Django has a wonderfully gritty feel to it. It and other Italian westerns of it's time (e.g., The Dollars Trilogy) had an enormous effect on American cinema — first in the Western genre (even the later John Wayne films drew from the Italian West) and then branching into mainstream affairs. Though the character of the antihero, so popular in the spaghetti westerns, had long existed in American film, he lived (and usually died) in the crime noir genre almost exclusively. Until Italy made its mark, westerns were inhabited by absolutes: good guys wore white and bad guys wore black. But if something as pure as the good old fashioned western could be polluted by the noirish antihero elements, so could (and would) all other genres. And so it went.

Franco Nero, as the title character, Django, fulfills perfectly the classic spaghetti western role (as did Eastwood in his own projects). He is the unstoppable, immoral, gunfighter whose only weakness is his conscience. Seemingly indefatigable, he falters only slightly when his heart is touched, and is undone — only to return to conquer all his opposition. Eastwood follows the identical path in Fistful Of Dollars.

All told, Django is a fun and entertaining, though not light and inconsequential, glance back to the beginnings of the modern western. My only real complaint with the DVD release is the lack of option concerning subtitles and the original-language track. Especially after the packaging material laments the poor English-language dubbing, I would've been excited to hear the original track (with English subs, of course!).