Let me set the stage for one particular scene. The film opens with a savage slaughter of an Indian village. A group of rough riders serve as hired guns, paid to find Indian scalps. A dollar a scalp, to be exact. But one slipped through. Navajo Joe.

Next scene. The scalpers ride into a canyon. A lone rider sits alone on the crest above. BUMM!!! Opening chords of Ennio Morricone’s “Il Profilo Del Destino” thunders across the speakers. The walls seem to close in and circle the murderers. There are about two dozen riders, and you can read the evil swagger in there faces. As the music echoes through the valley (not literally, but that is the effect it creates and that’s why Morricone is a bad ass) we see two members of the gang tear off through waves of tall green grass(rare in a spaghetti) and we are given a Leone-esque close-up gallery of rogues. Hard faces of evil, twitch and leer as their two scouts go after this silhouetted stranger. The music thunders to Corbucci’s cuts like a giallo murder set piece as we wait... and wait... and wait for what we hope is coming. The preamble to the showdown is drawn out like watching a rope slowly splinter. When Corbucci kills someone, he really kills someone.

In a flash Joe is on them with his blade. The camera is off the tripod and rolls and tumbles in the middle of the hand to hand combat as Joe emerges victor over one, then shoots the other dead. But he doesn't just shoot him. He shoots the guy EIGHT TIMES. You’re not going to see this in American westerns. American heroes are satisfied with one shot, maybe two if the first only winged him. This is about deep seated hate and it makes the highly stylized artificial films seem all the more real. Emotion. Opera. This is what the Italians do best, besides make hot women. Really hot women.

The story isn’t brain surgery. The bandits return to town with their scalps. Town doesn’t want to pay. Bandits raise hell and go rob a train. The soul survivor of the opening massacre (Navajo Joe) tracks down the killers as they try to rob said train and he steals the money from them and kills them off. That’s the beauty of revenge films. They do not need to be too convoluted or have huge subplots. The ones that work hit us emotionally hard in the beginning-- right between the legs and we agree to pretty much anything after that, so long as it includes laying the hurt on those responsible. This is where the skill of directors like Corbucci come in. Finding the rhythms and details in expected conventions and making us remember them forever.

A soldier looks down at a fragile carnation that the wind seems to be blowing against his foot. A moment of serenity in his ugly world of dust and blood. Before he realizes it, the rouse of the carnation is revealed to be Joe taunting him as he drags him off the train and right into his awaiting blade of vengeance. I’ve always wanted to have an excuse to write that phrase. Years after, fans do not remember the twists of a plot or why someone had to go to such-and-such a place to find such-and-such clues--- they remember details. The cigarette being laid down in the POV shot of “Bird with the Crystal Plumage.” They remember the glass shards spray over Edwige Fenech in “Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh.” They remember the cigar fall out of the soldiers mouth in “Good, Bad and the Ugly.” And they remember the carnation in “Navajo Joe.”

I spent about an hour tearing my apartment apart for this bootleg Morricone documentary this morning. A while back I had rented a spaghetti western from an L.A. rental house and it was a copy off of TV. After the film there was this incredible doc on Morricone’s career that was not advertised on the tape. I don’t think they even knew it was on there. Well, I can’t find it. So there will not be any brilliant citations from real sources who know much more about him than me, it’s just plain ‘ol me and my ten-inch hard-on for his musical stylings.

Right about now you’re asking why they hell am I talking about some god damn bootleg doc on a composer? Well smart guy, YOU DO NOT TALK ABOUT ITALIAN GENRE CINEMA WITHOUT TALKING ABOUT ENNIO MORRICONE.

Douche bag.

Any fan of Tarantino will recognize two music cues from this film. I should preface this, I love “Kill Bill.” I love “Kill Bill Vol.2.” I saw “Kill Bill Vol. 2” everyday for six days straight the week it came out in theaters and have watched it about 300 times on DVD. He is an absolute master of cinema and I would not know about most of the films in my odd collection if it were not for him. That said, Corbucci uses the music cue better. He uses the rhythm of the beat to make the awaiting fight draw out in such a delicious, delirious, and devious manner that we are left with mouths agape. Being a fan of Tarantino first, these filmmakers later, there is a real joy in discovering, usually unexpectedly, these lifts and borrows; be it music lifts, the Ezekiel 25:17 speech from Sonny Chiba’s “The Bodyguard “or one of a hundred subtle nods-- they never come off as campy or jarring. Just a fellow appreciator who incorporates their films into his lexicon of film language.

