Tarantino & Corbucci

 Currently tucked away on Netflix is one of the largest pieces of the movie history jigsaw, Italian TV documentary maker Luca Rea’s 2022 Django & Django - Sergio Corbucci Unchained. It is basically a monologue by Quentin Tarantino about his idol, Italian director Corbucci.

The way it’s presented is pretty scattered. There’s the nice opening, where Tarantino sits in an auditorium and we go to his voice-over on drawings with limited animation, showing a characteristically never happened meeting between Corbucci and Rick Dalton, the fictional fading cowboy TV star lead of Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It's taking place in an Italian restaurant where the yank visitor keeps on putting his foot in it, confusing the host with Sergio Leone and knocking his Navajo Joe. (“Burt Reynolds in a black wig that makes him look like Natalie Wood”) Cartoon Corbucci saves the day by rejecting that one’s English dubbed version himself.

The European (Italian-Spanish-Yugoslav) action films, that followed the success of Steve Reeves as Hercules and invaded the world's Drive-Ins and grind houses from the fifties,   were polyglot, European, American or Israeli actors speaking their own language in the same scene. The French version of Corbucci's 1966 Django, which was filmed in Italian, has a play out song in English. Corbucci never shot direct sound, meaning the final tracks were in the hands of dubbing crews of varying talent though, when the director became more prominent and the American market more important, his cast was likely to all speak English, a language  in which Franco Nero, his Italian star was fluent.

Apart from being slyly entertaining and providing several savers, this opening to Django & Django sets out the agenda establishing Corbucci as an ignored pace setter of the European popular cinema of the day. The convincingly faked Italian Rick Dalton movie promotion material shown in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, gets another airing here. Rea’s movie then settles in for the extended Tarantino monologue with well reproduced clips, on-set 16mm. shooting with frame lines visible and archival footage of the real Corbucci, along with new interviews with Franco Nero, now eighty year old and having fifteen films listed as in production, and Ruggero Deodato, assistant on thirteen Corbucci films, who claims to have come up with the distinctive red hoods the  KKK modeled heavies wear in Django. Rea's work assembles great material efficiently.

Though I felt like standing up and cheering for Tarantino bringing attention to my long time hero, I found myself at odds with his assessment. He correctly places the westerns and particularly “the Mexican Revolution trilogy” Django, Il Mercenario (“He sells death to the highest bidder. Buy or die”) and Compañeros as the centre piece of Corbucci’s career but enthuses over his flat footed Massacre at Grand Canyon, Minnesota Clay and The Specialist and appears to be unaware of the flamboyant Il Bianco, il giallo, il nero and Johnny Oro / Ringo & His Golden Pistol. He deals with Corbucci’s gladiator movies but ignores his later collaboration with Adriano Celantano which produced among others Er più: storia d'amore e di coltello, one of his best films. I’m also guiltily attached to Il figli del Leopardo a Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia burlesque of the Visconti film, where Corbucci’s familiar split screen has Cicc. playing both the Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale characters simultaneously.

Indeed I’m not happy with Tarantino’s assessment of Corbucci as inferior to the ponderous Sergio Leone. (“It's not a dogfight in Italy. Number two is fucking Corbucci.”) This echoes the interview that Burt Reynolds gave after Navajo Joe, about working with “the wrong Sergio.”

However I come at this, it remains fascinating. I’d homed in on Corbucci’s 1966 Ringo & His Golden Pistol when it showed up at the Sydney Capitol in one of those polished English language versions (“Smile at me Ringo, for I am death!”) MGM produced at that stage. I did a screening here on a copy that was specially made for the event and, when I got back to Europe, Django was one of the nine films banned in Australia that I saw in my first week. It rocked me back on my heels. Though I didn’t realise it at the time, I'd plugged into what would become a dominant movie tradition.

The movies that Tarantino grooved on in his video store days are the ones I used to schedule trips to Europe to catch on their first runs there, knowing they weren’t going to surface in Britain (or Australia) where they were despised or banned for their violence, an aspect Django & Django lovingly annotates, complete with the hapless Northerner’s ear being cut off in Django. The 1968 Il grande silenzio / The Great Silence followed a particularly revealing arc getting a Paris first release two weeks of wide showing and disappearing to re-surface in one art theater where it ran for months, after star Jean Louis Trintignant got his Cannes Grand Prix. Trintignant out maneuvered dodgy dubbing by playing his character as a mute and Django & Django has a nice clip of a press conference where he mimes his responses.

Compañeros - Thomas Milian & Corbucci

A whole feature documentary devoted to the film maker who riveted my attention half a century back is going to be like Xmas under any circumstances but this one has the added attraction of prompting me that what I noticed was not just a run of ferociously entertaining movies but also the birth of what is now a shift in the dominant mind set. The clue is in the film’s clip where Corbucci explains that his inspiration was in the comic books of the day, in which he found his man with the coffin, who he even smuggled into his Toto movies.

