Django (1966)

Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) arrives dragging its coffin and its reputation, a mud-caked unofficial riff on Kurosawa's Yojimbo that has spent six decades being mistaken for something more programmatic than it is. On the matter of casting, the film offers almost nothing to admire. Franco Nero, José Bódalo, Loredana Nusciak, Eduardo Fajardo: a uniformly white European ensemble, with the mixed-race prostitute María handed to a white Italian actress. The character's mixed parentage exists in the script as texture, not as a casting principle. No LGBTQ presence of any kind registers. María is whipped, crucified, rescued, wounded, and finally reduced to begging Django to take her along, which is a damsel's arc with extra lashings.

Where the film does engage the culture is race, and it does so with some conviction. Major Jackson's Red Shirts are a hooded Klan analogue who use Mexican peons for target practice, and Corbucci reportedly studied Klan newsreel footage while writing them. This is anti-fascist politics of the 1960s, not contemporary identity discourse, but the engagement is genuine. The politics of money are present and unspoken: stolen gold, corrupt authority, revolutionaries funding an insurgency. Corbucci was a self-described left-wing director, and the film's class cynicism is real, though it is delivered through greed and betrayal instead of a speech.

The remaining categories are barren. No climate allegory, the mud is aesthetic. No body positivity, the body here is only a site for violence. No neurodivergence, since Django's crushed hands are a grim joke about the guitarist Django Reinhardt. No revisionist history, only a fictional border town. And no lecturing whatsoever. The film argues with corpses, machine guns, and a coffin, and it lets the audience do the arithmetic.