Navajo Joe

The fourth and last film directed by Sergio Corbucci in my Spaghetti Western festival is Navajo Joe, from 1966. It is my favorite of the films so far, perhaps because it feels more American than any of the others.

To start, it stars American actor Burt Reynolds, before he was a big name. He had played a half-breed Indian on the old TV show Gunsmoke, and his dark good looks made him a natural to play the title character, a solitary Indian bent for vengeance, in an era before actual Indians were used as actors.

The film begins with a band of cutthroats, led by Aldo Sambrell, massacring an Indian village. They are selling scalps, at a dollar a head, but the local sheriff wants none of it anymore since Sambrell is killing women and children. So they turn to robbing a train, making off with half a million in cash that is earmarked by the government for a small town (presumably in the southwest somewhere).

All the while, this gang is stalked by Reynolds, who picks off a few here and there. He agrees to help the townspeople get their money back, but he's more interested in killing Sambrell, who murdered his wife.

Though there are elements that are just plain stupid--why a train loaded with soldiers as escorts doesn't smell a rat when a pile of logs is neatly placed across the tracks I'll never know--Navajo Joe unfolds with expert pacing. Reynolds is a bit of a superman, outdoing the bandits at every turn, but he is capable of being hurt and captured (as seen in the poster, he is hung up by his heels).

Sambrell makes an extraordinarily vicious villain--he kills a minister after the man thanks him--and the final showdown between he and Reynolds is worth the build-up.

The film was scored by Ennio Morricone (some of his soundtrack was used to great comic effect in Alexander Payne's Election), but for some reason he is credited as Leo Nichols.