Django the Bastard

Director- Sergio Garrone

Cast-Anthony Steffen, Rada Rassimov, Paolo Gozlino

Country of Origin-Italy
 

Number of Discs - 1

Reviewed by - Bobby Morgan

Date- 10/17/2019

Okay folks stop me if you’ve heard this one before: in a rickety western town beset by greed and corruption (and lots of dust), a stranger in black arrives to settle a score the old-fashioned way – with violence! That’s about as basic a movie premise gets, and it dutifully describes 1969’s Django the Bastard. Directed by Sergio Garrone (S.S. Experiment Love Camp), this is one of many flicks made solely for the purpose of cashing in on the success of Sergio Corbucci’s spaghetti western classic released three years earlier. Since the original Django wasn’t familiar to American moviegoers at the time, distributor Herman Cohen had Bastard retitled The Strangers Gundown for its U.S. theatrical debut, but fans can now rejoice that the film is finally available in high-definition and with its original title on the packaging (if not on the actual print).

So that stranger dressed in black, he’s a mysterious gentleman by the name of Django and is played by Anthony Steffen, a familiar face in Italian westerns whose acting credits also include The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave and Killer Fish. This incarnation of Django has come to a nameless town with vengeance on his mind and a fiendish method of cluing his victims in on their impending bloody demise – he leaves crosses with their names and death dates written in stark black lettering on them where the corpses-to-be can easily spot them. First on his list is Sam Hawkins (Victoriano Gazzarra), and next is Ross Howard (Jean Louis), but his toughest targets will be the town’s most powerful citizens, the brothers Murdock – responsible, respected older brother Rod (Paolo Gozlino) and his reckless and impulsive younger sibling Jack (Luciano Rossi).

As Django carries out his mission, often wiping out scores of gunmen without catching so much as a flesh wound, his reasons for coming to this town soon become clear. What’s not as clear is if Django himself is an indestructible spirit of supernatural retribution or if the Murdocks and their small army of gunfighters are just stupid and really bad shots.

Django the Bastard is pretty good as far as lesser entries in the spaghetti western canon go, and I’ve seen me plenty of the true classics, some hidden gems, and a few outright clunkers. Sergio Garrone’s film kinda falls in between the latter two because it tries to do something different with the western genre even as it lacks other qualities that would have made it an all-timer. Steffen cuts an impressive figure in the title role, emanating the appropriate guile and menace required for Django, but he’s allowed to be little more than an angel of vengeance mowing down endless supplies of hired killers with much of a character to play during the quieter scenes. Gozlino (Man of La Mancha) makes for a fine level-headed baddie as Murdock the elder. On the other hand, Rossi (Salon Kitty) overplays his part of the little bro to the point where you want this sniveling punk to buy it the moment he first enters the story. Maybe that was the intention of Garrone and his screenwriting partner Steffen.

No surprise that women get the shortest shrift in this tale, with one of the few female characters of any importance only known as “Whore”. The burden of supplying Django the Bastard with some trace of femininity falls on the shoulders of the lovely Rada Rassimov (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly), sister of Italian exploitation great Ivan and an accomplished actress in her own right who later went on to work with Dario Argento (The Cat o’ Nine Tails) and Mario Bava (Baron Blood) before becoming an Emmy-winning television producer (La Traviata) in the 90’s. Rassimov does well with what little she is given to work with here. The camera certainly loves her, that cannot be denied.

Speaking of that camerawork, Bastard sports some impressive Techniscope cinematography from Gino Santini (Caligula’s Hot Nights), who makes exquisite use of the widescreen frame to capture the desolate western town in all its sand-blasted splendor and even injects some cool blue tinting in a climatic flashback sequence that appears to have been shot day-for-night. Credited on this print as “Vasco & Mancuso”, composers Vasili Kojucharov (The Devil’s Wedding Night) and Elsio Mancuso (Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror) collaborated to create an original music score that is surprisingly understated for an Italian western and recalls the better-known works of Ennio Morricone at times but manages to carve out an identity for itself as the film goes on and does its job splendidly. The composers also worked together on the music for God Will Forgive My Pistol and I Am Sartana, Your Angel of Death.

Synapse Films’ new high-definition transfer of Django the Bastard, presented in full 1080p resolution, was sourced from a 2K scan of – in the company’s own words – “a beautiful original 35mm negative element”. Judging by the 99-minute running time and presence of the Strangers Gundown title on this print, the element is most likely the American theatrical cut and doesn’t differ much from the 107-minute original Italian version with the exception of the mid-film placement of a crucial flashback sequence (which served as the Italian cut’s opening). Presented in the 2.40:1 widescreen aspect ratio, the transfer does terrific justice to Santini’s cinematography and comes complete with an authentic pastoral color scheme and a fine layer of natural grain that brings out renewed texture and depth in the image previously dulled out of existence by bootleg editions. Accompanying the improved video quality is an English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track offering an American dub that doesn’t sound muffled and accurate volume and spacing granted to the music and ambient effects work. The English subtitles provided for this release are newly translated, and optional obviously.

The only supplement is an audio commentary with author and film historian Troy Howarth, and he does a typically excellent job of discussing the film in as great a detail as possible, with special attention paid to the backgrounds of the cast and crew, the popularity of the Django movies, and how Garrone’s unofficial contribution used the established franchise as a springboard for exploring some offbeat ideas that fans of spaghetti westerns likely found bizarre and out of place.

What Django the Bastard lacks in memorable characters and action scenes, it nearly makes up for with a narrative that cleverly bridges the gap between violent western and supernatural horror to fascinating effect. Though somewhat forgettable when weighed against the genre’s true classics, the film is fun and well-paced enough to give a willing viewer an hour-and-a-half of Italian exploitation entertainment value. The amazing HD transfer on Synapse’s new Blu-ray release sweetens the pot.