If you wanted 500 guys on horseback, you had to shlep your cast and crew out to whatever country was willing to cough up 500 guys on horseback........
.....which explains why "Taras Bulba", a bustling, bloody, muscular epic set in the Ukraine Steppes of the l6th century was filmed in Argentina......
Hey, we're not complaining......the scenery's stunning and looks authentic enough, with the possible exception of the matte-painted bottomless gorge that the film's Cossacks like to jump their horses across when they get into manly pissing contests.....(whichever guy and horse go ass over teakettle down the gorge have clearly lost the bet.....)
When not engaged in Extreme Gorge Jumping, our Cossack horde, led by sword-swingin', limb-lopping Taras Bulba (a fully committed, enthusiastic Yul Brynner), does furious battle with the invading Poles, who wear spiffier uniforms and live in walled cities......
Crafty Yul, hoping to soak up Polish knowledge to better kick their asses, packs his two sons (Tony Curtis, Perry Lopez) off to school in Kiev...(the Poles, for their part, consider the boys' enrollment as an experiment in taming and civilizing Cossacks)......this, understandably, does not go well for anybody.....
Even while suffering through numerous hazings and floggings from the Polish student body and the sadistic monks running the place, Tony finds time to fall head over heels for an unattainable classy cutie (Christine Kaufmann, who enraptured Curtis is real life as well).......
This star-crossed romance figures majorly in the film's thunderous third act, in which Yul and his fur-lined army lay siege the Poles' fortress city Dubno. This presents quite a quandary for Tony, because his Polish sweetie is stuck inside the city and the place is racked with plague, not to mention a populace eager to burn Christine at the stake for felonious Cossack-snuggling.....
Mass quantities of dead Poles and Cossacks pile up, tragic melodrama ensues.......and all of it's put to Franz Waxman's monumental, pounding score, music that blares out for a better movie than this to accompany it......
The film was supposedly designed as a 3 hour Ukrainian 'Lawrence Of Arabia' and the decision to truncate it into a run-of-the-mill action time-waster forever soured Yul Brynner from ever again hurling himself into a role......like some bored, jaded stars of the 60's, Brynner fell back to coasting on his formidable charisma. You could even call him the first meta actor, ironically playing a robotic version of his "Magnificent Seven" character in "Westworld".......
Maybe the final cut disappointed Yul, but there was enough here to entertain the young BQ back in '62.....and today as well. You'll never see any major studio film employ flesh and blood men and real live horses for battle scenes like the ones depicted here........and most sadly, you may never again hear such a thematically brilliant score like Waxman's......since studios now commission colorless, themeless, Hans Zimmer-like orchestral wallpaper to play underneath their CGI circuses.....
With its furious battles, primal emotions and 'Star Wars' worthy music, we might even categorize "Taras Bulba" as a pre-Digital popcorn blockbuster........an analog epic with not a single pixel in sight......so we'll take three giant Steppes and give it 3 stars (***)........(next time you want to jack up the burned calories on your treadmill or lifecycle, put Franz Waxman's "Ride To Dubno" on your Ipod....)
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