Django, Prepare a Coffin (1968)

Hard to believe I’ve been writing reviews for this long and have never tackled a Western (Spaghetti or otherwise).  Why, you ask?  Well, several reasons.  The Western is a very special genre to me (Once Upon a Time in the West is in my top five of all time), and I was reticent to dive in on one because I wanted to do whatever the selection would be justice (time and about another nine hundred words will tell the tale on that one).  Second, and more important, I wanted the film I wrote about to be worth the time.  I had been hovering around reviewing Little Rita of the West (coincidentally, also a Ferdinando Baldi film), but that film’s run time made it a bit more difficult to squeeze into my schedule (you’d think a guy so devoted to film would make the time, but there you have it).  Thankfully, Arrow Films have come through again with Django, Prepare a Coffin (aka Preparati la Bara! aka Viva Django aka Get the Coffin Ready aka Django Sees Red), so the choice was taken away from me.  Their transfer is gorgeous, as always, though the special features are thin (yet filling), including a trailer and an overview of the Django films by Kevin Grant (author of Any Gun Can Play).  Still, if you’re a fan of the genre, this film is good (notice I didn’t say great) but worth owning simply by virtue of the fact that it exists in such nice shape.

Django (Terence Hill) and his crew are ambushed while transporting a gold shipment.  Django is shot, and his wife is brutally killed.  Years later, Django is employed as a hangman, but secretly he is gathering the falsely accused people he actually doesn’t hang to help him get payback on Lucas (George Eastman) and his henchmen.  And what has Django’s old buddy Dave Barry (Note: not the writer, but still played by Horst Frank) have to do with this (I’ll bet you can’t guess)?

I am a huge fan of Sergio Corbucci’s Django, and I realize that a cottage industry of films named for (but rarely having anything to do with) it enjoyed much success in Italy and abroad.  Django, Prepare a Coffin is one of the handful of films that does actually relate to its progenitor, though it hews far enough away to be its own film.  Mainly, this is a tonal difference, specifically, the difference between Hill and the earlier movie’s Franco Nero.  Nero’s Django was a somber, haunted man.  He dragged his own coffin around with him, and inside it was death (both his and other’s).  He was as much the grim reaper as he was a man starving for (perhaps denying himself) peace.  Hill’s Django is more amiable.  He has a pal in Barry, and his big dream is to settle down and “wait for the last judgment.”  More notably, this Django is happily married, a state which seems foreign to the character as depicted by Corbucci and company.  Even after he sets himself on his path of vengeance, Hill gives the character a certain goofball charm, which, let’s face it, is Hill’s stock in trade.  He plays with the local telegraph operator’s (his other friend) pet bird, offering it booze and conversing with it.  He also has an openly virtuous spirit.  While he is using his “deadman” gang to take revenge for himself, it feels as though he would have helped these people avoid the hangman’s noose, regardless.  He’ll gun a man down, but he’s so not stoic it feels slightly out of character.  It left me thinking that this was actually a prequel or origin story for the man from the 1966 film.

Prepare a Coffin likewise shares its screenwriter (Franco Rossetti), director of photography (Enzo Barboni), and producer (Manolo Bolognini) with Corbucci’s movie.  This provides another throughline between the two films, but the character is clearly the same, just different.  He still wears his heavy, dark Inverness coat (but significantly, he doesn’t don it until after his wife is gone).  He still has his huge, belt-fed machine gun.  He still suffers some hand injuries (though not nearly as mutilated as before) prior to turning the tables on his enemies.  Mostly, he is still heavily associated with death.  He figuratively buries himself next to his wife.  He’s a hangman, a legal dealer of death.  He is shown often digging graves.  The finale of the film takes place in a cemetery (again).  He’s as ghoulish as a man as can be, but Hill makes him goshdarned likeable.  Unfortunately, the two tastes don’t quite taste great together.  It’s tough to pull off being death incarnate and a swell guy at the same time, and this movie proves it.  This Django rebels against his loner stereotype.  He wants a family, he wants a community, he strives too stridently to not be alone in the world.  He’s Django Lite.

The film still deals with Western genre themes.  It primarily concerns itself with the struggle to civilize the frontier.  What’s interesting here is its attitude regarding it.  Dave Barry and men like him have an air of respectability to them (he is an elected representative at the film’s opening).  He has money, he has status, and these give him power.  He is civilizing the West and killing it.  These aren’t cross purposes, they are the same purpose.  The socioeconomic status of men like Barry and Lucas is directly proportional to the level of their turpitude.  Moreover, it’s the greedy like Barry and Lucas who carelessly destroy the lives of the working men and women who actually endeavor to civilize the frontier in less exploitive fashion (of course, we can argue that such a feat is impossible), to live their simple lives.  Moneyed land barons and the like are nothing new in Westerns, but Barry’s political background gives his villainy a more far-reaching touch.  Guys like Garcia (Jose Torres) just want to be with their families.  Nevertheless, once gold enters the picture it’s a short trip to becoming exactly like the opposition and rationalizing it.  Naturally, only Django is incorruptible, giving his hanging fees to the men he emancipates.  He, then, is the true civilizing agent, selfless and self-determined.  He wants to give what was taken from him to others.  The problem is, most other people haven’t (or won’t) come around to his way of thinking.  And that’s life.

MVT:  Baldi is a solid director.  Though much of the film has a certain flat, stagy look (which harkens back to more traditional, classic American Westerns), it moves along nicely and has enough interesting turns to be worthy of its genre.

Make or Break:  Django trying to get a bird to drink.  It just doesn’t feel right.

