempt to out-ugly each other, support the idea that the entire movie can be read as a variation on a sadistic children’s game. Sam Peckinpah would later incorporate this idea into the opening sequence of his Spaghetti Western-influenced picture, THE WILD BUNCH (1969). Perhaps the most blatant example of this theme of childlike regression is found in Zorro and his boys-only club of costumed muchachos. Like spoiled brats playing at pirates, Zorro––who even keeps a talking parrot––and his gang egg each other on, raping, pillaging and throwing tantrums until they are all tuckered out and curled up on the floor. Zorro is even allowed a moment of childish emotion when he confides to his parrot, “It’s a pity you don’t understand what my muchachos mean to me.  They make me so happy in their black uniforms.” Not since Nicholas Ray’s JOHNNY GUITAR (1954) had the Western been such a hotbed of heightened sexuality and exaggerated stylizations.

Whether read as a Freudian critique of the genre, a horror film subversion of Spaghetti Western conventions, a Christian allegory about temptation and vice, or simply taken at face value, DJANGO, KILL! is a strange and unsettling film designed to provoke extreme reactions. Graphic violence is intercut with slapstick humor and visual puns, while soap opera plot twists and fairy tale logic challenge the expectations of audiences open to even the most radical genre fare. If you thought that the films of Leone or Corbucci took the horse operatics as far as they could go, then prepare yourself for the genre-bending insanity of DJANGO, KILL!…IF YOU LIVE, SHOOT!

––MW