borrowing (quite heavily and without permission) from Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo.”
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The rest of the world immediately ran to imitate that film’s success, and already-profitable Italian Westerns, nicknamed Spaghetti Westerns, continued to proliferate. At the time, a young and upcoming actor name Burt Reynolds was following a similar career arc to Eastwood. He had small parts in mainstream Hollywood movies, and played one of the lead characters on a TV series called “Riverboat.” He, too, would have loved the acclaim of a stylized Italian Western under his belt, and even got advice to that effect from Eastwood himself. The two were friends. Eastwood advised Reynolds to look up a Western director named Sergio, knowing that he did good work.
There was, however, a bit of a mix-up. Reynolds did indeed find an Italian director named Sergio, and he did indeed learn that Sergio had a Western lined up, but it turns out it was the wrong Sergio. Reynolds talked to Sergio Corbucci, the director of “Django,” as well as several peplum films and crime movies. Reynolds agreed to make Corbucci’s Western, assuming that he was the one who made “A Fistful of Dollars.” Reynolds unwittingly agreed to make “Navajo Joe,” a racist Western that, afterwards, the actor long considered one of his worst films. The story is detailed in Howard Hughes’ book “Once Upon A Time in the Italian West: The Filmgoers’ Guide to Spaghetti Westerns.”
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