Navajo Joe (Corbucci, 1966): Nickel Cinema, 5pm
One of Quentin Tarantino's favourite Spaghetti Westerns, and an influence on Django Unchained, I've seen this and it packs quite a punch.
Nickel Cinema introduction:
After a gang of marauders massacres his tribe and desecrates their land, a lone warrior named Navajo Joe (Burt Reynolds) vows to track down the perpetrators across a frontier defined by greed, violence, and shifting alliances. Hired by a corrupt town to combat the very outlaws responsible for his people’s destruction, Joe becomes both a weapon and a reminder of the hypocrisies embedded in the settler economy. As the conflict intensifies, the film charts a path of brutal reprisals and uneasy transactions, where every act of resistance is shadowed by exploitation. Positioned within the mid-1960s explosion of Italian westerns, Navajo Joe blends Corbucci’s flair for stark landscapes and ruthless pacing with a pointed critique of frontier mythmaking. Ennio Morricone’s insistent score underscores the film’s tension between Indigenous identity and genre convention, resulting in a western that is both operatically stylised and structurally confrontational — a story where revenge intersects with the broader violence of colonial expansion.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
After a gang of marauders massacres his tribe and desecrates their land, a lone warrior named Navajo Joe (Burt Reynolds) vows to track down the perpetrators across a frontier defined by greed, violence, and shifting alliances. Hired by a corrupt town to combat the very outlaws responsible for his people’s destruction, Joe becomes both a weapon and a reminder of the hypocrisies embedded in the settler economy. As the conflict intensifies, the film charts a path of brutal reprisals and uneasy transactions, where every act of resistance is shadowed by exploitation. Positioned within the mid-1960s explosion of Italian westerns, Navajo Joe blends Corbucci’s flair for stark landscapes and ruthless pacing with a pointed critique of frontier mythmaking. Ennio Morricone’s insistent score underscores the film’s tension between Indigenous identity and genre convention, resulting in a western that is both operatically stylised and structurally confrontational — a story where revenge intersects with the broader violence of colonial expansion.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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