Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot!

The title is a lie sold to cash in on Corbucci: Giulio Questi's film has no Django in it, just a half-breed drifter, played by Tomas Milian, who claws out of a mass grave and walks into the worst town in the West after the men who left him there. What he finds is a hallucinatory parable of greed where the loot is gold, the townsfolk are hypocrites and sadists to a person, and one of the most notorious images in the genre involves a mob cutting golden bullets out of a corpse with knives. Questi came up under the neorealists and shoots the violence as though it disgusts him, and that is why it sticks. It was censored across the map for scalpings, a molten-gold killing and worse, and it plays less like a western than a fever. Milian is extraordinary, and so is the film's total lack of interest in comforting anyone.