Capital Celluloid - Day 147: Saturday May 28

Django (Corbucci, 1966): Odeon Covent Garden, 4.30pm

The fifth Cine-Excess festival features filmmaker discussions, exclusive UK theatrical premieres and a three-day conference with over 30 separate talks on cult film controversies from around the world. You can find all the details about the event here at the Cine-Excess website. All the talks and screenings are at the Odeon Covent Garden.

The screening of the infamous spaghetti western Django will follow a special onstage interview and career retrospective with its star, Italian acting legend Franco Nero. The actor has made over 150 films films including Keoma (1976), Hitch Hike (1977), Enter the Ninja (1981) and Die Hard 2 (1990).  Nero is best known for his iconic screen role as the amoral but deadly gunslinger in Sergio Corbucci’s landmark western, which was the subject of notoriety for its excessive scenes of violence and torture. 

Here is the Time Out review:

'Originally banned in Britain for its comic-strip iconoclasm and graphic violence, this rates alongside Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy as one of the daddies of the spaghetti/paella Western. It's a clean- up-and-paint-the-town-blood-red revenge drama with a difference. Nero's mud-spattered ex-Yankee soldier, first seen squelching towards a US-Mexican border ghost town, a coffin forever in tow, has every Western hero's quality in extremis. His speed-of-light gunslinger outlaw has a romantic heart - his wife was killed by one of Major Jackson's KKK-like henchmen - and an enigmatic morality. He solves the war between Jackson's men and General Rodríguez' bandidos by dispensing death to all, but his sympathies are shown when he later teams up with Rodríguez for a gold heist. Corbucci's style is a mix of social realism, highly decorative visuals, and finely mounted action sequences. For the rest, there are enough mud-wrestling prostitutes, whippings, ear-loppings, explosions and scenes of wholesale slaughter to keep any muchacho happy. Funny, visceral, bloody, no-nonsense entertainment with a touch of class.' Wally Hammond

Here is the trailer. 

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