Django

The central image of the coffin dragged across the wasteland is from Buñuel's Simon of the Desert, which points up the surrealism at play. "Burning is better than being beaten to death," not much of a choice for the runaway prostitute (Loredana Nusciak), her ordeal is curtailed by the impassive stranger (Franco Nero) with the mysterious box. Mud and wind outdoors and painted showgirls and forlorn fiddles indoors, the border town spectral and "neutral" between warring factions. The ex-Confederate Major (Eduardo Fajardo) loathes all not "pale-skinned and Southern," he presides over a cult of cutthroats and uses prisoners as clay pigeons. His opposite number is the Mexican General (José Bódalo), who rides for the Revolution and demonstrates his own barbarism on an eavesdropping Bible-thumper. Facing the new graveyard he has to dig in the wake of a massacre, the saloon keeper (Ángel Álvarez) shrugs: "It's better to be above ground doing that than below doing nothing." The sacred crate made to conceal guns and loot, the heroic genre made to parade violence and prejudice, Sergio Corbucci's great Western desecration. (Swift, handheld bursts are his forte, a soiled lens to magnify the ugliness of the realm.) The protagonist plays his cards close to the vest until he's on a sludgy street before a private army of hooded fanatics, his ejaculation of bullets goes into The Wild Bunch soon enough. "After the showers the sun will be shining," goes the song, instead there's engulfing muck, the gunslinger is pulled out of quicksand only to have his hands pulverized in a graphic update of Mann's The Man from Laramie. Spent pistol and tilted crucifix for the closing tableau, "how come you haven't got your burial suit with you?" Decades of sequels pave the way to Tarantino's scorched plantation. With Gino Pernice, José Canalejas, Rafael Albaicín, José Terrón, and Yvonne Sanson.