WHITE COMANCHE

 

WHITE COMANCHE is a 1967 Euro Western starring--of all people--William Shatner, who made the film during a break in his STAR TREK schedule. What's more, Shatner plays twin brothers, sons of an American father and a Comanche mother. Johnny Moon is a decent man who has chosen to live in the white world, while his brother Notah is a murdering renegade. 

Shatner was one of the many 1960s American male actors who traveled to Europe hoping to emulate Clint Eastwood's success with Spaghetti Westerns. If Shatner thought his time on the plains of Spain would give him some big-screen clout, he was sadly mistaken. 

Johnny Moon is constantly being mistaken for his brother Notah, and constantly blamed for the latter's crimes. This is such a problem that one wonders why Johnny just doesn't go ahead and kill Notah when they confront each other at the beginning of the film (of course if he did, the movie would be only five minutes long). Instead Johnny challenges Notah to meet him in the nearby town of Rio Hondo in a few days. Until then Notah continues his depredations, while Johnny gains the trust of Rio Hondo's Sheriff Logan (Joseph Cotten). 

The situation of William Shatner playing twin brothers, with one of them in Native American garb, calls to mind the STAR TREK episodes "The Enemy Within" (where a transporter malfunction creates a good Kirk and a bad one) and "The Paradise Syndrome", in which the Captain loses his memory on an unexplored planet and is assimilated into an indigenous tribe. Shatner does quite well as the tight-lipped Johnny. He's proficient in the action sequences and he rides a horse very well (which will be no surprise to anyone who knows about the actor's personal hobbies). When it comes to the role of Notah, Shatner just can't cut it. Notah is a peyote taking, crazed savage, and the whiter-than-white clean-cut Shatner looks ridiculous trying to emulate him. (It's easy to tell the brothers apart--Johnny wears a shirt, while Notah doesn't.) 

The lackluster production didn't do Shatner any favors. The movie has a cheap feel to it, with choppy editing, strange camera setups, and mediocre music. The version I watched of this film had an English-language soundtrack, and while Shatner and Joseph Cotten provided their own voices, the rest of the cast sounds flat (and it doesn't help that at times the sound of gun shots are not properly aligned with weapons being fired in the scenes). You can't really call WHITE COMANCHE a true Spaghetti Western, since it was a Spanish-American production, with a Spanish director named Jose Briz Mendez, who is credited as Gilbert Lee Kay in the main titles. One of the producers of the film was Sam White, who was the brother of long-time Three Stooges associate Jules White. 

Rosanna Yanni, an actress who would later work with the likes of Paul Naschy and Jess Franco, plays saloon girl Kelly, who is raped by Notah and later falls in love with Johnny. Yanni has screen presence but it's a bit of a stretch to think her character would have feelings for the identical twin of the man who viciously assaulted her. Joseph Cotten doesn't have much to do as Sheriff Logan, even though he gets top billing above even Shatner. No one else in the cast particularly stands out. 

Much of the plot seems an excuse just to kill time before the final confrontation between Johnny and Notah--a confrontation that winds up being very underwhelming. William Shatner probably assumed that getting a dual role in a European Western would give him a chance to show off his acting chops, but it didn't do much for his career. (I've been an original STAR TREK fan for most of my life, and I barely knew anything about this movie, and hadn't even seen it.) For those who enjoy the camp aspects of William Shatner's performances, WHITE COMANCHE might be of interest, but overall it's a below average Euro Western that might have had a lower budget than the average STAR TREK episode.