Reviews

Giallo fans can only gorge on this one. The colour contrast is worthy of Argento. There are tropes galore, the leather gloves, the scarlet blood, the mannequin doll - and a story that even evokes a canto from Dante's Inferno. It's all Italy at its best to the umpteenth power.

As with all giallo genre films, the beauty is not to be found in the plot, the dialogue or the acting, but more in the imagery. In contrast to Argento's 'Suspiria', there are numerous outdoor scenes. The eye-witness account is exploited and no venue is exempted from being a crime scene.

I spent the whole film trying to spot a non-1970s anachronism. With the possible exception of what looked like a child-proof lock on a bottle of pills, I didn't find any. My only complaint is that the acting struck me as being 'too good for a real giallo' - but that's more of an unexpected bonus really.

I've just seen the UK premiere of this one in Birmingham's 'Mocking Bird Cinema' at the Cine-Excess film conference. I highly endorse it. Its grubby realism grips throughout and the script was earthy and not in the least bit pretentious. Stunning camera work too.

Director Duane Graves was even kind enough to give us a Skype chat before the premiere. He has achieved incredible results on a modest budget, in part by managing to get hold of vintage anamorphic lenses and by carefully negotiating free access to his filming locations. He told us his next project is apparently called 'Chill Canyon' - but he's given himself a hard act to follow...

However far-fetched this ripping yarn may be, it is undeniably clever, moving and enjoyable. Other reviewers for this have missed the key point, that the hero's horse is a brilliant metaphor of himself. Hidalgo is a tongue-in-cheek reference to a Spanish aristocratic naming convention, meaning 'The son of', while Mustang is most likely ultimately etymologically tied to the Latin word for 'mixed'. Both rider and horse are half-breeds, taking on the finest Arabian thoroughbreds. I watched this film with a class full of Saudi male students of English. Apart from the whiskey, there was nothing I felt to be too strong for Islamic conventions here. The students were charmed by the classical Arabic of Omar Sharif, and the respect shown by the hero for the Arab world.

Intriguing hybrid adventure, as much a ripping yarn as a western.

Unredeemed human suffering, violence, lust and betrayal – this could be a spaghetti western inspired by Dostoevsky.

In a recent interview, Franco Nero contrasted the Hollywood western hero with the Italian spaghetti western hero:– the former is indeed a hero, while the latter is more a 'son-of-a-bitch'. Yet Nero plays no such 'son-of-a-bitch' role in this film. Trauma and tragedy are his lot. Nero's attitude to the marketing fixation with the 'Django' name was simply – 'It's their problem'. He maintains that he only ever made one 'Django' film, and it certainly was not this one, so don't be taken in by the German title of 'Mit Django kam der Tod' ('With Django Came Death').

It is hard to believe that such awesome landscapes exist within our very own EU (shot in Andalucia!). I particularly enjoyed the careful rationing of images of water, which contrasted so starkly with the bone-dry natural setting. The change of location from Spain to Mexico in the uncut German version gets away with murder. For example, one scene showing the longing for an escape from an outlaw's exile in the desert is expressed in some shot-reverse-shot images of a tortured gaze at flamingos taking off from a lake. The birds are fortunately native to both Spain and Mexico...

Gypsies too are native to both – though our Carmen (i.e. Django's 'Conchita' in the uncut German) would be a rather Spanish-looking gypsy for Mexico, were it not for the black mourning clothes she wears in remembrance of her mother. The Italian-to-German dubbing has been done to a high standard – no mean feat considering that the names of characters and locations have also been altered in the German. Soldiers of the Spanish Bourbon regime must have had uniforms that almost pass for those of the US Civil War – or can some military history hack out there expose the shameless German tampering ...?