filmthug movies, reviews & rants: Sam Peckinpah’s Blazing Saddles

Django Unchained

Sam Peckinpah’s Blazing Saddles

There’s a scene near the start of Mel Brooks’ gut-busting 1974 comedy Western Blazing Saddles when the railroad foreman, Taggart (veteran character actor Slim Pickens), informs his henchman, Lyle (Burton Gilliam), that there may be quicksand ahead. When Lyle offers to send a team of horses ahead to test the ground, Taggart smacks him upside the head saying: “Horses? We can’t afford to lose any horses, you dummy! Send over a couple of niggers.”

It’s a throwaway moment of angry eloquence that, in one scene, lays bare over two centuries of American racism, illuminating a brutally stark, uncomfortable truth; that the Land of the Free was built on oppression. In the context of the film, it’s also shockingly funny. With his gory, cartoonishly violent reimagining of Sergio Corbucci’s Django, Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino, cinema’s greatest magpie, loudly makes the same point for two and three quarter hours (um, racism & slavery bad!) while homaging (STEALING!) scenes here and there from his favourite Spaghetti Westerns and trying to set a Guinness World Record for use of the ‘N-word’ (somewhere in the region of 134 instances). The resulting collage however may just be Tarantino’s best film in years (certainly since Kill Bill: Vol 1) even if it does feel at times like you’re watching Sam Peckinpah’s Blazing Saddles.

Set in America’s Deep South two years before the Civil War, German former dentist turned bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) purchases the slave Django (Jamie Foxx). Schultz is after a trio of outlaws, the notorious Brittle brothers, and only Django can identify them. In return for fingering the brothers Schultz offers Django his freedom and trains him as a bounty hunter, taking him on as his partner.

Together the two men spend the Winter collecting bounties before setting out to rescue Django’s wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of moustache-twirling villain Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), owner of the infamous Candyland plantation, where he trains male slaves as “mandingo” fighters for vicious human cockfights while prostituting the female slaves. When Django and Schultz infiltrate Candyland under false pretences, they arouse the suspicions of Candie’s duplicitous house-slave Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson) setting in motion a spiral of violence that ends in a bloody showdown.

At two and three quarters hours Django Unchained, like most of Tarantino’s films, could do with being trimmed by about a third. The first hour is immense fun, rattling along at a fair old clip, being primarily the adventures of Django and Schultz as they hunt down outlaws and bond, their relationship evolving from mentor and student (NEVER slave and master!) to a friendship of equals as Schultz teaches Django the bounty hunter business, Django commenting: “Kill white people and get paid for it? What's not to like?” Then the film slams headfirst into the Antebellum columns of Candie’s plantation house, Tarantino treating us to the dinner party from Hell as Django, Schultz and Candie dine, dicker and discuss phrenology while the sly but outwardly servile Stephen (his very name a play on Steppin Fetchit) sniffs out Django and Schultz’s true mission before the film rallies for its rousing last act as Django metes out some much-needed justice to Candyland.

The action is fast and thunderous, Tarantino eschewing his usual Mexican stand-offs for sudden, often unexpected, explosions of gunfire, one furious shootout in Candie’s plantation house rivaling Kill Bill: Vol 1’s climactic nightclub massacre in terms of carnage as Django paints the walls and floors with Candie’s henchmen’s blood. The performances for the most part are good with Jamie Foxx on cartoonishly badass form as the titular avenging hero, Kerry Washington doing her best with the underwritten Broomhilda (more plot device than character) and Leonardo DiCaprio villainously twirling his moustache and chewing the scenery like he’s playing Abanazar in panto in Woking. Tarantino displays his usual gift for casting however by filling every frame full of sly cameos from the likes of Bruce Dern, Lee Horsley, Don Johnson, Jonah Hill, Don Stroud, Tom Wopat (The Dukes of Hazzard’s Luke Duke) and the original Django, Franco Nero. Johnson and Hill are particularly fun as two ineffectual Klansmen in a scene that could’ve been lifted wholesale from Blazing Saddles as the Ku Klux Klan find their night charge stymied by the eye-holes in their masks being in the wrong spot.

The most interesting performances however belong, unsurprisingly, to Waltz and Jackson. Amongst a rogue’s gallery of white Southern grotesques, Waltz’s Schultz is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the film; his cultured, educated killer and abolitionist is the only one troubled by the brutality and sadism around him, the only one outraged by the cruelty, the only one moved to try to help his fellow man. Even the hero, Django, is unmoved by the plight of his fellow slaves, is focused solely on achieving his goal of rescuing his wife. In the midst of the carnage, Waltz is the conscience of Django Unchained. Jackson’s Stephen though is the true villain of the film and it’s to Tarantino and Jackson’s credit that they’ve had the courage to create such a complex, duplicitous, venal character. Stephen is the slave Malcolm X warned us about, who’s whiter than the massuh, complicit in the oppression. Candie might be the one calling the shots but it’s Stephen who’s the boss.

Sure, the film is overlong and messy, factually inaccurate (the KKK didn’t exist until after the Civil War, mandingo fighting never existed outside of Kyle Onslott’s despicable ‘50s potboiler novel Mandingo), splashily violent and features Tarantino’s worst ever cameo appearance as an incongruously Australian cowboy. But it’s fun, playful and actually has something serious to say for a change. If you only see one factually inaccurate movie about slavery this year, make it Django Unchained. The other one has nowhere near enough vampire killing.

David Watson

Directed by:

Quentin Tarantino

Written by:

Quentin Tarantino

Produced by:

Pilar Savone, Stacey Sher and Reginald Hudlin

Starring: