jcalberta
The caste alone is worth the admission: Connery, Bardot, Hawkins,Steven Boyd, Eric Sykes, Honor Blackman, Woody Strode, others ... Mostly European (actors) - strange for a Western - but not unrealistic to the times. Hawkins and Boyd - both recently out of starring in Ben Hur. A coterie of fine acting talent and charismatic screen artists. Proves my theory as to why Western Film will never die: Every Actor and every Director want to make a Western at some point. Connery and Bardot have some nice interplay in sharing the bulk of the screen time. Meanwhile here's some decent action here in what is a pretty well a straight up Western adventure tale. Possibly a Western that will enjoy greater appreciation with time.
Neil Welch
What an oddity this is.If you put to one side the Louis L'Amour source novel, and Woody Strode in the supporting cast, this traditional western has no US input at all. Even the spaghetti westerns usually had a Yank at the top of the cast list.This European western has quite a high profile cast list - Sean Connery (Scots), Brigitte Bardot (French), Stephen Boyd (Irish), Peter van Eyck (German), Jack Hawkins and Eric Sykes (English) - none of whom would be obvious choices for a western. The Spanish locations are, I suppose, redolent of some American desert areas, but still aren't really the sort of places which evoke the US places where one might expect a European hunting party to visit.This sense of geographical dislocation gives the movie a weird feel. When you factor in the fact that this is quite a sadistic picture, with a level of violence not commonly seen in westerns in 1968, you get a movie which doesn't easily bear comparison with anything else. It's like wandering through an art gallery looking at portraits by old masters and suddenly seeing a landscape painted by Steven Spielberg - yes, it's a painting, and yes, Spielberg is undoubtedly a man of great artistic vision and ability, but this particular item simply doesn't fit.Is it any good? It's OK, and I think it would be better if you could shake off the air of weirdness which is there whe whole time you're watching it.
Kakueke
A group of arrogant European hunters takes to the North American West to pursue game. Apaches? Am I about to say, little do they know that they will have to encounter hostile Apaches? Nope. Actually, it is, once they find out there are hostile Apaches, the more they want to stay. That is the tone set by the group's arrogant leader, Baron Frederick Von Hallstatt (Peter van Eyck). He and his haughty group, a German and a bunch with supercilious British accents, do not want to yield to "savages," but desire to teach them a lesson, even though the Apaches have treaty rights on their side.Sean Connery plays Carlin, a hunter and tracker, but he is known as Shalako, a name given to him by the Indians. The tracker who leads the group, however, is Bosky Fulton (Steven Boyd). Rivaling Connery's celebrity in the film are those beautiful European actresses Brigitte Bardot (Countess Irina Lazaar) and Honor Blackman (Lady Julia Daggett). The Countess is supposedly being matched with the Baron, but she and Shalako later have eyes for each other. As for Lady Julia, she is married to Sir Charles Daggett, who loves her, but Lady Julia and Fulton have something cooking. The other leading couple is Senator Henry Clarke (Alexander Knox) and his wife Elena (played by the also-beautiful Valerie French). There are a few others in the Europeans' coterie, and Fulton leads a slightly larger group of American frontier types who escort them. Toward the start of the movie, when the Countess is hunting on her own, the Apaches kill the Countess' companion but let her and Shalako, who was passing by, go. This is after Shalako promises to tell the group to get off Apache territory. The group does not cooperate, and the Apaches attack the Europeans' encampment, and I will stop my narrative.By and large, the characters, including Shalako, are uninteresting. As the protagonist, he continues to make the right moves, in contrast to the loser Baron, but is given no character development and is not a compelling presence. Yes, Sean Connery is miscast and boring here. His character is not even worthy of the mediocre eponymous score. The Europeans have their boring and condescending say; sometimes, one gets the sense that director Edward Dmytryk deliberately has them muttering or whispering inaudibly to emphasize their emptiness, nothing to listen to anyway. Still, I like the movie, and the reason is its atmosphere. I am not aware of other movies in which Indians are fighting not white American settlers but aristocratic Europeans. Not only is the tension grounded more tightly because the supercilious Europeans add the level of snobbery to the typical superior attitude of whites, but we also know they are unfamiliar with Indians. Like the men, Lady Julia thinks the Indians are savages. She has the stereotypical terror of them one might think a member of 19th-century European nobility might feel. Such a group is not made up of people of the land in the sense of American whites, but people with a silver spoon in their mouth. Perhaps the tension in "Shalako" is comparable to the tension in some flicks in which well-to-do Europeans go to African jungles. Here, the backdrop is instead the wide open expanses of Western plains and mountains, shot well by the cinematographers, who do very well with the distance shots as well as the closer-up action scenes.Also, the story involves some intrigue, if uncomplicated, including the treachery of Fulton and Lady Julia. Honor Blackman is not a femme fatale Pussy Galore, but she is a traitoress of sorts. Some fairly graphic combat scenes are included, as was beginning to be the trend in the late 1960s in American and European films; Lady Julia screams in a gruesome scene involving a spearing, and in another, suffice it to say she is "handled" by the Indians. That is quite an intense one, worth seeing. However, as a final note, don't expect much from the ending, which as one might expect involves a face-off with the Indians. It befits the mediocrity of the overall script and characters, except it is perhaps worse.
xredgarnetx
Based on a Louis L'Amour story, SHALAKo is a standard Western about an ex-Army colonel (a miscast Sean Connery in a really silly cowboy hat) trying to keep a party of Europeans alive after they have invaded Indian territory. A Spanish-made film, the only American in the cast is Stephen Boyd as the party's villainous guide, and he's OK. Well, and Woody Strode is the chief bad Indian! Otherwise, you have a broad spectrum of accents and acting to deal with here. Heavily eyelined Frenchie Brigitte Bardot is a countess from who knows where and German actor Peter Van Eyck plays a stiff-backed baron. Brits Jack Hawkins and Honor Blackman are a couple of English nobility. And so on. Even the butler is foreign. This is one of those glossy European flicks, of which there were quite a few made back in the 1960s and 1970s, and most of which never quite clicked here. In the end, the story comes to nothing. And the endless shots of Spanish desert wear thin after awhile. You may safely skip this one.
