Django

Watch it in Italian with subtitles. Trust me on this. I lasted ten minutes before switching.

The English dub neuters Django. It softens his edge, dumbs down the dialogue, and creates a bizarre disconnect between what Franco Nero’s face is doing and what’s coming out of his mouth. They tried to make him sound like Eastwood but landed somewhere around “General Hospital.” The Italian version gives you the real thing—Nero’s actual voice, cold and precise as a scalpel.

And what a performance. At twenty-five, Nero looks ten years older and twice as tired. Those blue eyes cut through the perpetual gloom like headlights through fog. He’s found something Eastwood understood: silence weighs more than words.

Director Sergio Corbucci’s vision is relentlessly bleak. This is a world where the mud never dries, the sky never clears, and everyone’s soul is already damned. You can see the actors’ breath. You can practically smell the rot. The production design doesn’t just suggest desolation—it rubs your face in it. Dirty windows, empty saloons, streets that are more swamp than road. Even the hero drags a coffin through the muck.

The violence startles. Not because it’s excessive, but because it’s unflinching. An ear gets sliced off and shoved down someone’s throat. A whipping draws gashes of blood. The finale features a hobbling that’ll make you wince. Corbucci refuses to let violence be clean or consequence-free. Every bullet leaves a mark, every death means something, even in a place where life is cheap.

The cynicism runs deep. There are no white hats here, only varying shades of gray and black. Django’s vendetta against a Confederate major gives the film structure, but Corbucci is more interested in showing us a pocket of hell where corruption is the baseline and cruelty is currency.

My one beef: the third act leans on coincidence when it should lock into inevitability. A crucial moment feels handed down from the screenwriter’s god rather than earned through character and circumstance.

But if you loved Leone’s Dollars films or Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, give Django a look. Just remember: Italian audio, English subtitles. Accept no substitutes.