Duck You Sucker (1971)

In Revolution-era Mexico, Juan (Rod Steiger) is a bandit with dreams of knocking over the country's biggest bank. When he meets wanted IRA terrorist John (James Coburn), Juan blackmails the Irishman into helping him. But the bank is as empty of money as it is full of political prisoners. After freeing them, Juan finds himself hailed as a revolutionary hero, but that means betrayal and tragedy are around the corner.

Director Sergio Leone kick-started the Spaghetti Western Genre with his ground-breaking 1964 film A Fistful of Dollars, and expanded on the template of amoral heroes, violent gun-play and eerie sun-baked apocalyptic atmosphere with For a Few Dollars More, The Good The Bad and The Ugly, and Once upon a Time in the West.

But, Duck You Sucker (aka A Fistful of Dynamite) feels like a step backwards, lacking some of the elements that made the other films work, particularly Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name character. In the Dollars Trilogy he's a tight lipped stoical man, who sets a tone of ambiguity and understatement. This provides a much needed contrast to the more outre characters. Here, Steiger and Coburn go for the thick cartoon brand of Mexican and Irish accents which soon become grating. Luckily, their natural presence and charisma stop the characters from being unwatchable. Also, the script is heavy handed with too much talk and exposition, while the soft focus flashbacks to John's back story become ludicrous.

Aside from occasional casual misogyny, Duck You Sucker has some more positive, familiar Sergio Leone traits. The Ennio Morricone soundtrack is as quirky, bombastic and haunting as his earlier work with the director. The action sequences, particularly the raid on the bank by Juan and his gang are brilliantly executed. The massacre of a large group of peasants by Mexican government troops is disturbing, and makes a contrast from the dismissive attitude to death often seen in this genre.

Django (1966)

Despite being fifty years old, Django remains a brutal and disconcerting entry in the spaghetti western sub-genre.

Across a bleak muddy landscape, a lone figure in a Union Army uniform drags a coffin behind him. The man is Django, a former soldier with a secret from his past and a secret in his coffin. These secrets will soon drag him into the paths of a prostitute named Maria, a racist confederate ex-soldier and his hood wearing henchmen, and an excitable gang of Mexican revolutionaries.

All Westerns are slightly surreal and somewhat stylised, especially with the excess or lack of blood, given the amount of bullets fired, but Spaghetti Westerns, the uniquely European appropriation of a uniquely American genre are even more so. Whereas the US versions may celebrate or explore both the light and dark sides of the modern history of the country, the continental equivalents are shorn of that cultural context, and seem to take place in a strange alien world, but the world of Django goes a step further.

The bleak, isolated muddy town looks like a post-apocalyptic war zone, a place where human life has lost all value, where unlucky men are used as sporting prey, the unlucky women used for pleasure, and the "lucky" women get to feel like "real" women and be loved by a man.

The script is offbeat, unpredictable, and shocking. Plot wise, barely more than half an hour and the big twist about the contents of the coffin is revealed, turning the focus of the story elsewhere, with the links between Django and the other characters becoming apparent.

Clearly modelled on the two criminal sides of A Fistful of Dollars, the two gangs in Django are both equally despicable, but director Sergio Corbucci takes things a disturbing step further. The confederate gang dress in in red Ku Klux Klan style hoods, and treat their Mexican prisoners like animals, to be hunted for sport.

Django himself is no angel, repaying the hospitality of Nathaniel the saloon owner by shooting up the bar to demonstrate a weapon to the Mexicans, then later cajoling Nathaniel into driving him to a massacre. It's a testament to Franco Nero that he can make a character like that likeable enough to keep us rooting for him.

What makes Django so compelling is the extremity of so many of the elements, even by the standards of the Spaghetti Western. The dialogue veers between the cringingly cheesy (“I felt like I was a real woman. Someone to protect, and to be loved), and the portentous (“His time hasn't come yet”). The violence is still shocking today, the tone being set in the opening scene of Maria being mercilessly whipped by the Mexicans, after which we get everything from an ear that gets cut off and fed to its owner, to the comical, almost sexual pleasure General Rodríguez takes from watching Django having his hands crushed. Not surprisingly the film suffered with the censors, especially in the UK, with the BBFC refusing a certificate for the film until 1993.

There are also two things in Django that are surprising for this sort of film. Firstly is a modicum of character development. As the end theme music swells, Django walks off into the distance, but in the foreground we see that he has left his gun behind, which throughout the film has been the main way for Django to define himself as a man. Secondly, as he walks off, he has Maria with him, signifying another change in how he defines himself, this time with the love of a good woman. Both of these thing point to a changed man, and a happy ending of sorts, for an audacious and forgettable classic.

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968)

If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, is a competent, enjoyable, but highly derivative Spaghetti Western.

Gianni Garko plays the title character, pretty much a clone of Clint Eastwood's Man with no Name from his work with Sergio Leone, complete with a face full of stubble and a cool, indifferent attitude towards his adversaries.

The plot is also reminiscent of Leone's "A Fistful of Dollars" with Sartana playing two rival gangs off against each other to get his hands on a box of stolen gold, and as well as borrowing for story ideas and characters, director Gianfranco Parolini also lifts many of Leone's visual ideas, in particular, juxtaposing extreme close-ups with lengthy long shots.

However, none of this ever tops it's source material, lacking Leone's knack for over-the-top grandeur and sadism, and it fails to create something new from the basic Spaghetti Western blueprint, such as the grimy weirdness of Sergio Corbucci's "Django".

Even Klaus Kinski, although charismatic as ever in his role as a hired killer, fails to completely light up the screen, coming across as a little restrained and not as much fun to watch as normal.