DS Navajo Joe / Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo

The films Navajo Joe and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly fall under the "Spaghetti Western" sub-genre. "Spaghetti Western" is a catch-all term that has come to mean a low-budget, European film (usually Italian). These films offer a European perspective of American culture, often in the form of a critique. Necessarily, the spaghetti western sub-genre differs greatly from the classic American western.

Violence and greed are integral to both films, and serve to mock America's glorification of and capacity for each. The films portray violence as senseless and to the amusement of the characters perpetuating it. By the time each of these films were produced in 1966 the Vietnam war was already being broadcast to the television sets of hundreds of thousands of Americans, effectively exposing the country to the harsh realities and violence of war as well as desensitizing the American public to the exposure to such violence. Similarly, greed and the pursuit of money guide the plot and the actions of the main characters within the films, as opposed to the duty-driven American alpha male cowboy. This depicts a European distaste for the cutthroat nature of American capitalism and the seeming imperialistic tendencies of the American government around the world leading up to 1966. The European immigrants in Navajo Joe see the potential in coming to America only to end up dead when they're caught in a wake of violence in the name of greed.

These films also portray the glaring inequalities that are espoused in American society. The character of Navajo Joe is a surprise for a leading role in a western because typically Native Americans are cast aside as "other" in the backdrop of the story of the alpha male cowboy. Joe represents the role of oppressed minorities in American culture, and his ability to overcome an adverse society represents the black, women's, and Native American civil rights movements which characterized the 1960s. The sheriff of Esperanza informs Joe that even if he could stop Duncan's gang he could never take up the position of sheriff because he is not "American." Joe retorts by stating that he is in fact more "American" than the Scottish-descendant sheriff despite not being white, challenging the notion of what really makes someone "American." This scene epitomizes the American tendency that places white men in a ignorantly superior position to all others.