Fade in. A lone bounty hunter occupies centre-frame of a long shot amidst an arid Andalucían desert landscape, his recently-slain human quarry sprawled limply over the saddle of a spare horse. As the camera pulls out to reveal Glenn Garvin waiting in the near foreground, the inevitability of a stylised confrontation becomes clear to all but the most inattentive viewer, for virtually every aspect of this opening sequence of Alberto de Martino’s Django spara per primo (1966) places it firmly in the milieu of Italian cinema’s most lucrative and, by this time, ubiquitous format: that of the Spaghetti Western. As befits the formulaic nature of filone cinema, the mise en scène is lifted directly from an earlier, more successful film – Sergio Leone’s Per qualche dollaro in più (1965) – and De Martino’s lone rider is to be almost as short-lived as Leone’s. The limp body, it transpires, is that of Garvin’s father yet, the anticipated act of explosive violence fulfilled, our hero soliloquises towards a surprisingly pragmatic conclusion: since his father was a wanted man, it would be more prudent to claim the $5000 reward on the body than to bury it.

As opening vignettes go, this comic undercutting of familial loyalties, too, is not entirely alien to its generic context: one broadly characterised by ruthlessly sardonic irreverence and hard-nosed, remunerative expediency. The archetypal hero of the Western all’italiana is certainly no stranger to unyielding Realpolitik, even in his most endearing incarnations. See Duccio Tessari’s Una pistola per Ringo (1965), for example: a film whose comic value rests largely upon the wisecracking hero’s frequent exposition of a strict “moral” code that shooting people in the back is common sense. Yet here, though moral judgements are amusingly nebulous, they are still informed by familial, and more specifically filial, ties: Ringo’s role-model is his father, who switched sides in the Civil War when the South started losing. When one considers that, by contrast, the narrative content of Django spara per primo for all the world resembles a family revenge Western, the tenor of the opening sequence is a jarring departure. De Martino arrests the spectator with a series of incongruous familial and marital associations, while at the same time trying to chronicle a hero seeking righteous vengeance upon the man who betrayed his father. Even at the film’s denouement, Garvin’s stony-faced declaration to his nemesis that he must pay for “la morte di mio padre” is again diminished, as his knowing winks, grins and happy-go-lucky demeanour return the moment the decisive gunsmoke has cleared and the real, financial, motivation is secured.

The above analysis is no ground-breaking deconstruction of the Spaghetti Western’s purposefully oblique moral code. The sneering reinterpretation of Hollywood’s hallowed founding text undertaken by Italian film-makers in the 60s and 70s is well-travelled scholarly territory, and in any case, Django spara per primo is unremarkable in its stylistic and thematic derivativeness. The dissonance between the film’s cynical, world-weary humour and its ostensibly cathartic revenge plot, however, signals an oft-overlooked point concerning this perennially-popular yet oft-misunderstood genre’s industrial conventions: namely, that verisimilitude, narrative coherence and dialogue did not necessarily supersede cinematic style and astute post-modern panache in film-makers’ production practices.

A blog entry is not, I think, the forum for a deeper critique of this point, but please let me indulge this minor bugbear until the end of this paragraph. Since Christopher Frayling’s ground-breaking volume Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone (1981) admitted this filone into the academic fold, two of the foremost models of criticism in 1960s and 1970s analysis of the Hollywood Western – structuralism and auteur theory – have remained dominant in critiques of the Italian version to the present day. To take the centrality of a Spaghetti Western’s narrative unity for granted – as both of these fields are wont to do – is to overlook its aspect as “popular” cinema, along with the industrial, cultural and stylistic implications of that term. By its very typicality, Django spara per primo offers an emblematic case-in-point.