aka Comanche Blanco

• Directed by “Gilbert Lee Kay” (Jose Briz Mendez)
• Written by Frank Gruber and Robert I. Holt
• Starring
  • Joseph Cotten
  • William Shatner
  • Rossana Yani
  • Perla Cristal
  • Vidal Molina

I can only imagine the “What I Did For My Summer Vacation” conversation when the cast of Star Trek came back from their shooting hiatus (I’m going to guess, from the dates, that this would be at the start of the third season). Most of the principals kind of muttered, having done nothing but enjoyed the feel of a non-polyester fabric against their skin (this was before the ’70s, when they and everyone in America convinced themselves that they liked the feel of polyester). Leonard Nimoy might have volunteered that he had recorded a song they’d all like called “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins.” And then eyes turned to William Shatner.

“I shot a dumbass spaghetti Western in Spain,” he’d have said. “Wait, that means Italian, doesn’t it? What do they call a Western shot in Spain? A burrito Western? No, that sounds Mexican. Anyway, I played twin half-breed Comanches.”

“So, lots of pancake makeup?” George Takei asked. “To darken you up?”

“No, none,” said Shatner.

“They must as least have given you a black wig,” said Jimmy Doohan. “I mean, since you’re already used to wearing…”

“I don’t wear a hairpiece,” Shatner snarled. “And no, they didn’t.”

A moment in which everyone blinked.

“She packed my bags last night pre-flight Zero hour nine a.m. And i’m gonna be high as a kite by then..”

“So…” Nichelle Nichols said, “they just had you, fair-skinned and Irish looking, playing twin Comanche half-breeds just the way you are.”

“Pretty much,” said Shatner. “One of the twins was more Comanche than the other, so sometimes he wore warpaint. And that one didn’t have his shirt on the whole time.”

“Good thing you lost that weight before you flew to Spain, Bill,” said Leonard Nimoy. Nimoy could always get away with that stuff.

“Whatever,” Shatner said. “Let’s just forget about it, okay? I’m sure everyone else will. And I’ve got to start getting into character. Where’s an ensign with my coffee?”

And it would have stayed forgotten, too, except for two things: 1) the DVD revolution, in which cheap distributors mined any old faded print they could find to put out as cut-rate product; and 2) Cold Fusion Video Reviews, which insists on reminding the world about movies that they had quite sensibly forgotten. Shatner does indeed play twin half-breed Comanches here; raised as outsiders to both cultures, one gravitates more toward white culture, becoming a wandering gunman known as Johnny Moon. The other, retaining his Comanche name of Notah Moon, gets heavily into peyote and becomes the leader of a bunch of renegade Comanches who worry at the edges of frontier culture, robbing stagecoaches and whatnot. Naturally, Johnny keeps getting mistaken for the “white Comanche,” especially since the brothers looks exactly alike, right down to the conservative haircuts. (You’d think that maybe Johnny would grow a mustache, but no.) In fact, the first scene of the movie has Johnny riding overland only to get ambushed by a bunch of white men who want to string him up.

Well, that’s one way to affix a toupee…

Meanwhile, Notah is leading an attack on a stagecoach. They shoot all the men, and Notah drags pretty blonde saloon girl Miss Kelly (Rossana Yani) off into the bushes to dot dot dot. So Johnny arrives at the Comanche camp to confront Notah. They almost have a shootout to settle their differences right there, but (a) Notah’s been at they peyote, and shooting a man when he’s not at his best doesn’t sit well with Johnny; (b) Notah’s woman White Fawn (Perla Cristal) leaps between them just as they’re about to draw; and (c) that’d be a real short movie, wouldn’t it? So Johnny instead gives an ultimatum for Notah to meet him in the town of Rio Hondo in four days. Johnny plans to relax in Rio Hondo between now and Saturday, but a couple of things conspire to make his stay eventful. For one thing, on the way to Rio Hondo he meets a bunch of thugs in the middle of stringing up a pudgy man named Ellis (Vincent Rocca); he shoots a couple of them and allows Ellis to escape. As his discovers when he makes Rio Hondo, Ellis is an employee of Grimes (Luis Prendes), a wealthy man who own the saloon and half the town besides, and the thugs were employees of General Garcia (Vidal Molina), a cattleman who owns the other half of town. Congratulations, Johnny is in the middle of a Western turf war. For another thing, Rio Hondo is where the stagecoach Notah attacked was headed, and where it eventually ends up, with a mostly-dead coachman up top and the ravished Miss Kelly in the back. Stoic Kelly declares she’ll be at work that night, in Grimes’ saloon.

