‘Django & Django’: Film Review | Venice 2021

A doc with its heart in the right place but very little polish, Luca Rea’s Django & Django wants to carve out space in the cine-pantheon for Sergio Corbucci, said to be the best director of spaghetti Westerns except for that other Sergio. Reliant to a surprising extent on a single casual, rambling interview with superfan Quentin Tarantino, the movie is not nearly as interested in his Django Unchained as its title suggests. (That film’s presence here amounts to a single scene, albeit one with a point to make.)

Though likely to inspire a viewer who’s seen only one or two Corbuccis to dig up more, it’s far from the comprehensive portrait one might want on the subject, and would be more at home as the second-best supplementary feature on a Blu-ray box collecting the auteur’s Westerns.

Related Stories

Movies

Alberto Barbera Extends Contract as Venice Film Festival Director Through 2026

Movies

How Quentin Tarantino's 'The Movie Critic' Fell Apart

Things begin rather bizarrely, with a story from Tarantino that runs for about nine minutes. That’s a lot of real estate in a film whose closing credits start to roll at the 72-minute mark (and which pads things out before then with too many on-location home movies). It’s even stranger when you realize that Tarantino’s yarn is pure fiction — part of the offscreen narrative of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, in which Leonardo DiCaprio’s faded movie star goes to Italy to wring a few dollars from his remaining fame. This little bit of fan fiction is amusing enough, but hasn’t Tarantino already had his shot at repurposing all his Hollywood leftovers in the novelization he released in June?

Once we’re finally in the doc proper, Tarantino informs us that he once considered penning a book on Django writer-director Corbucci, which in part would argue that all his Westerns were about fascism. Maybe he (or someone else, with his help) should whip out a quick essay film instead, because the evidence here is just enough to suggest that a tightly focused featurette on the subject would help earn the Italian exploitation director some cred in film theory departments.

But the doc’s treatment of Corbucci, who died in 1990, is largely haphazard and anecdotal, pairing a sketch from his boyhood (he was in a Fascist Party choir that performed at a meeting between Hitler and Il Duce) with some clips from the Westerns in which authority figures execute those who oppose them.

Rea treats his subject’s filmography like something we already know fairly well, hopping back and forth and letting interviewees (mostly Tarantino, but also actor Franco Nero and filmmaker Ruggero Deodato, who worked on Corbucci’s crews) refer to the features with little introduction. You’d never guess the vast number of features he cranked out, which might be a tacit admission of something QT hints at: Maybe the ’60s Westerns are the only ones worth watching.

If that’s the case, though, why are we given such a long montage of silent behind-the-scenes footage from the goofy comedies he turned to in the ’70s? Why not put more energy into following those stories of the American West from their start through the genre’s fadeout? Tarantino makes interesting points about the ways Corbucci’s Westerns differ from his friend Leone’s, and does an especially good job analyzing the protagonists of these films: “In another film, they could be the villain,” he says of these vengeance-minded men, struggling through worlds defined by villains and loathsome townspeople. Corbucci’s vision of the West’s everyday folk, we hear, is the opposite of the John Ford, salt-of-the-earth version.

And Corbucci put these towns through the ringer, in spectacularly bloody films. We’re told that Navajo Joe (1966) was the most violent pic released by a studio until The Wild Bunch came out. In uncomfortably funny interviews with schoolboys of the day, the kids rave about the gunslinger flicks they find vastly more violent than war movies.

The few interview clips Rea includes of Corbucci himself suggest a man who took himself not at all seriously — whose friendly humor suggests that, when Deodato says he “learned cruelty from Corbucci,” he’s speaking only in terms of storytelling. It may be that the Italian film press of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t ask the most probing questions of a director few took seriously. But still, in a doc aiming to make us pay attention to him, one wonders if these are all the good interview clips Rea found.