Ten Days to Tulara

My assumption is that in 1958 Sterling Hayden was either very hard up for cash or there just weren't that many job offers. Otherwise, why would he have agreed to star in such a cheap Mexican production? Apart from being a tad dull and having a silly romance, the film isn't bad...but it's certainly a step down for Hayden.

Hayden is a widower and pilot who is working somewhere in South or Central America (it's location is pretty vague). He's approached for job but doesn't realize that it's really to spirit a mobster and his gang out of the country with some stolen gold. To ensure his cooperation, they've kidnapped his son and threaten to kill the boy. The entire film consists of Hayden and the gang trying to make their way to the coast after the plane is shot down--avoiding another gang as well as the police. There really isn't any more to it than this--other than a romance that seems to come from no where and develops way too quickly to believable.

While the film is not bad, it clearly isn't all that good and is a bit sluggish. You could do worse, but you could certainly do better. Hayden gives it his usual professional best but there just isn't much life in this film shot in Mexico on a very meager budget.

Ten Days To Tulara sounds like a film of convenience for both the Mexican film industry and Sterling Hayden. The industry gets the use of an American name with some box office and a chance for distribution in the north of the border market. Hayden gets a Mexican vacation, and a paycheck for his ever increasing debts to the IRS and his estranged wife.

Mexican film star Rudolfo Hoyos co-stars with Hayden in this film about an American pilot and a Mexican gangster on the run from the Mexican civil and military authority. Hoyos has kidnapped Hayden's young son and forces him to participate in a holdup that nets the robbers 8 bars of gold bullion worth a quarter of a million Yankee dollars. But when Hayden's plane is forced to crash, the robbers have flee and have ten days to make it to Tulara on the Mexican Pacific coast in order for Hayden's son to be free.

While all this is going on, would you believe Hayden has time for romance with Hoyos's daughter Grace Raynor?

The film resembles the Robert Mitchum RKO classic The Big Steal which also involves a chase through Mexico. It's not half as good though, the actors look like everything was done in one take. I'm sure they all wanted to make sure the paychecks cleared, no one more so than Sterling Hayden. He would not be seen on the big screen again until Dr. Strangelove. In the meantime his custody battles and fugitive status outside the USA got a lot of publicity as Hayden took his children to raise wherever his boat docked.

The film also has elements of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing two very stylish caper films that Hayden was part of. But Ten Days To Tulara will never be in that category.

This second feature is neither as good nor as awful as other reviewers might have you believe. Sterling Hayden is blackmailed into taking part in a hold up south of the border and then has to go on the run. It has some good photography and decent direction by old hand Henry Hathaway to keep things moving along. But co-star Rudolfo Hoyos steals every scene he is in and the fact that a lot of his and Hayden's conversations take place in alternating takes makes me think that either the two didn't get along or that Hayden really didn't want to be there -- quite probably the latter.

It's hard to make a movie when the star wants to be several thousand miles away on his boat, but this one frequently works, despite an awful script with idiotic dialogue, mostly due to some lovely photography by cinematographer Alex Phillips, who started off in the US during the silent era and then spent the next thirty years shooting in Mexico for the local industry. But really, if Hayden really had such contempt for his craft -- and he did -- he should have tried working for a living.

The plot revolves around a widowed pilot working in Mexico. He is forced to help a former associate steal 8 bars of gold and then fly him out of the country. The bad-guy-former-associate kindly informs the good-guy- pilot, that he, the-bad-guy-former associate is holding the son of the good-guy as hostage to guarantee proper behavior. The, to complicate matters, the daughter of the bad-guy-former-associate who is a good- girl, falls in love with the good-guy pilot over the objections of the bad-guy-former-associate.

Then it starts to get complicated. The guards guarding the gold shoot at the plane and generally screw it up causing the screwed-up airplane to lose air speed and altitude at the same time. This usually results in a crash. So the good-guy-pilot, the bad-guy-former-associate and the the other bad-guys decide to bail-out. Unforturnatly they are short one parachute. Fortunatly, one of the associates of the bad-guy-former- associate dies as a result of the gold-gurarding-guards shooting at them as the plane flees into the distance. So they jump, land safely, disguise themselves as very strange people and escape...sort of.

Then it gets weird. A Mexican Federales Captain, who contrary to all films about Mexican soldiers, turns out to be reasonable intelligent. (Though he does do a few not-so-bright things, but thats just for comic relief that allows the movie writers to not let the audience down in their belief that all Mexican cops and soldiers are not-to-s-m-a-r-t.)

And on and on and one. Actually, its not to bad. The movie was probably well written, will directed, well acted but butchered when it came to editing.

My advice? Don't expect to much, sit back with a bowl of popcorn, the adult beverage of your choice by your side and let your imagination run amok. That way you can enjoy the movie without using to much brain power. Fill in the edited out parts yourself. You might actually enjoy a lousy movie that had great potential.

Oh yea....here is the spoiler.....naw... watch the movie and see for yourself.

Jigsaw

(Jigsaw1695@aol.com)