Call in the cavalry, because Navajo Joe is the Greatest Movie EVER!
Click on the movie poster or the title above to download our review of the film, featuring Sean “Hollywood” Hunting.
(NOTE: The audio quality suffers a bit in this one. I just moved and some switches got flipped, and the Skype conference was plagued with technical difficulties. Apologies.)
Review in a Nutshell: Navajo Joe puts the “spa” in Spaghetti Western. Replete with inconsistent Spanish geography and Italian banditos, it’s the film Burt Reynolds wishes everyone would forget.
The Greatest Movie EVER! Podcast 
firsties ever time yeah but keep up the awesome
Don’t do that. If you comment to say “first”, but don’t have anything to add to the discussion, I’m going to remove that comment from now on.
wowzers!!!!!! I was listening to another podcast and to my pleasant surprise I find a new GME podcast. I guess its true what they say about watched pots
Well I will keep suggesting this but something to do with the hulk you guys have talked about it before but I want to know if you are going to do this also no more firsties comments. Thanks for answering the whole catherine thing in last weeks podcast.
Eh – just give McTron CancerAIDS and wish that he die in a fire, like they do over at THE ONION’s AV Club. He’ll be happy then….
About NAVAJO JOE – despite Burt Reynolds’s loathing of it, it got a surprisingly positive write-up in Hughes’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE ITALIAN WEST: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns. So I suspect a lot of this movie’s bad reputation may be more a case of Reynolds and Director Sergio Corbucci not working well together than anything else, since most “respectable” critics didn’t pay attention to Spaghetti Westerns during their heyday (Pauline Kael seriously reviewing a few of the more mainstream ones in the pages of the oh-so-tony THE NEW YORKER was a major shock at the time, even if she ended up not liking any of them very much).
no just do some more animated movies with deryll and more fast karate guys. What about one of the hulk movies or do a double header
featuring the ang lee hulk and the 08 revamp what do you think of shows like adventure time and the regular show
I’ve never seen Adventure Time or Regular Show, so I can’t comment on either.
I hated, hated, hated the Ang Lee Hulk. It’s probably the worst comic book movie ever made, and I include the Reb Brown Captain America and the David Hasselhoff Nick Fury and the Bulgarian Fantastic Four movies in that assessment. I saw it for free because my friend could get me into employee screenings as the local movie theater, and I still wanted my money back. Sean and I will probably cover it eventually, because I am a sadist and he hasn’t watched it yet, so I feel compelled to inflict it on him at some point. But I don’t feel like doing it right now; I’d rather cover Batman and Robin first.
As for the `08 reboot, it was fun, and it was the type of Hulk movie that everyone wanted in the first place, with lots of smashing and some tongue-in-cheek humor. That being said, it was only an average movie, and I don’t really have a lot to say about it, so a double-feature is unlikely.
You should watch Adventure time. There’s a rainbow unicorn in it.
what about the ang lee hulk and one of the older hulk properties
Also what about a once a month tv bonus episode or even bimonthly to cover series and made for tv movies that deserve recongization and belong along side the rest of your awesome back catatologue.
would you cover the Hulk tv movies??
Stop pressuring me about the Hulk movies. You made your point. I’ll get to it if and when I get to it. Badgering me about it and spamming comments all over the place is not going to motivate me to get to it any faster.
I’m extremely busy with school right now. I can’t commit to additional projects, and I don’t watch a lot of TV or TV movies. Bonus content will become available only when it fits my schedule.
Damn there is some serious Hulk action going on in the forum here. Out of all of the spaghetti westerns I know, (which is sadly not a great deal) Navajo Joe is definetly not one I am familiar with, however Django being a film I have a lot of time for means this will be something to check out at some point.
Great podcast, i completely agree with your QT feelings. Loved the podcast as always!
good episode, I think I will have to check this one out. I usually don’t go for westerns but this one sounds like it would be fun. For some reason the sound quality was not as good as it usually is on this episode, I’m not complaining, just an observation, did anyone else have a problem or was it just my computer?
Don’t give in to the pressure Paul! the hulk isn’t worth it. I prefer the episodes where its a legitimately awesome movie (Fight Club style or Tank Girl style) that I haven’t heard of or wasn’t brave enough to watch on my own. The ones where they are doing a movie because they feel obligated to do a movie that everyone knows is bad are not as fun.
Also the episodes of movies like waterworld and hook (80’s and 90’s nostalgia movies) are really enjoyable.
No pressure on my end, Goob. Review them when you wanna review them. I’m in no rush.
Ehh, this one is longish, but at least it’s not about Hulk.
