Western Week: Navajo Joe

Get some!!!

Howdy buckaroos and welcome to the first day of Western Week.  Now having not tackled this particular field of film outside of my own entertainment this should be an interesting week.  So let’s start the week off good and proper.  With a bloody massacre, women and children butchered and a man seeking revenge to the point of utter madness.  Doesn’t that sound keen?   So saddle up your mustang, grab a Spencer rifle and aim good.  This is Navajo Joe.

Spoilers is sneaky as them injuns!!

Our film is fast paced, very little lag between scenes and frankly one of the better revenge storylines I have seen in a while.   The film opens up with a young Native American woman at the edge of a stream just washing some clothes against the rocks when a man on horseback trots up to the other side of the stream.  They share glances, albeit the girl’s a bit more shyly and then our charmer Duncan (Aldo Sambrell of The Sea Pirate, The Texican, A Bullet for the General, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Hellbenders and Tex and the Lord of the Deep) draws his revolver and drops her dead.  I know, right?   This starts up this amazing score that seems to be timed when the screams of violence and gunfire kicks in. Enno Morricone (Composer of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Red Sonja, The Untouchables, Causalities of War and Inglorious Basterds) has been the primary composer for any Dino de Laurentiis production as well as almost every Sergio Leone (A Fistful of Dollars, A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in America and My Name is Nobody) film and this score covers the various moods of the film but captures the overtone of revenge seething in Joe’s soul.  Also from a film goers’ point of view this was a complete waste of actress Nicoletta Machiavelli (The Hills Run Red, Matchless, Face to Face, Temptation, Anyone Can Play and Garter Colt) this gorgeous girl who can run lines well, give good emotion and presence with almost any male counterpart…again wasted within a matter of minutes. 

Gorgeous mountain range or Matte painting? You decide.

As the men ride off with their scalps they get that prickly feeling like they are being watched. Up in the far mountain range some 800 yards away is Joe (Burt Reynolds of Deliverance, Shamus, White Lightning, The Longest Yard, Gator, Hooper, City Heat and Boogie Nights) stalking them slowly.  Vigilant but not impatient, he waits for them to get comfortable and then will strike.    Duncan gets antsy and sends two of his boys to take him out, only to hear loads of repeater gunfire and see two horses sent back with his men slumped on their former saddles.  Duncan rides his boys back to town rouse the place and shoot up a far amount of folks in it.  Just so we are clear, these are bad hombres and I am behind Joe 100% in their deaths of which by far are quick.

An interesting film goof in my opinion, the train heist works by dumping logs on the track and yet the land they are driving the train through I didn’t see one fricking tree at all.  Sparse of trees I would think boulders rolled over the tracks would have been more feasible but hey I am not directing the flick.  My only point there is work with what you have and not what you just trucked in from a nearby town.   If you thought Reynolds got wailed on in Gunsmoke, holy hell they done threw him a whoopin’ in this.   Rest assured Act 3 has yet to happen.   

Shatner Hairpiece for Men: You're gonna love the fit.

The film of course is pretty dreary in its theme and I have seen a bit better examples of it but all in all it is a revenge story with western backdrop and I feel they did their level best.  Reynolds however feels it was a turd overall.  He describes the film as so awful it can only be shown in airplanes and prison that way the audience cannot leave. 

Sorry Burt I have to disagree.  Not too shabby.  Although those buck skins had to be getting hot running around in I wager.