Navajo Joe

• Directed by Sergio Corbucci
• November 1966

A Navajo Indian fights against a group of outlaws responsible for slaughtering his tribe.

Burt Reynolds as a Navajo? Sure. William Shatner played a Native American once so why can’t Burt Reynolds? That along with some of the most Italian looking Mexicans you will ever see makes Navajo Joe unusual film right from the start. But it gets better.

The dubbing of the Italian actors-and there are many of them-is rather bad. Real bad. It sounds like cheap animated voiceover work. I’m not sure what all goes into dubbing then or now but there are some very fine examples of it from that era. Navajo Joe is not one of them. The volume in comparison the lines of the English speaking actors is, well, off as is the sound quality.

This is the most spaghetti of spaghetti Westerns. With music by Ennio Morricone to how this film is shot this has that distinct identity. And with the general quality of the film the great Morricone was kinda slumming it here. You have a legend working in something this low quality.

Reynolds as the titular character doesn’t come in until about 15 or so minutes after the start of the movie in any significant capacity. Until then you see him in a distance shot. They spend most of the time on the villains. It feels like Navajo Joe was almost an afterthought added in once the main story was completed. I can name a few modern movies with a similar vibe.

The focus of the movie is more in the mechanizations of the villains. Scalp hunter Jeffrey Duncan (Lucio Rosato) and his gang matter more to the filmmakers than the supposed hero. They killed Joe’s tribe to collect the bounty on scalps but have since resorted to killing any old Native American rather than just renegades. As a character Joe is more irritated than angry and the villains are jerks rather than evil. It is all just…bland.

The story just shuffles from moment to moment. You don’t feel like you’re heading towards a confrontation. The villains never feel that murderous. And Burt Reynolds in his youth doesn’t come off as that tough. This was the man’s man of the 70s and he just never gets to tough! He was Gator!

And then there are the elements of bad comedy. You’ve got thieves and murderers and vengeance and you go into light comedy? It’s not like the former elements are treated lightly. They’re treated seriously but then you do the goofiness of the latter. What boob puts in bad comic relief in in a movie involving vengeance and genocidal bigots? Director Sergio Corbucci that’s who.

I can’t tell you much about any of the characters. They just, well, are. You get no feel for anyone or anything in this movie. It moves from event to event and then it ends. Really. It just ends. No development. No growth. No strong sense of justice whatever that might be.

Burt Reynolds was right to not like Navajo Joe. He dissed it publicly several times in public. It’s certainly a low point in the career of everyone involved. If this comes up as a suggestion somewhere don’t waste your time.