Corbucci was not the only one to absorb this. Glauber Rocha and Antonio des Mortes and George Miller and Mad Max, with its Heavy Metal comix imagery, were coming out of the same door.  The bandes dessinés, the graphic novels which blossomed in the sixties, are a major input into these but the films also belonged to the era of May ‘68 and European “political” cinema.

Django & Django goes into Corbucci’s background, growing up during WW2 in a fascist home, even singing in a choir that welcomed Hitler to Rome.  As an adult, not only did he reject the Right but he had minimal sympathy with the new Left. Il Mercenario was originally to have been made by the highly politicised Gillo Pontecorvo and Corbucci turned its content into a comic confrontation between the two outlooks. Compare this to the then contemporary issues films of Elio Petri (Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto / Invesitigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion) or Damio Damiani (L'istruttoria è chiusa: dimentichi / We Are All on Provisional Release), key contributors to the Italian cinema. Damiani also did a handsome spaghetti western.

Being handled by the same international distributors, the Seventies Hong Kong cinema absorbed the Italian model. For starters, Giulio Petroni's Da uomo a uomo / Death Rides a horse of 1967 is a martial arts sensei and student-fighter piece with John Philip Law and Lee Van Cleef acting out the plot we will see ten years later with Jackie Chan and Siu-Tin Yuen in the prototypical Zui quan / Drunken Master.

All this totally baffled the critical establishment, partly because the materials never reached the festivals and press shows which were their frame of reference. The Euro Westerns found their home in exploitation outlets, if they weren’t just banned outright for their violent content. Some of them are still prohibited on paper, never having been re-submitted, though that proved a permeable barrier with alternative titles and VHS and DVD distribution, often furtive - not to mention the foreign language circuits of happy memory. The European writers I discussed the cycle with wouldn’t have a bar of them, clinging to the John Ford western model with it’s nineteenth century origins in Bret Harte, Peter B. Kyne and Frederick Remington. I remember arguing about this with Bertrand Tavernier who had decided Sergio Leone was an auteur, which made him all right.

Tarantino - Sukiyaki Western Django

Tarantino on the other hand was fascinated with the Django phenomenon, though (like me!) he never got round to his planned book on Corbucci.  Vincent Jourdan’s “Voyage Dans le Cinema de Sergio Corbucci” now fills that gap. Tarantino appeared in Takashi Miike’s 2007 Sukiyaki Western Django and made his own Django Unchained with a sequel, Django / Zorro now in the pipeline, and placed Corbucci as an (off screen) character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

The Django character appears to arrive copyright free and the name was even post produced onto the leads in Euro westerns which were shot with a different protagonist. He doesn't come on with a dog like Hondo or The Westerner's Dave Blassingame. Nero doesn't even have a horse when we first see him dragging the coffin by foot. It is difficult to give individual traits to the character when it contaminated so many other spaghetti western heroes though, as with Sartana, it does still conger up certain expectations -  solemnity, ultra violence, not much of a sex life and an ability to mow down squads of extras. 

Corbucci had settled into burlesques and rip offs - a 1961 Toto La dolce vita, Toto and Vittorio de Sica in I due marescialli (also 1961) from La traversée de Paris, the all star Il giorno più corto (1963) from The Longest Day and the later Er più from Fellini Roma. By 1966 he'd already done those few early Euro westerns and even scripted Mario Mattoli's Per qualche dollaro in meno / For a Few Dollars Less that year, so it was logical to wheel him in to counterfeit A Fistful of Dollars. Young Franco Nero had a support role in Corbucci's Gli uomini dal passo pesante /The Tramplers and scored his first lead in Django. The result, while it had zero impact on English language commentators, was huge in the world of Spaghetti cowboys.

Rather than reduce Corbucci's status, Django's origins in the dollars films places him in the company of celebrity directors who did their best work improving on established material - Rouben Mamoulian channeling Ernst Lubitsch with Love Me Tonight and his Tyrone Power versions of The Mark of Zorro and Blood and Sand or John Sturges spinning The Walking Hills off The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Bad Day at Black Rock off High Noon and Magnificent Seven off the Kurosawa original.

Now in the wake of Tarantino's efforts, sixty years after his triumphs and thirty years after Corbucci's death, the Paris Cinémathèque has done a major retrospective and people who heaped scorn on his work when he was alive now lecture about it. Along with the Vincent Jourdan book and Django & Django, there’s Gioia Magrini & Roberto Meddi’s 2015 one hour documentary Sergio Corbucci: L'uomo che ride.

Films trading in sixties art cinema's jump cuts, improvisations, available light photography and montages of wall paper have receded, shrunk into badly attended day time sessions at film festivals, while the Mighty Marching Marvel Super Heroes, Mad Max, The Batman and Tarantino’s films are filling auditoria in what may be the twilight of theatrical exhibition. Like it or not, it is Sergio Corbucci's strip cartoon aesthetic that has flourished. That's not the first wrong guess from the critical consensus.

It's worth thinking about that.

Django - Franco Nero, the man with the coffin.

Barrie Pattison 2022