Chuka (1967)

Director:

Gordon Douglas

Writers:

Richard Jessup (novel)
Richard Jessup (screenplay)

Release Date:

23 July 1967 (USA)

Genre:

Western

Tagline:

Of his kind Chuka's the best there is. At fighting. At loving. And when it had to be - at killing!

Plot:

While Indians besiege a U.S. Army fort in 1876, residents of the fort a gunfighter, a stagecoach driver, two Mexican women, and a motley company of soldiers try to come to terms with their pasts. |

Plot Keywords:

Fort | Calvary | Whipping | Punishment | Bare Chested Male

Cast

Rod Taylor	...	Chuka
Ernest Borgnine	...	Sgt. Otto Hahnsbach
John Mills	...	Colonel Stuart Valois
Luciana Paluzzi	...	Veronica Kleitz
James Whitmore	...	Lou Trent
Victoria Vetri	...	Helena Chavez (as Angela Dorian)
Louis Hayward	...	Major Benson
Michael Cole	...	Spivey
Hugh Reilly	...	Captain Carrol
Barry O'Hara	...	Slim
Joseph Sirola	...	Baldwin
Marco López	...	Hanu (as Marco Antonio)
Gerald York	...	Lieutenant Daly
Herlinda Del Carmen	...	Indian Girl
Lucky Carson	...	Stage Driver

Also Known As:

Chuka: The Gunfighter

Runtime:

105 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color (Pathécolor)

Aspect Ratio:

1.85 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Singapore:PG | West Germany:16 (nf) | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15

Company:

New Art Film Company

Quotes:

Col. Stuart Valois: How many men have you killed?
Chuka: I stopped counting at sixteen.
Col. Stuart Valois: Were they fair fights? Mr. Chuka! Where they fair fights?
Chuka: Fifteen were fair.
Col. Stuart Valois: And what is fair to you, Mr. Chuka
Chuka: They were facing me. They had a chance at me.
Col. Stuart Valois: And the sixteenth?
Chuka: I shot him in the back of the head. But like the doctor here, I can't prove that he stuck a knife in me and was stealing my horse.

Chucking It All Away

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.