Sergio Corbucci: The master of the gritty, violent western
In the sun-soaked realm of western cinema, with its renegade, cold-eyed outlaws, stunning vistas and dusty plains, and narratives of justice, vengeance and redemption, the likes of Sergio Leone, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Clint Eastwood and Sam Peckinpah are often the names that are considered the greatest, but one ought not to forget the sheer violence of the Italian filmmaker Sergio Corbucci.
Corbucci began his career with a series of low-budget sword and sandal films before his first western, Grand Canyon Massacre, arrived in 1964, the title of which would serve well as an overview of his take on the genre. Corbucci had been keen to eschew the romantic ideals presented in Hollywood westerns, offering instead a brutal depiction of the American frontier.
Where the protagonists of John Ford and Howard Hawks seemed to fit into archetypal roles, the main characters of Corbucci were profoundly flawed and possessed an elusive and ambiguous moral stance. In a world where merely surviving was more important than sentimental conceptions like justice and honour, Corbucci demanded a more cynical yet realistic characterisation of his fictional figures.
It’s hard to think of Corbucci and not consider his widely influential 1966 film Django, which cemented his reputation as a fierce and uncompromising director. It tells of a Union soldier-turned-drifter accompanied by a mixed-race prostitute, who both become wrapped up in a tale of revenge set against the barbarity and desolation of the old west. Corbucci ramped up the film’s violence right up and set a precedent for the gritty and graphic western movies that would follow in the following years.
From there, and with a newfound respect from his contemporaries, Corbucci continued to explore the nature of violence and betrayal in a series of quality westerns, including The Great Silence, The Mercenary and The Specialists. In the former film, Corbucci again subverted the expected tropes of the western with a bleak, tragic outlook and a morally ambiguous protagonist.
Corbucci was also known for his political and social commentary and would offer reflections on the political turbulence of Italy in the 1960s throughout his works. In The Mercenary, he draws parallels between the Mexican Revolution and the Italian struggle for independence amid fascism and exploration, while Companeros served as a polemic on the inherent greed in a capitalist society.
Quentin Tarantino, known for his love of the western film genre, has a deep respect for Corbucci and wrote his 2012 western Django Unchained in homage to his predecessor director. He once called Corbucci “the second-best director of Italian westerns” behind his greatest admiration, Sergio Leone, noting, “He’s at the tip-top of the action filmmaking game, which is the most cinematic game a director can do.”
“The effortlessly and the mastery involved in some of those sequences,” Tarantino added. “You don’t get that good until you’ve made thirty movies and you know what you’re doing. He was the most prolific of the great spaghetti western directors. There is nobody who specialised in westerns that was as committed to a surreal, cynical and violent version of the west as Sergio Corbucci. [He’s a] fucking revelation.”
The westerns of Sergio Corbucci are absolutely essential to the genre, and though his name often arrives after the likes of Leone, Ford and Hawks, his commitment to gritty realism and graphic violence makes him one of the most significant western directors to have ever lived. Departing from the romantic notions of Hollywood, Corbucci challenged his contemporaries to depict the old west as it really was: a barbarous arena of blood, violence and injustice.