“No, I’m not planning to use it.  I’ve just got nowhere to hide it in this outfit.”

All of which means that Johnny gets a warm welcome when he wanders into the saloon for a drink that night. First, Garcia’s brother tries to kill him for “murdering” two of his men, and they have a fight that destroys just about everything in the place, or at least everything that can be made of balsa wood: chairs, tables, bannisters… (In case you’re wondering, no, Shatner does not use the patented Captain Kirk move of a flying two-foot kick, nor does he karate-chop his opponent in the neck.) And then once Johnny has wiped the floor with the younger Garcia, Kelly pulls out a gun and starts shooting at him, mistaking him — naturally — for Notah. Fortunately, Sheriff Logan (Joseph Cotten!) is on the scene by that time, and believes Johnny; at least, he knows that the same man couldn’t have rescued Ellis and robbed the stagecoach at the same time. All the same, the Sheriff asks how long Johnny plans to be in town. “Only until Saturday…” Since Notah isn’t scheduled to show up until Saturday, at which time the movie will be finished, most of the middle portion of the movie is a low-rent version of A Fistful of Dollars (1964), with Johnny caught reluctantly in the escalating war between Grimes and Garcia. Also filling that time is the world’s least likely whirlwind romance between Johnny and Kelly, with her doing most of the romancing after she realizes she shot at the wrong man. I don’t care how decent a soul Johnny is or how much buried sorrow shows in his eyes, the fact that he looks exactly like the man who raped her should stand in the way of passion and devotion, at least before Saturday.

Johnny converses with the tiny Joseph Cotten on his shoulder — but is it an angelic Joseph Cotten, or a demonic Joseph Cotten?

Amidst it all, Shatner has the occasion to fill the backstory of Notah and him (which I already told you — I’m a giver!), and to ruminate on how this struggle seems almost like a conflict between the two sides of himself. At some point, I would presume that Shatner felt like he was starring in a Western remake of the first-season Star Trek episode “The Eemy Within,” wherein a transporter malfunction created a “lamb Kirk” and a “wolf Kirk.” Shucks, there’s even an attempted sexual assault in that episode and everything. (Shooting this movie also let Shatner warm up to the white-man-turned-Indian episode upcoming in the third season, “The Paradise Syndrome.” I AM KIROK!) Which leads to the biggest question: How’s Shatner’s acting? That’s is a bigger question than we can tackle here — it’s practically cosmic — so let’s narrow it: How does Shatner pull off playing two different roles? Well, his Johnny Moon is taciturn and understated (at least as understated as Shatner gets). His Notah is bombastic and stagey and “MR. TAMOURINE MAN!!,” using the stilted diction that always crops up in screenplays where American Indians speak English. As different as those sound, they’re both very Kirk-like. I can see that he really wouldn’t feel like stretching himself on a movie in which he and co-star Cotten are the only ones whose lines aren’t going to be dubbed. And really, there wasn’t much work done to make Kirk as Notah one with the Comanches; whereas he’s a sandy-blond white man who goes without a shirt for the whole movie, the rest of the Comanches are Spanish extras with godawful black wigs and long-sleeve shirts, probably to lessen the skin area that they had to rub with cocoa powder.

Hey, the Captain’s gotta stay in practice during the summer vacation.

At least the final scenes give a practical answer to, “Why are the twin brothers not differentiated by hair length or facial hair or anything?” The answer is, “Because then it wouldn’t be hard to tell them apart when both strip to the waist, tie on headbands, and ride at each other down Main Street, shooting.” It’s not a very good answer, but it’s the best you’re going to get.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 25
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • William Shatner, obviously