What Morricone brings to the film is not only his unique choices, you know it’s his score in the first bar and half of music, but he gives each film it’s own signature from every other film he has done. If you take a stack of Jerry Goldsmith or Hans Zimmer scores, as good as they are and with their great scores aside, their bread and butter output while good, are a little hard to distinguish from each other. They are good, you hear them and you know its Hans Zimmer but some of them are not identifiable and singularly unique. You hear a Morricone score and you know what film it is from. And the guy wrote hundreds of damn scores. “Il Mercinario” (another Kill bill borrow), if you’ve seen it and you hear it, you know the arena theme from that movie. If you’ve seen “Bird with Crystal Plumage” (another Tarantino borrow-- see “Death Proof”) you know the stalking photographer theme.

A quick note about the production team. Genre cinema fans will grin with glee when they see the script was written by future crime cinema master Fernando Di Leo (one of my all time favorites, do yourself a favor and see “Il Boss”) and assistant director was non other than master of gore and gut wrenching terror, Ruggero Deadatto. Stop reading this and go watch “Cannibal Holocaust.”

Screen beauty Nicoletta Machiavelli turns in an interesting performance as a hand maiden to one of the rich towns ladies and serves as the last link between Joe and society. An outsider, she is an untouchable servant who’s the only one who understands him, what he is capable of and the sadness they share between them in a time of racial discrimination and flat out bigotry. It’s hard to get too political about treatment of the Native American when you have a clean cut white guy playing the Indian hero and a hot piece of Italian ass playing the squaw. She serves more as a reminder to us that the town can never understand a man like Joe, who he is, what he’s after and what he has suffered.

Burt Reynolds hoping to cash in for himself on some of that Eastwood TV-turn-Mega Box Office fame came to Italy to star as the titular Navajo Joe. Though the film was laughable to the public on initial release, we are all aware of Reynold’s major star run in the seventies and early eighties. And this film has rightfully grown in reputation as a great Spaghetti Western. Sure, his hair in this is a little silly, the accent a touch off, but the man conveys pain on screen and the need adjudicate with extreme prejudice as good as any. It also shows a remarkable performance of physicality for Reynold’s. Some scenes obviously have some poor Sicilian getting the shit knocked out of him, but some are undeniably Reynold’s. Be sure to check his upside down hanging escape to see what I mean. The guy was a stallion.

Aldo Sambrell is pretty much in every damn western Europe made in the sixties and seventies. Some will remember him best from OUATITW--- “Two tickets, to the next stop. One way.” My only real comment on him and his characters half brother played by Lucio Rosato is that I wanted more of them. We get the taste of a really interesting relationship between these two men but, like any good villain, we don’t get enough. But the charm may be in the wanting.

While Sergio Leone was top dog in the Italian Western, Corbucci should never be considered second tier. He wasn’t some cheap knockoff. He was a craftsman who had a different attitude towards our memory of the old west. Leone looks back at the west as a long forgotten time with sadness and love. Corbucci looks back with anger at an ugly time of ugly people where goodness emerged in very small acts that one was usually punished for. Being the hero meant being less of a son-of-a-bitch than the villain. He was a sadistic director that you couldn’t trust. Case in point.-- The villains have been using the local townspeople as hostages. The money is delivered, they are set free. As they are leaving the priest looks back and says “Thank you for your mercy.” Then, and ONLY THEN, do they shoot him. Just because they can. That’s the delight of Corbucci. He doesn’t shy away from the cruelty of violence and violent men. His heroes Silence, Django, the Pollock and Navajo Joe are mythic, quiet men with a gimmick and a tragic past. Usually they are not good men (although Joe really ain’t a bad dude) but they are good compared to the unbridled fatalist villains he pits them against.

MGM recently released this on a Region 1 DVD. No special features. Boring disk. Great movie. Cheap price.

Disc 5 out of 10.
Movie 8.5 out of 10.

-Chris Sacks