Sergio
Leone's masterpieces with Clint Eastwood were just beginning
to make their mark on America when Navajo Joe came along,
attemping to do a similar kind of thing but in an even
grittier way; a different Sergio was in the director's
chair (Corbucci, who had made the seminal Django), and
Burt Reynolds was in place of Eastwood. One constant was
the composer - of course, Ennio Morricone, whose work
in this genre I would rank as the most extraordinarily
creative and brilliant film music there has been.
The main
title theme for Navajo Joe is a hoot, unexpected even
from this most unpredictable of film composers - it
begins with a woman's screech, a primal and startling
sound, before a choir sings the name of the character
and occasionally utters some words of wisdom about him
(eg: "Never so bold!") - a memorable, striking,
vintage piece of Morricone, famously used in Alexander
Payne's Election over thirty years later. And there
aren't many film scores which become ingrained in popular
culture because two entirely separate pieces from them
cropped up in entirely different films decades later,
but as well as the main title in Election, Quentin Tarantino
used "A Silhouette of Doom" in Kill Bill -
it's a driving, suspenseful piece for the villains of
the story, built around a five-note motif hammered at
the low end of a piano which forms a key building block
of the score as a whole.
Those two
pieces dominate, cropping up in countless variations
over the 45-minute score, but always given fresh impetus
with each new appearance thanks to the composer's ingenious
knack for building up whole scores sometimes from relatively
small (in terms of volume) ideas. It also helps that
there are one or two other set-pieces along the way
- the inevitable saloon music, "The Peyote Saloon",
with the piano and banjos, the wonderfully outlandish
"But Joe Say No", the two "Navajo Harmonica"
source cues and the breathtakingly beautiful "The
Demise of Father Rattigan".
A kind of
legend has built up about this score over the years
due to numerous factors - no doubt the fact that it
is such good music is the key one, and the use in other
films has also helped, the fact that Morricone wrote
the score (somewhat mysteriously) under the pseudonym
Leo Nichols (and the possibly apocryphal story that
Burt Reynolds was furious that the producers were too
cheap to hire Morricone so got this Nichols fellow instead)
but its peculiar release history also plays a part,
with various LPs being issued through the 1960s and
70s which were all unsatisfactory for one reason or
another, and the only CD release (in the mid-1990s)
suffering from very poor sound. Now Film Score Monthly
has put out the definitive release, of the whole score,
plus 10 minutes of bonus tracks, in easily the best
sound yet (though it is still certainly not problem-free).
Even by their standards the liner notes are good, with
a short essay by John Bender, track-by-track analysis
from Lukas Kendall and Jim Wynorski and a brief note
from the latter about his history with the score. Top-notch.
