Devotion to Corbucci has a precise formulation: Tarantino presents him as the second great director of the Italian western, behind Leone.
What the second place really means
In the documentary Django & Django, directed by Luca Rea and released in 2021, Quentin Tarantino develops his admiration for Sergio Corbucci. The wording quoted by distributor Shameless Films places him as the second-best director of Italian westerns. The adjective matters: this is not a proven ranking of every western filmmaker in the world, nor a statement that automatically puts him above every American director.
The preference also has an earlier record. In the list Tarantino submitted to The Spaghetti Western Database in January 2009, Django was in third place and The Great Silence was fourteenth. Both choices show sustained attention to Corbucci, even if a film's position on a personal list does not by itself explain the reasons for the admiration. To understand them, it helps to look at what kind of West his images build.
Corbucci opens the door to a territory where violence can be built into institutions, the economy, and everyday life. The protagonist does not always arrive in a community capable of restoring balance simply by eliminating a villain. Sometimes the community is organized in such a way that cruelty is profitable. That difference changes the expectations with which the appearance of a gunfighter is viewed.
Django: the hero enters dragging a coffin
Django, released in 1966, shows Franco Nero crossing a muddy landscape with a coffin. The image defines a strange relationship between movement and burden: the character moves forward, but he carries something that belongs to the world of death. Before we know his intentions, his presence already raises a question. The mystery does not depend on an immediate verbal explanation; it is built into a visible action and an object that cannot be ignored.
Mud also transforms the texture of the western. The ground slows movement, dirties bodies, and strips nobility from travel. The spaces seem worn down and hostile. The landscape does not function as a promise of unlimited freedom, but as a material weight pressing on those who try to cross it. That physical experience prepares a story in which the hero's superiority also cannot be taken for granted.
The violence of the opposing groups places the protagonist inside a system of domination and opportunism. Intervening does not mean finding a morally transparent side to join without reservation. The viewer has to follow the alliances and distinguish between what the character says and what he is trying to get. The lone figure remains compelling, but his journey is cut across by interests that do not disappear with a display of skill.
The body's vulnerability is essential. A gunfighter is usually defined by the speed and dexterity of his hands; threatening them is a way of challenging the identity the genre gives him. Corbucci makes violence have consequences for the very possibility of acting. The tension is not only about waiting for the next duel, but about asking what is left of a hero when he loses part of what made him formidable.
The Great Silence and the fragility of justice
The relationship between landscape and body makes it possible to compare both films without reducing the difference to their plots: walking through mud and advancing over snow impose visibly different forms of resistance.
The Great Silence, from 1968, replaces mud with snow and places Jean-Louis Trintignant opposite Klaus Kinski. The cold is not a pleasant backdrop to the action. It conditions movement, isolation, and dependence on scarce shelter. The whiteness of the landscape also offers no equivalent moral clarity: a clean appearance can contain a deeply cruel order.
The reward system turns death into a paid activity. Legality can serve as cover for those who profit from hunting vulnerable people. That mechanism makes the conflict harder to resolve through a simple opposition between representatives of the law and criminals. The viewer needs to see who gains power from the rules and who is exposed to them.
The silent protagonist shifts attention to gestures, looks, and the relationships he forms with others. His restraint does not remove emotion, but it forces us to perceive it without the constant aid of explanatory speeches. Opposite him, the antagonist's confidence is unsettling because it seems to rest on something more solid than his individual skill: an environment that tolerates and rewards his behavior.
Without revealing the ending, the film makes it possible to measure how far the western needs to promise that justice will be possible. Corbucci stretches that expectation and forces us to recognize the distance between wanting redress and having the means to achieve it. Tarantino's admiration finds here a cinema that can be spectacular and harsh, recognizable as adventure and difficult to absorb as consolation. Watching Django alongside The Great Silence makes it possible to appreciate two variations on that harshness without reducing the director to a single image of violence.
Check out the selection of directors and actors admired by Tarantino.