Some Dollars for Django

Having collected the money on three of the outlaws behind a silver mine robbery, bounty killer Reagan finds the trail going cold, with their leader, Norton, apparently dead. Suspiciously, however, Norton's identical twin brother has recently appeared in Montana.

Reagan duly travels north and, having found the body of the newly appointed sheriff of Mild City en route and taken up the man's badge, lands himself smack bang in the middle of a land war between cattlemen and farmers…

You're probably asking yourself the same question as I was at this point: Where is Django in all this? The answer is he's not. The Some Dollars for Django title is simply a piece of opportunism on the part of the distributors, hoping to cash in on the success of Sergio Corbucci's film of the previous year. (Presumably the Dollars reference was for those who hadn't heard of, or didn't like, Django.)

Anyway, so long as this is borne in mind, Some Dollars for Django is still a worthwhile spaghetti, with solid contributions from genre stars Antony Steffen, playing the bounty killer, and Frank Wolff, playing his quarry – to reveal that the Norton brothers are in fact one and the same probably won't surprise anyone – and an incident and action packed story that keeps you involved.

On the downside, the dubbing is almost always out of synch and Carlo Savina's score not terribly inspiring. There's also a strange closing sequence where, presumably having paid the money for a Don Powell ballad that they hadn't otherwise managed to shoehorn into the narrative, the filmmakers treat us to a full three minutes of disconnected shots of galloping horses and the like and Reagan/Django riding off into the sunset, then coming back again as we go to a freeze-frame ending.

One of the bad guys is called Buck Dago, while the actor playing opposite him is credited as Joe Kamel. Sometimes you have to pay attention to the indicentals…

C'est La Vie's Region 0 PAL DVD of Some Dollars For Django looks to have been pieced together from English and German sources. The film is presented in widescreen at approximately 1.77:1; better than full frame but not so great given that the original aspect ratio was 2.35:1. Thankfully, it's a pretty good transfer for the most part, with only a few scenes where the loss of information from the sides of the screen seems particularly noticeable. Disappointingly the only audio option is the English dub.

The extras comprise brief notes on the film, where it is credited to assistant director Enzo Girolami/Castellari rather than the credited Leon Klimovsky – the high number of fistfights and stunts lending credence to this, along with the production credit given his father, Marino, and the likelihood that the Italians would have been the dominat co-production partner over the Spanish – two page bio-cum-filmographies of Steffen and Klimovsky and a trailer for the film, complete with the closing statement of "Came soon to this theatre".

Mark this down as one for more dedicated and less demanding spaghetti western fans.