Uccidi Django… uccidi per primo (IT); Tequila (SP)
D: Sergio Garrone.
P: Sebastiano Cimino. W: Ambrogio Molteni, Victor Andres Catena, Sergio
Garrone. Ph: Francisco Sanchez. M: Elsio Mancuso. St: Giacomo Rossi Stuart
(Johnny McGee), Aldo Sambrell (Burton/Santana), Diana Lorys (Molly), Mario
Novelli (Ted, bounty hunter), George Wang (Lupe Martinez)
Leone, Corbucci, Sollima… Somehow, the pantheon of great Sergios has never found space for Garrone. Almost half his directed works were westerns, all of which he co-wrote, most of which have a distinctive scruffy charm, an authorial signature. He made two of Anthony Steffen’s strongest vehicles, No Room to Die and the slyly macabre Django the Bastard; the uncommonly engaging No Graves on Boot Hill; and one of the hardest-hitting films of the post-Trinity era, The Last Day, aka Vendetta at Dawn.[i]
Kill Django, Kill First, his penultimate
western, was the least of his contributions. The script – about a
bandit-turned-banker muscling in on struggling prospectors – would have seemed staid
in 1965, never mind six years later, and is symptomatic of the half-cocked
quality of the film as a whole. Clearly, Garrone had little money to work with
or time to spare, but that had always been the case and had never proved unusually
detrimental. On this occasion, the restraints are everywhere apparent, from
poor production values to film-making technique. Shot around Madrid, AlmerÃa
and Rome, it has all the hallmarks of a rush job – camera movement is minimal,
zooming endemic, set decoration basic. There is little evidence of the
director’s familiar resourcefulness – action scenes, for instance, are cut in a
shot-reverse shot pattern, with none of the dynamism of his best works. Editing
in general is poor, especially in the early stages; scenes end so abruptly,
hindering continuity, it is almost like switching channels from one second-rate
western to another. The effect is not unlike watching a Demofilo Fidani film,
complete with music recycled from older scores.[ii]
The casting of Giacomo Rossi-Stuart in a heroic role, as opposed to that of a supercilious villain, has the usual bland result. As a miner who leads the fightback, he sets his jaw and stolidly follows wherever the script leads him, contributing nothing extra to raise the tempo (perhaps he felt his abundance of topless scenes would accomplish that). Sambrell, as the ruthless banker, seems constrained by the largely interior setting. He is merely adequate – again, this is the kind of role he had played many times before (as recently as the previous year’s Hands Up Dead Man, You’re Under Arrest), although it remains a novelty to see him survive to the last reel. (Aficionados will also appreciate prominent roles for habitual bit-parters Furio Menicone, as the town sheriff, and Lorenzo Robledo – rarely for him, he makes it through the movie relatively unscathed.)
Slightly more
eccentric are the parts afforded Mario Novelli, as a leather-clad bounty hunter
armed with a flute-cum-blowpipe and an advanced knowledge of ballistics, and
George Wang, playing another of his suspiciously oriental-looking Mexicans,
this time a mentally anguished “executioner” who spends his downtime moping in a
cave. His appearances kick the film into a different gear while they last, but
they belong in a different movie – one of Garrone’s earlier westerns, for
example.
The script suggests a history between Sambrell and Wang’s characters that is supposed to add weight to their final confrontation but, like much else in the film, there is no substance behind it. Sambrell implied the only reason Wang was involved was because he was a friend of the producer. Perhaps that explains why he seems to have been shoehorned in, adding a minor point of interest to an otherwise mundane production.
The best one can
say of Garrone’s direction is that it is anonymous – had anybody else shot this,
it would be difficult to tell the difference. And it probably goes without
saying that the title is disingenuous – nobody is called Django, although
presumably that was Rossi-Stuart’s character name in the Italian dub.
Kevin Grant
Kevin Grant
[i] The Last Day, originally Quel maledetto giorno della resa dei conti,
was begun by Luigi Mangini but completed by Garrone. According to Garrone, the
situation was reversed on the same year’s Bastardo,
vamos a matar (see Marco Giusti, Dizionario
del Western all’Italiana)
[ii] It doesn’t help
that the longest extant version appears to have been compiled from different
cuts. It opens with a superfluous 10-minute sequence showing Sambrell’s banker
in his bandit days, double-crossing his gang after they have massacred a family
of prospectors
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