Tag: westerns

Greed and Film Grain: Vera Cruz (1954)

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

vera-cruz-poster

Probably no single US Western had more influence on the Italian revision of the genre in the 1960s than Vera Cruz. You can imagine Sergio Leone watching this movie and saying, “Hot damn, this is how I wanna make ‘em!” (Sam Peckinpah was watching too; The Wild Bunch contains direct visual quotes from this earlier trip down south for trigger-happy gunslingers to shoot up Mexico.) It was also a technical development in film formats: not exactly a tremendous leap forward, but something that placed the wider screen in reach of studios with less cash.

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Navajo Joe: Not Burt Reynolds’s Favorite Flick, But I Like It

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

Navajo-Joe-blu-ray-review
When Burt Reynolds died earlier this month at age eighty-two, I went directly home to watch Navajo Joe. Not Deliverance. Not White Lightning. Not even Smokey and the Bandit, which Amazon Prime loaded up only the week before. Nope, none of the classics. Instead, I went to a 1966 Italian Western that Burt Reynolds rarely had anything positive to say about.

When he hit the talk show circuit in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Reynolds liked to joke about Navajo Joe as a movie only shown in prisons and on airplanes because the audience couldn’t walk out. He often told a story about how he thought he was signing up for a film directed by Sergio Leone when he accepted producer Dino de Laurentiis’s offer, only to discover it was Sergio Corbucci. “Wrong Sergio,” he’d crack.

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