Score:  6.25/10

Odds and Evens (1978)

I’ve never been a huge gambler.  It’s not that I hate it.  Put me at a blackjack table, and I’ll have some fun (until the jerk sitting next to me starts acting like I’m playing with his money; more on this later).  Same with video poker machines.  They’re entertaining in small doses, and I’m not above buying a Powerball ticket or playing an occasional scratch off game.  But I could never be the type who takes a bus trip to a casino every weekend.  I could never be the person who stands in front of me at the convenience store with an envelope stuffed full of cash looking to get their (clearly un) lucky numbers for some lottery drawing (or worse, the guy who buys a scratch off, plays it right there at the counter in front of me, and then cashes it in [and keeps this cycle going] rather than doing the polite thing and moving off to the side so others can get their business done).  I think that’s what I find so unattractive about degenerate gamblers; their personalities are so self-involved, so Gollum-esque, they’re basically little more than raw nerve endings that have to take piss breaks every now and then.  This is why I visited Las Vegas exactly one time (same with Atlantic City) even though I had family living there.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that every single person I came into proximity with was eyeballing me with either suspicion or maleficence.  It’s almost like they share a perniciously hedonistic streak, and it frankly puts me off.  Still and all, I don’t mind watching gambling series and films (Casino, Luck, et cetera), and that certainly puts Sergio Corbucci’s Odds and Evens (aka Pari e Dispari, aka Trinity: Gambling for High Stakes) in my wheelhouse.

Johnny (Terence Hill) is an avid athlete as well as a lieutenant in the Navy who gets assigned to locate the big Syndicate honcho, Mr. Parapolis (Luciano Catenacci), whose illegal bookmaking and strongarm tactics are just ruining everything for the legit Florida venues.  Johnny is ordered to coerce the assistance of Charlie Firpo (Bud Spencer), a professional-gambler-turned-career-trucker who just so happens to also be Johnny’s brother, in this matter.  Needless to say, Charlie is reluctant, but that’s okay, because Johnny is devious.

When Corbucci’s name is mentioned, it is typically in the same breath with either the original Django or the superlative The Great Silence, two Spaghetti Westerns that simultaneously set standards and broke molds.  But a lot of people don’t realize that he actually did quite a few comedies, like this, Super Fuzz (an early pay cable staple), Three Tigers Against Three Tigers, and so forth.  What I find interesting is that, at the time Odds and Evens was made, this was the brand of comedy that was fashionable in America (an international pop culture equivocation that I’m of the opinion occurs far less than one might think).  This is the kind of film that Hal Needham would be proud to have his name attached to.  Its characters and situations are broad, it’s not above dressing up its stars in silly outfits for a chuckle, its bad guys are bumbling and oafish, and there is plentiful violence (primarily directed at the same bumbling, oafish bad guys).  Said violence, however, is of the slapstick variety.  The action is often undercranked for comedic effect (something that never works, if you ask me), and even though characters get bludgeoned and thrown around to the point where a normal human being would be hospitalized or dead, they all appear in the very next scenes with nary a bruise.  They bounce back like Wile E. Coyote, always ready to take another licking and never, ever learning a single thing from their bad experiences.  

It’s this cartoon nature that is embraced equally in the relationship between Charlie and Johnny (and it should be said that, while I have not seen tons of Hill/Spencer buddy pictures, my understanding is that this is the relationship they typically presented).  One of the main things I got from this film was the Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck rapport of the leads.  Nonetheless, neither Charlie nor Johnny is wholly Bugs or Daffy.  They commingle traits of both.  Charlie just wants to be left the hell alone (which is normally a Bugs trait) to drive his truck and help Sister Suzanne (Marisa Laurito) and her orphanage.  Johnny plays against Charlie’s obvious weaknesses to get him to do what Johnny wants (also a Bugs trait, especially in relation to Daffy), the results of which Johnny relishes (more of a Daffy trait but arguable).  Charlie dislikes Johnny, but when the two find a reason to work together, they handily take care of the Syndicate goons (a collective Elmer Fudd).  By keeping this in mind, I think a viewer will get far more out of this film than would normally be anticipated.

Another of this film’s strengths is in the way that it captures not only a time and place but the feel of that time and place.  The late Seventies were awash in eye-searingly garish clothing alongside couture so shabbily unspectacular, you could easily envision Archie Bunker wearing them to go out with Edith for an evening.  For as glamorous as people liked to feel and behave, I’m still amazed at the color schemes used in some of the popular hot spots (although cocaine may account for a lot).  Earth tones were in in a big way, and it would be rare to enter a building without some form of brown and/or orange splashed around the joint, simultaneously assaulting your senses and covering up various unsightly stains.  Corbucci and cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller do a brilliant job of showcasing Florida and a certain attractive lifestyle that this geographic area was associated with in the public mind (in the same way that De Palma’s Scarface would be five years later and resonating for much, much longer).  It’s a freewheeling, high energy glimpse into a culture many would love to dive into, and the fascination is a large part of the reason why television shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous were so well-received.  Of course, it’s still manufactured like most, if not all, glamor is.  That the filmmakers are able to get their audience to go with it, to float along with it, to buy into the fantasy of it, is a massive credit to their efforts (and I don’t think that the material alone is enough to do the same; presentation is a large part of it).  Your life will never be enriched by Odds and Evens (unless you’re the type whose life could be enriched by it), but you’ll finish watching it with a big, dumb grin on your face, and that’s perfectly fine, too.

MVT:  The easygoing ambience and the quasi-antagonistic groove between Hill and Spencer is the heart of how this film succeeds.

Make or Break:  The scene where Charlie gets dressed up (one of a couple) and roughhouses with some thugs was the clincher for me.  Up until then, the film was certainly fun, but at this point it becomes clear just how far Corbucci and company are willing to go to make you smile.

Score:  7/10