Cavalry Charge (La Carga de la Policía Montada) Review

Director: Ramon Torrado Cast: Frank Latimore Alan Scott Diana Lorys Maria Silva Alfonso Rojas Xan Das Bolas Tito Garcia

CAVALRY CHARGE

(La Carga de la Policía Montada)

Review of Cavalry Charge (La Carga de la Policía Montada) (See Database Page) by Simon Gelten

In 1964 everybody in Europe seemed to be busy making a western. This one's a Spanish production, and like the Germans and Italians, the Spaniards thought a genuine western couldn't be made without some American acting talent. This movie was obviously made with a decent budget, so instead of one, we get two American B-actors, Frank Latimore and Alan Scott. Both had been in various European genre movies, but neither of the two had reached a star status.

Latimore is Paul, a young officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a womanizer who is kicked out of every regiment because he has a habit of seducing the wives of his superiors. Even before arriving at his new post, he helps a lovely young lady out of trouble, and yes, she turns out to be the fiancée of his new commander."This means I'm in trouble," Paul says to his best friend, a trapper working for the Mounties as a scout. In the meantime, a young Indian is killed by a group of poachers, who also try to rape the young warrior's sister. Paul, who has witnessed the incident from a distance, saves the girl's life, but the poachers escape. The Indian chief Brown Bear declares war on the white man ...

The film is set in Canada, in and around a Mountie Fort, the red coats replacing the cavalry uniform, and therefore it has been described as a Spanish effort to emulate an American Cavalry western. The bombastic theme song does indeed sound American, but otherwise the movie has more in common with the German Karl May Westerns. Some story elements, like people tied to totem poles and the hero being liberated at night by an Indian whose life he had saved earlier on, are directly taken from the Winnetou movies. The difference is that the Indian is in this case a girl, not a young warrior sympathizing with the young white Indian friend. The romantic subplot is definitely a new element, Old Shatterhand and Winnetou never were womanizers, to put it mildly. The subplot is, by the way, quite nice: we get two men suing for the hand of one woman, and two women suing for the hand of one man. If you want to know how this awkward situation is solved, you'll have to watch to movie, I'm not going to give it all away.

La Carga de la Policia Montada is not much worse than most Winnetou movies, nor is it much better, which means (I'm afraid) that it's not very good. Latimore is okay, but he's no Lex Barker, Lorys (in real life Ana Maria Cazorla) on the other hand, is as pretty as any of the women in the Sauerkraut westerns. Tito Garcia is a familiar face as one of the poachers and according to the database and Giusti's reference work, Frank Braña and Aldo Sambrell are also in the movie, but I haven't spotted them.

The action scenes look quite spectacular, but with the Indians launching suicide attacks on the fort in broad daylight, they also look a bit ridiculous. There's some very ugly horse-tripping and a couple of stunts look terribly dangerous, with stuntmen falling from great heights without any object breaking their fall. It's a confirmation of these stories about Spanish stuntmen being real reckless daredevils. On Fistful of Leone it is noticed that a mistake was made in relation to the Mountie uniform: "the white lanyard to which a Mountie's revolver is attached, should be worn on a loop around the neck instead of bandoleer style. However, that same mistake is also made in a couple of well-known Hollywood westerns: Cecil B. De Mille's Northwest Mounted Police and in Alan Ladd's Saskatchewan" (1). If you're a sucker for Mountie movies (I've been told that such people do exist) or like the Winnetou movies (I already knew such people exist), this one might give you some hokey-pokey fun, but if you don't manage to get hold of a copy, I wouldn't be too disenchanted, worse things happen in a western buff's life.

Notes:

• (1) http://www.fistful-of-leone.com/forums/index.php?topic=10525.0

--By Scherpschutter