CHUKA —good cast—Rod Taylor, John Mills, Ernest Borgnine, Luciana Paluzzi, James Whitmore—flounders in a boring 1967 western about ignorant whites giving the Arapaho an excuse to raise hell.  No sweep, a tired plot, care-not characters, a cut-rate, set-bound production. Taylor and Borgnine have a gnarly knockdown dragout fistfight (laden with haymakers), foreshadowing Rod’s later high-octane brawls in Dark Of The Sun and Darker Than Amber. By the time of the final Arapaho attack on the fort (clumsily staged) is over, nearly everyone gets dead. And you may be asleep.

Written by Richard Jessup (The Cincinnati Kid), based on his novel, produced by Taylor, lasting 105 minutes, its trapped fort setup with disparate, desperate characters suggestive of a western Beau Geste it’s one of the usually reliable director Gordon Douglas’ worst wrangles. Mills character (a disgraced former Brit officer apparently castrated in the Sudan and therefore rendered psychologically bonkers) seems a faded revisit to his superbly wrought work as a tormented officer in Tunes Of Glory.  Aside from being flawlessly gorgeous, what the hell is fave Luciana Paluzzi doing out there among the cactus and critters? Oh, she’s supposed to be Mexican.  Costing $1,700,000—with maybe $200 tops going to the cheese-ball mockup of the fort, looking like one of those playsets kids had back in the era—it also features Louis Hayward, Victoria Vetri (wasted) and a lamentably lame 22-year-old Michael Cole, just about to commence five years on The Mod Squad. Wait! The Mod Squad ran five years?   Like the decimated cast, the movie died at the cash trough, a take of $1,900,000 expiring at 101st place for the year.  Upchuka….*

* Taylor, 37, had hopes for his inaugural (and only) run as a producer, offering in the film’s press book “I’ve always wanted to do a Western I believed in. And so I jumped at the chance to not only star in it but to protect myself by producing it as well….Another good thing about Chuka is that I get to play a part that’s the complete antithesis of the leading man types I’ve been doing. It turns me into a character star and it ought to open up an entirely new range of parts for me to play.” Alas Beau West turned into Bro’s Waste. Rod had better luck that year with Hotel, which ranked 38th at the tills.  Chuka was not the worst western of 1967. That dishonorable discharge belongs either to Welcome To Hard Times, A Time For Killing or Hostile Guns. But considering the pro cast ad cheap look it stands as the most disappointing.

Rod goes for it. Luciana is realizing she’s gone from “Thunderball” to  “Chuka”.