Django, Kill! (If You Live, Shoot!)

The leader of the caballero gang settles down for an evening with his parrot (it demands a drink) and his toy Civil War soldiers to give the theme and supply Mel Brooks with Dark Helmet’s action figures in Spaceballs.

This is generally a survey of Leone in aid of the theme, derived from De Toth’s The Stranger Wore a Gun like as not, with a happy echo of Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and again the flaming dénouement is picked up by Bergman in Fanny and Alexander.

The “mixed-breed” between two warring factions is a Buster Keaton joke.

For Questi, a memory of the partisan fighting.

La Morte ha fatto l’uovo

The wife’s poultry farm is a “modern plant” entirely automated. The men complain, out of work. The husband takes it out on prostitutes. The wife cultivates a pretty cousin without a fortune, whose family were killed in a car wreck.

The Poultry Association has big plans for the future, including an advertising campaign to put a chicken in every post, and a radioactive breeding plan to create headless wingless chickens with “thin bones”.

The ad man and the cousin spy on the husband, who makes his own plans.

All comes to naught, dead or implicated the principals fill out the scene while the chief inspector sucks an egg.

Gina Lollobrigida, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Ewa Aulin, Jean Sobieski.

Score by Bruno Maderna.

Arcana

Mystery and furor of the greater subculture.

Questi’s undoubted masterpiece on a low-grade witch and her warlock son (the subway took Papa).

Sonny Jim leaves his mark on the city, where the witch is shot down by riot police, and a parody of Jewison’s fiddler plays on and on and on.

The tune is taken up again in Questi’s next production, Vampirismus.

The theme and locale are those of Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli, “south going north”, a donkey on a rope.