Slideshow
TAZA, SON OF COCHISE
in 3-D
U.S., 1954
Directed by Douglas Sirk
Starring Rock Husdon, Barbara Rush, Jeff Chandler
Approx. 79 mins. U.S. PREMIERE OF NEW 3-D RESTORATION.
Thanks to Universal Pictures and 3-D FIlm Archive.
Rock Hudson’s Apache Taza wants to continue dad Cochise’s peace plan, but his brother, the old chief, and Geronimo like the old ways — and then there’s the Barbara Rush love triangle. Only Western by melodrama meister Sirk, with Jeff Chandler’s third and last COCHISE. “To an impressive extent, Sirk’s deeply engaged handling of 3-D compensates for the ideological shortcomings of script and casting. To underline the marginalized place of the Apache, Sirk often places Indigenous characters in the second layer of his multiplaned 3-D compositions, behind gnarled trees, twigs and branches, rocks, wagon wheels, teepees, ropes, and poles that emerge out of the screen and into the auditorium. Sirk’s thematically pointed mise-en-scène is both a kind of directorial comment and a striking demonstration of 3-D’s visual complexity, its triply planed visual field of foreground, middle ground, and background. Seen flat, TAZA, SON OF COCHISE is a complex but sketchy pageant… in 3-D, it becomes a visual poem about a dispossessed people.” – Foster Hirsch
Reviews
“Sirk's pantomime western is all rust-coloured innuendo, Freudian penetration of frame and flesh, and many layers of play and dress-up. Hudson's body is a totem, a sacrifice to his dueling masters: his heart and his loyalty, the whites and his tribe, his art and his director. This is, in many ways, the purest of Sirk and Hudson's eight collaborations, if also the roughest and the dirtiest.”
– Scout Tafoya, The L Magazine