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He Who Shoots First More at IMDbPro »Django spara per primo (original title)

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DJANGO SHOOTS FIRST (Alberto De Martino, 1966) **, 17 June 2006

Author: MARIO GAUCI (marrod@melita.com) from Naxxar, Malta

This Spaghetti Western isn't as bad as it's been described in "Stracult", a compilation of essays on Italian B-movies that I purchased at the 2004 Venice Film Festival, but it's certainly not anything special either! Glenn Saxson is a cheerful lead in the Errol Flynn vein, which is incongruous for the genre - at least in this early phase, before comedy set in with the Terence Hill/Bud Spencer films!

Still, the revenge/control-of-a-Western-town plot is fairly engaging - though it has nothing whatsoever to do with the original DJANGO (1966; whose 2-Disc LE Set via Blue Underground, incidentally, I should be receiving soon) - and even includes some nice, original touches: Django taking his outlaw father's corpse (after dispatching the bounty hunter who murdered him) to town to pick up the reward money for himself; a "Three Musketeers"-like subplot involving a beautiful but wicked woman (Evelyn Stewart) and her former husband, friend of the hero, who warns him against her; an amusing double-twist at the end in which, first, heroine Erika Blanc outwits a fleeing (i.e. uncommitted) Django, thus making sure that he goes back to her - followed by a reprisal of the film's opening sequence with the arrival of a new gunslinger in town, this time to challenge Django's own authority! The climax, set inside a graveyard, is also effective - as is Bruno Nicolai's bouncy score.

Having said that, the film is too slowly-paced and, even at a little over 90 minutes, it feels protracted - particularly the silly bar-room brawl towards the end!

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