The movie Burt Reynolds didn’t want anyone to see: “Shown only in prisons and aeroplanes”
In 1963, Clint Eastwood seized the opportunity to star in an Italian western turned down by his Rawhide co-star Eric Fleming. He wanted to leave television in his rearview mirror and seek movie stardom, but this low-budget, foreign-made film was an unconventional choice. Of course, the gamble paid off handsomely for Eastwood, and he became a superstar with a trio of movies dubbed the Dollars Trilogy. A few years later, Eastwood’s pal Burt Reynolds tried to emulate this success with his own spaghetti western. Unfortunately, lightning didn’t strike twice, and the picture turned out so dismally that Reynolds never wanted anyone to watch it.
The tale of this misbegotten movie began with mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis offering Sergio Corbucci the chance to direct a script entitled Un dollaro a testa, which translates as A Dollar a Head. Corbucci, who made the original Django in 1966, later claimed De Laurentiis promised him Marlon Brando was on board to star in the film. In the end, though, he got Reynolds, who De Laurentiis (mistakenly) felt looked like the On the Waterfront star.
For De Laurentiis, the biggest selling point about Reynolds was that he was willing to do his own stunts. For Reynolds, the most significant selling point was that he’d be working on a western with a director named Sergio, the same man Eastwood had raved about. When he arrived in Italy in April ’66, though, Reynolds was shocked to learn that the Sergio directing his movie – now titled Navajo Joe – was Sergio Corbucci, not the Sergio Leone who directed Eastwood. Two Italian directors named Sergio?! Say it ain’t so!
This baffling oversight aside, Reynolds quickly realised the movie had bigger problems than the director being “the wrong Sergio.” Barely anybody in the cast spoke English, making communication exceedingly difficult, and he claimed the Italian crew had no idea what “real Indians” looked like. This meant that besides having his skin darkened to play a Native American – something that was problematic in and of itself – Reynolds was also saddled with a longish black wig that he joked made him look like Natalie Wood.
When he spoke to the Chicago Tribune about the difficulties of playing a Navajo Indian seeking revenge against the bandits who massacred his tribe, Reynolds said one of the most shockingly 1969 things ever uttered. “Of course, when you play a half-breed, you have to be stoic,” he groused, “and you can’t get funky, and you have to have a deep voice. Apparently, there are no Indians with high voices.” The notably hirsute star also complained about being forced to shave his arms constantly, wryly quipping, “It’s easy to get the left, but just try and reach the right.”
Unsurprisingly, Navajo Joe wasn’t received by critics with open arms, and it was dismissed as an inferior version of pictures like A Fistful of Dollars and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Amusingly, Reynolds was one of its harshest critics, once joking that the picture was “so awful it was only shown in prisons and airplanes because nobody could leave. I killed 10,000 guys, wore a Japanese slingshot and a fright wig.”
In the decades since its release, though, at least one prominent voice admitted to being a Navajo Joe superfan – and if you didn’t immediately guess that it is Quentin Tarantino, hand in your movie buff card. In fact, the iconic movie geek and director extraordinaire had such a soft spot for Reynolds’ attempt at a spaghetti western that he used some of the film’s Ennio Morricone score in Kill Bill: Volume 2.
