Navajo Joe

Dino De Laurentiis must have staggered out of a Sergio Leone screening knowing he had to get in on the Italo western craze  “oggi!, subito!”  His instructions to his out-sourced sub-producers were to get some American actors on board immediately. Ermanno Donati and Luigi Carpentieri had produced  sword ‘n’ sandal costume pictures, some  classic Euro-horror and even a James Bond rip-off.  Navajo Joe appears to have been the second half of a two-picture Italo western package, with The Hills Run Red with Henry Silva and Dan Duryea. Both were released through United Artists.

Burt Reynolds often repeated the story that he thought he had signed up to be directed by Sergio Leone, not Corbucci, a story that mainly says how unhappy he was with the shoot. Reynolds passed away before the release of  Once Upon a Time In Hollywood, in which Quentin Tarantino put Sergio Corbucci on a high pedestal. The Roman-born Corbucci was at the time the most respected name in Italo westerns this side of Leone. He had just filmed what would be his ‘signature’ feature, the original Django with Franco Nero.

Navajo Joe was presumably finished in multiple language versions but we’ve only seen the English version here. The IMDB names 20 different dubbing artists doing the voices, but the males sound like the same 2 or 3 voices. The majority of the film is shot on exteriors, with a lot of Day-for-Night work.

The story is straight violence and revenge, as if De Laurentiis had ordered his western mayhem by the yard —  “give me a shootout, a knife killing or some sadistic mutilation or torture every 10 minutes. No, make that every 5 minutes.”  The movie is pure nihilism, with cruelty and killing repeated so often that the impact dulls to nothing. We lose track of the body count. A young family shows up, including a baby?  They all die. A supporting character is no longer essential to the story progression?  A scene needs punctuation?  Time for an offhand killing.

When we see the villain’s enormous bandit troop we’re thinking, ‘oh, the hero has 94 minutes to kill all these guys.’  How does the villain feed them all, on $1 a head per dead Indian scalp they turn in?  They’re incredibly loyal — even when most are killed, none of them quit.

The underachieving villain is scalphunter Vee Duncan (Aldo Sambrell), a mass murderer who makes a deal with the crooked doctor Chester Lynne (Pierre Cressoy) to steal $500,000 dollars of a town’s money. Duncan’s only plan is to slaughter everybody. A high level of gore is in evidence. The Indian scalps taken aren’t just swigs of hair, but bloody hunks of flesh as well, including the entire top of a woman’s head. She’s a svelte fashion model the Native American wife of ‘Joe,’ a Navajo said to be way South of his ancestral home.

The seemingly unkillable Joe (Burt Reynolds, lean and mean) begins dispatching Duncan’s interchangeable henchmen by twos and threes. A banjo player and his showgirls (Antonio Imparato, Lucia Modugno,  Franca Polesello and Tanya Lopert  ↓ ) escape from Duncan, thanks to Joe’s intervention; they later come to the rescue when the gang hangs Joe by his feet in a corral.

There’s very little here in the way of frontier spirit. The little town of Esperanza is on a rail line, which ought to make it a frontier hub, but it seems far removed from civilization. The production’s main asset is a railroad train, which carries a safe where the coveted loot is stashed. The screenwriters accept the train as might a 6-year-old: anyone can make it go, and although it sits idle for hours, it always has ‘steam up’ and is ready to roll.

Sergio Corbucci and Burt Reynolds might not have been friendly on the set but they’ve likely made the best movie possible out of this screenplay. With Reynolds reportedly in charge of the action choreography and doing most of his own stunts, the show delivers a lot of energetic mayhem. Some of the dialogue exchanges are well done, especially those between Joe and Estella (Nicoletta Machiavelli). She plays the mixed-race maid of a banker’s daughter, but as a potential love interest she is restricted to ‘meaningful’ looks.

Numerous characters are introduced and then made irrelevant by blasts of gunfire. We’re supposed to be shocked, shocked I tell you, when Dr. Lynne, his wife Hannah (Valeria Sabel) a kindly priest (star Fernando Rey) all become casual victims. Only the body count and the action matter, not the people. The sound effects are extremely repetitive, with the same ‘mass hoofbeat walla’ continuing across the many riding scenes, without a change in pitch or persepective. The characters shoot their guns continually. Where are the big crates of ammo to account for all the shots fired?

Sergio Corbucci’s direction has good energy, but lacks the artfulness and inspiration of the other two Sergios, Leone and Sollima. At one point we cut to a flat area with Sambrell and his gang walking forward.  ↓ We know they’ll end framed in a medium shot and, sure enough, there’s a prominent rock on the ground screen center that Sambrell uses as a ‘stage mark.’

We do admire the horses and horsemanship in the movie. The animals are handsome and some of the riding is expert. Burt Reynolds rides bareback at breakneck speed, without batting an eye. We are less enamored of the violent horse falls on view. A few trained horses appear comfortable rolling on their sides, but a pair pulling a wagon at a gallop are rudely tripped. They are possibly sacrificed; the shot ends abruptly, perhaps because the animals’ suffering is obvious.

As we say, the action powerhouse Burt Reynolds is almost the entire show. He looks just fine, even wearing a black ‘Injun’ wig. In three years Burt would play a similar character in more choreographed action with Jim Brown and Raquel Welch in  100 Rifles. Most everyone else just fulfills their part without doing anything particularly special. The townspeople cower and worry about their money. The crooked doctor isn’t particularly interesting, and neither is favorite Fernando Rey. Three of the five women characters survive in good shape, unmolested, making us think that producer De Laurentiis asked Corbucci to avoid censorable sex scenes.

This show is a big opportunity for actor Aldo Sambrell, a leading player in Sergio Leone’s colorful stock company. He’s usually Henchman #2, without too much dialogue; he must have had a terrific agent because he shows up in many foreign pictures filmed in Spain. His most memorable non-violent scene is in John Milius’s  The Wind in the Lion. He’s the Arab brigand who entices a young girl from her hiding place in the opening scene, with a wink and a smile. Sambrell does well in Navajo Joe, maintaining a pretense of menace even when Duncan’s actions don’t make much sense. His performance is dulled somewhat by his dubbed English voice.

Twenty years ago we tried to interview Señor Sambrell for our MGM extras. He was visiting California and staying in town with one of the Leone experts who helped with our first Sergio Leone DVDs. Sambrell was in great physical shape but the interview was a mess. Because he claimed he was fluent in English, we didn’t bring along a translator. He could barely make himself understood, and kept repeating, “I am the Spanish Marlon Brando.”  The session didn’t come off.

We’re told that Navajo Joe went straight to 42nd street grindhouses when released here late in 1967. That was the fate of almost all Spaghettis in the U.S..  We find its saving grace to be the original soundtrack. Ennio Morricone’s arresting music cues keep us interested long after we otherwise would have found something else to watch. This reviewer has only seen Navajo Joe all the way through now. Back in the early DVD days I worked in the next room while my teenaged kids watched it and laughed their heads off. To them it was an intentional comedy: everything was beyond silly, especially the casual overkill factor. They were already big Leone fans, and to them the screeching, screaming main ‘Navajo Joe’ theme served to ridicule the action on screen.

Another Tarantino connection: Joe carves his symbol in the forehead of the second-to-last bad guy, more or less identically to the ritual performed on various Nazis by Lt. Aldo Raine in  Inglourious Basterds.