Chuka

Just recently I found a video store in New Haven County where fine old westerns can be had on VHS. One of the ones I had long wanted to see was "CHUKA" or Chuka: the Gunfighter, from 1967.

The video transfer was high quality and so watching this movie on tape was an enjoyable experience. Luciana Paluzzi is stunningly beautiful.

Indeed, Chuka is something of a Hollywood fantasy but the tone and the settings of the story are fairly well done.

Both Paluzzi and her niece, played by Victoria Vetri ( as Angela Dorian ), do very well in this western oddity. Ernest Borgnine is good as ever, at being Ernest Borgnine. Rod Taylor was also very good and very believable as the cowpuncher turned hardened hired killer.

The most interesting part of the story was about how Fort Clendennon became a dumping ground for misfits, rejects, and bad officers. This is a well-known but seldom portrayed part of the truth of how the U.S. Army operated in the late 1870's. It is true that in this fiction, many of the soldiers and civilians seem to be just a little too clean for that day and age, but it doesn't really detract from the rapid pace of the events in this drama.

Additionally, the extreme deprivation imposed on the Arapaho tribal nation by the Army at this time is another important element. The "injuns" are rather cartoonish in their depictions but at least some aspects of their true grievances are relayed in the plot.

Perhaps this Chuka -- pronounced Chuck-Uh -- is a lot more savvy than circumstances in that day and age might have permitted, but Rod Taylor does really well at being fast-as-lightning and very tough.

This film gets a vote of 7 from me, which was really a six with a kicker for the beautiful Vetri and the beautiful Paluzzi.

Many of the better westerns have been good about presenting the Mexican culture of that time in a favorable light, and this is one of them, and neither Vetri nor Paluzzi appear as simply being "eye candy" for a rough-and-tumble western. The dinner sequence where Colonel Valois rakes his officers over the coals and embarrasses them all is a piece-de-resistance in western drama. Other elements are not so convincing but this is fun way to see a good western drama from a by-gone era of movie making.

Chuka derives its power from the high quality of the story on which it is based. I can recommend it heartily for western fans, for Victoria Vetri fans, and for Rod Taylor's excellent, dynamic performance.

Chuka is directed by Gordon Douglas and adapted to screenplay by Richard Jessup from his own novel. It stars Rod Taylor, John Mills, Ernest Borgnine, Luciana Paluzzi, James Whimore, Louis Hayward and Victoria Vetri. Music is by Leith Stevens and Pthe Color photography by Harold E. Stine.

1876 and Fort Clendenon is host to a bunch of army misfits and a lovelorn gunslinger, hardly a group capable of defending the Fort against an impending Arapaho attack...

A super cast and a rather gorgeous colour print can't avert this being a distinctly average Siege Oater. Prodution wise it's a hodgepodge, an uneasy blend of stuffy looking studio bound sequences, matte paintings and airy locales, while the acting, sparse characterisations and general reliance on non meaty chatty filler scenes, all make it an odd viewing experience.

The chat angle is most frustrating, not so much because there is so much of it so as to make this a 90% talky piece, but in that there are moments of great dialogue, where interesting character arcs are dangled, but alas they are threads that are never pulled to the benefit of all. Action is sparse but what there is is competently staged, with the siege itself - while not worth the wait - has enough moments of excitement and intelligence so as to not annoy.

A very good and intriguing ending further adds to the strange mix of poor and good of it all, but ultimately it's average and hardly essential for fans of Westerns and the stars involved. 5/10

That's for me one of the best Gordon Douglas' western, besides RIO CONCHOS of course. And Rod Taylor is purely magnificent in this awesome role, as excellent as in THE MERCENARIES, which he made the same year. It is a superb story, adapted from a novel by Richard Jessup that I have not read. It is action packed, moving, poignant concerning characters relationships, even the sub characters are terrific. John Mills, the British famous actor, gives here one of his most brilliant performances. It is an Indian wars, military western, not an outlaw one, a fort under siege scheme, an underrated film for my taste, but I repeat, an excellent one. And an unforgettable ending which may leave you unsatisfied. But that's a matter of opinion.

This is a strange western that I think owes some inspiration from John Ford's classic Cheyenne Autumn. Like the Ford movie it's concerning starving Indians on the reservation, in this case Arapahoe who resolve not to starve any longer.

Especially when post commander John Mills has plenty of army supplies in his fort and won't feed the Arapahoe or give them guns to hunt. His fort is a last chance outpost where apparently the army sends all its misfits from the commander on down. Holding some kind of discipline together is Sergeant Ernest Borgnine.

Into the mix rides gunfighter Rod Taylor in the title role together with Luciana Paluzzi and her niece Victoria Vetri. Paluzzi and Taylor had a little something something going back in the day.

In any event the Arapahoes have them boxed in with a massacre impending. Our sympathies are completely with the Indians on this one. This post contains some of the worst specimens of human being ever gathered together in one spot. Mills is a frightening spectacle with Borgnine enforcing his edicts on an unruly post. Of course there's a reason he's a drunken shell of a man which we learn near the end of the film.

Chuka misses being a classic because of the pedestrian direction it got from Gordon Douglas. Someone like Delmar Daves or John Huston could have made it a classic. The cast is a good one.

John Ford would never have directed it though, no way he would have portrayed his beloved United States Cavalry like this.

Chuka is an unusual and unsatisfying Western with a plot that several times reminds one of Beau Geste. It starts with the US Cavalry retrieving their comrades' bodies at a fort that has been overwhelmed by Indians and then flashes back to portray the events that led up to the massacre.

John Mills usually plays a sympathetic character but as Colonel Valois he has no redeeming feature at all, even at the end he stands apparently helpless as his ragtag soldiers fight off the Indian attack. (One wonders why a colonel has such a small command, which seems to total barely 40 men, and the fort itself is small enough to fit conveniently into a studio.) It is hard to find much to like about most of the cast, but then the members are playing unlikeable people. Rod Taylor as the gunslinger Chaka shows his good side in the opening scenes when he offers his food to starving Indians but drives a hard bargain when his scouting expertise is needed. Louis Hayward, looking a bit like the British character actor Terry-Thomas, pays for the services of an Indian girl. Only Ernest Borgnine, appearing larger than one usually visualises him, makes much of a screen impact, and his character is one of the few who seems not to have an unfortunate past.

The two Mexican ladies marooned at the post after rashly travelling across country in a stagecoach are an intrusion into the plot (but then I often groan at the contrived introduction of glamorous women into an environment that in real life would be all-male).

All in all, a disappointing oddity.