Nerdy film note — at the time this was made, a pro-Indian attitude would have been not at all uncommon. Euro westerns, for starters, were never all that interested in Indians as villains. There’s amazingly few that go that route. Also at the time, there was a strange fascination with American Indians in Europe, expressed most overtly in East German “Indianer” films, in which the Indians (or Germans pretending to be Indians, but whatever) were the heroes and the greedy, land-devouring white guys were the villains. Although the Indianer movie was a more or less uniquely German thing, the attitude filtered out through Europe.
Plus, by 1966, the counter culture was beginning to blossom, and there was an additional fascination with goofball “back to the land” attitudes which, while naive and often as historically inaccurate as their “Indians are murdering heathen scum” polar opposite, did much to begin the process of forcing American Indian reforms to…well, not the forefront, but at least into public consciousness. There was even less resistance to that aspect of it in Europe, where there was no real history to deal with.
As for The Searchers — John Wayne’s character is most definitely meant to be, if not the villain of the piece, then certainly a character so flawed that you can’t even call him a flawed hero. Much of the film is spent exploring how his flat refusal to evolve his philosophy makes him borderline psychotic — willing to murder his own family member rather than see her sympathize with Indians, let alone “become” one. His final shot, walking out alone into Monument Valley, is not just iconic because it’s a quintessential Ford shot. By this time, the viewers are all pretty aware that his character has become an irredeemable monster.
Navajo Joe is definitely Corbucci half-assing it, as most of his other films prove. At his best, I think Corbucci was every bit the equal of Leone.
NJ would make an excellent triple feature with White Comanchi starring William Shatner, and Apache Woman, starring the perpetually confused Al Cliver of Zombie fame
what are you in school for I thought you where done with school
I was concerned that there were all these comments and none expressing the sentiment I came to express. Fortunately, M.D. Allison abides. Corbucci certainly deserves to be on the same level as Leone. In fact, complete the Italian Western Sergio hat trick by adding Sollima in there for The Big Gundown and Run Man Run.
The assessment of Navajo Joe seems fair enough. It’s certainly not a bad movie, but it’s also not a movie I’d think to recommend to other people since as noted there are better Corbucci films. Still, I have no clue what’s on Netflix, and I understand that’s the primary driving factor these days. (I originally wrote “no clue what’s streaming on Netflix,” but that’s redundant now that it’s split.)
The Blue Underground restoration of Django and its subsequent re-releases/availability of Netflix have helped a bit as far as getting Corbucci’s name out there, but for most everyone the alpha and omega of Italian Westerns is Leone. But as Sean noted, Corbucci’s The Great Silence is essential (and one of the most nihilistic stories told), but of all the Corbucci movies I think Companeros would be the best fit for GME! I’ve posted it before, but every single thing on the poster is present in the film: http://tinyurl.com/5ursfc6.
I second Daryl’s suggestion. Companeros is fantastic, and the best example of Corbucci using the spaghetti western as a political film. Great soundtrack, fantastic acting (has Tomas Milian made an appearance on GME yet?), and a script that manages to be both serious and comical at the same time.
Plus, Franco Nero’s mustache in it is superb.
I wonder if there will ever be an episode on El Topo?
There was a Spaghetti Western mini-marathon a few years back on some cable channel (IFC, I think), and they showed MY NAME IS NOBODY starring Henry Fonda as an aging gunslinger, and Terence Hill as his biggest fan/wannabe successor/comic relief irritant. Hill’s character spends most of the movie pushing Fonda towards a climactic confrontation with “The Wild Bunch” (presented only as a distant dust-clouded horde of clumsily-galloping horsemen with Morricone writing a satiric version of his own Western-style themes), which ultimately doesn’t seem to do much to either side one way or the other, but satisfies Nobody just fine. That is definitely worth catching if you get the chance, Paul.
I also highly recommend both Quien Sabe/A Bullet for the General and Face to Face, two more very political/philosophical westerns; and Viva Cangaceiro and Matalo! — two spaghetti westerns that really cross the line into absolute strangeness, though not quite to the degree that El Topo does.
But if I was going to suggest another foray for GME into western territory…no question. It’d be SCALPS, from the people who brought you Zombie 3, Hell of the Living Dead, and Troll 2.
And yes, Paul – at some point, you really should review EL TOPO, because it’s just…something else. I’ll even send you my spare DVD of it if you don’t have one already….
Keith, I’ve heard about A BULLET FOR THE GENERAL – so I should give it look then?
I really hate to just come in here and dump off 2 movie suggestions, but both are on Netflix and are a great deal of fun.
Bucktown
Dead and Buried
Timothy — definitely give A Bullet for the General a go. I love it.