Oaks and his men cannot believe their eyes: the half-blood is still alive! They thought they had killed him after the robbery they did together, so they wouldn’t have to share the booty with him. The bandits have to watch their backs because the half-blood is seeking revenge. They should also be wary of the people in the town where they are hiding out: they may be God-fearing folk, but they are hungry for gold. The situation becomes even more explosive when the rancher Sorrow shows up with his henchmen. Django Kill (If You Live, Shoot!) is a unique western that combines Grand Guignol, surrealism, and social criticism. It was massacred by censorship and re-released in 1975, in a version which is closer to the original but still edited here and there.
Biography
film director
Giulio Questi
Giulio Questi (Bergamo, 1924), after his experience as a partisan, began to write short stories for various literary journals (including Vittorini’s “Il Politecnico); in the mid-1950s, he began working in cinema, as a documentary filmmaker (Giocare, 1957), an assistant director for Zurlini and Rosi, and an actor for Fellini in La dolce vita (1960). In 1961, he shot his first fiction film, Viaggio di nozze, an episode of Latin Lovers, and the next year he collaborated on the “mondo film” (a movie made with archival material that is deliberately shocking and offensive) Universo di notte. In 1963, he directed an episode of another collective move, Nudi per vivere, which he made with Elio Petri and Giuliano Montaldo under the pseudonym Elio Montesti; the movie was seized by the censors and was never distributed. In 1964, he directed Il passo, an episode for the film Amori pericolosi, and finally, in 1967, his first feature film: the western Django, Kill (If You Live, Shoot!), which was also seized because of explicit violence and was extensively re-edited (in 1975 it was re-released with the title Oro Hondo, in a longer but still incomplete version). In 1968, he directed A Curious Way to Love, an unsuccessful murder mystery starring Gina Lollobrigida and Jean-Louis Trintignant, and in 1972, Arcana, a surrealistic masterpiece which once again had distribution problems. He left cinema and in the 1970s and 1980s worked in television, directing works that include L’uomo della sabbia (1975), Vampirismus (1982) and Il segno del comando (1989), a remake of the tv film of the same title from 1971. Between 2003 and 2007, completely on his own, he made a series of seven experimental shorts (which were brought together in 2008 in the collection By Giulio Questi) in which he was the sole protagonist, as well as the director, screenwriter and editor. 2014 marked his debut as an author, when Einaudi published his collection of short stories Uomini e comandanti, for which he recently won the Piero Chiara literary award.
FILMOGRAFIA
Le italiane e l’amore (ep. La prima notte, coregia Marco Ferreri, Gian Vittorio Baldi, cm, 1961), Universo di notte (non accr./uncred., doc., 1962), Nudi per vivere (coregia Elio Petri, Giuliano Montaldo [Elio Montesti], 1963), Amori pericolosi (ep. Il passo, coregia Carlo Lizzani, Alfredo Giannetti, mm, 1964), Se sei vivo spara (conosciuto anche come/also known as Oro Hondo o/or Django Kill, 1967), La morte ha fatto l’uovo (1968), Arcana (1972), L’uomo della sabbia (tv, 1975), Vampirismus (tv, 1982), Quando arriva il giudice (tv, 1985), Il segno del comando (tv, 1989), Non aprire all’uomo nero (tv, 1994), Il commissario Sarti (tv, 1994), By Giulio Questi (serie di cortometraggi/short films series: Doctor schizo e Mister Phrenic, Lettera da Salamanca, Tatatatango, Mysterium Noctis, Vacanze con alice, Repressione in città, Vacanze con Alice, Visitors).
Declaration
film director
“Sandro Iacovoni, a crazy but brilliant producer, commissioned the film. It turned into my absolute favorite from my commercial filmography because, behind the banality of its western format, it actually depicts all that absurd violence that Kim [Franco Arcalli, Ed.] and I experienced during the partisan resistance.”
Cast
& Credits
Giulio Questi
soggetto/story
Giulio Questi, Franco Arcalli
sceneggiatura/screenplay
Giulio Questi, Franco Arcalli, Benedetto Benedetti
fotografia/cinematography
Franco Delli Colli
montaggio/film editing
Franco Arcalli
scenografia/production design
Enzo Bulgarelli
musica/music
Ivan Vandor
suono/sound
Goffredo Salvatori
interpreti e personaggi/cast and characters
Tomas Milian (lo straniero/stranger), Marilù Tolo (Lori), Piero Lulli (Oaks), Milo Quesada (Bill Templer), Francisco Sanz (Hagerman), Sancho Gracia (Willy), Roberto Camardiel (Sorrow), Miguel Serrano, Ángel Silva, Sancho Garcia, Mirella Pamphili, Ray Lovelock, Patrizia Valturri
produttori/producers
Alessandro Iacovoni, Giulio Questi
produzione/production
GIA Società Cinematografica
coproduzione/coproduction
Hispamer Films
Laura Argento
+39 06 722 943 16-5
laura.argento@csc-cinematografia.it
www.csc-cinematografia.it