Chuka (1967)

Director: Gordon Douglas

Writer: Richard Jessup

Composer: Leith Stevens

Starring: Rod Taylor, Ernest Borgnine, John Mills, Luciana Paluzzi, James Whitmore, Victoria Vetri, Louis Hayward, Michael Cole, Hugh Reilly, Barry O'Hara, Joseph Sirola, Marco Lopez, Gerald York, Herlinda Del Carmen, Lucky Carson, Ford Rainey

More info: IMDb

Tagline: They called him saddle-bum...desert rat...pistolero...but where would they have been without Chuka on that bloody summer's day.http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061477/combined

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.

My rating: 6/10

Will I watch it again? No.

It seems like everyone at the fort is there because of something bad in the past.  That adds a little more depth to the story but it's also blandly handled.  Rod Taylor's a badass and his fist fight with Borgnine is fun.  Borgnine's in bastard sum bitch mode.  He excelled at that.  The picture is OK at best.  It's kind of a downer with little to get excited about or like except for some of the performances.  Mills plays the commanding officer and he's so damn bleak and brooding to the point that I don't care almost as much as he doesn't.  Once the Indians show up and fight (at night) at the end I'd all but given up.  Maybe that's what the filmmakers wanted. The Warner Bros. Archive Collection DVD presents the film with a nice anamorphic widescreen image and no extras.