No, not music from M. Reinhardt, but the soundtrack to one of my favourite spaghetti westerns. This bloody, macabre and surprisingly influential film by Sergio Corbucci (friend and rival to Leone) revolves around the eponymous gun runner and anti-hero, a shell-shocked veteran of the civil war. He has no horse, and drags a coffin through fields of mud. Inside the coffin is a machine gun that he hopes to trade for gold. He fetches up in a ghost town dominated by two rival gangs: Mexican bandidos and southern racists. Hilarity ensues. And by "Hilarity", I mean "A deluge of bloodshed and ear-eating". This is, after all, an Italian film from the 60s.
Over 30 (some say the count is closer to 100) unofficial sequels were filmed in the years following, thanks to Italian copyright laws being fucking absurd. Furthermore, Django has found homages being paid to it from the likes of Danzig, Joe Strummer, Rancid, Takashi Miike (whose recent film Sukiyaki Western Django is a quasi-prequel) and most famously Quentin Tarantino, who apes the controversial ear-cutting scene from Django for his Reservoir Dogs. Django, being a film verging on demented, goes further than Tarantino dared, and had the ear being fed to the victim. Oh, and the victim was a priest. Who then gets shot by his captors. Right. Yes, this got past the censors in 1966. How? After the censors requested its removal, Corbucci decided to "forget" to cut it from the film.
The music is by Luis Bacalov, Academy Award-nominated Argentine composer (you'll have heard some of his stuff if you've watched Kill Bill), and is exactly what you expect (and want) from a Spaghetti Western score, but on top of the general dramatics and atmospherics it also has a kitch and super-catchy melodramatic title track sung by Rocky Roberts (R.I.P.) to boot!
Over 30 (some say the count is closer to 100) unofficial sequels were filmed in the years following, thanks to Italian copyright laws being fucking absurd. Furthermore, Django has found homages being paid to it from the likes of Danzig, Joe Strummer, Rancid, Takashi Miike (whose recent film Sukiyaki Western Django is a quasi-prequel) and most famously Quentin Tarantino, who apes the controversial ear-cutting scene from Django for his Reservoir Dogs. Django, being a film verging on demented, goes further than Tarantino dared, and had the ear being fed to the victim. Oh, and the victim was a priest. Who then gets shot by his captors. Right. Yes, this got past the censors in 1966. How? After the censors requested its removal, Corbucci decided to "forget" to cut it from the film.
The music is by Luis Bacalov, Academy Award-nominated Argentine composer (you'll have heard some of his stuff if you've watched Kill Bill), and is exactly what you expect (and want) from a Spaghetti Western score, but on top of the general dramatics and atmospherics it also has a kitch and super-catchy melodramatic title track sung by Rocky Roberts (R.I.P.) to boot!
Download HERE
