Ten Days To Tulara sounds like a film of convenience for both the Mexican film industry and Sterling Hayden. The industry gets the use of an American name with some box office and a chance for distribution in the north of the border market. Hayden gets a Mexican vacation, and a paycheck for his ever increasing debts to the IRS and his estranged wife.
Mexican film star Rudolfo Hoyos co-stars with Hayden in this film about an American pilot and a Mexican gangster on the run from the Mexican civil and military authority. Hoyos has kidnapped Hayden's young son and forces him to participate in a holdup that nets the robbers 8 bars of gold bullion worth a quarter of a million Yankee dollars. But when Hayden's plane is forced to crash, the robbers have flee and have ten days to make it to Tulara on the Mexican Pacific coast in order for Hayden's son to be free.
While all this is going on, would you believe Hayden has time for romance with Hoyos's daughter Grace Raynor?
The film resembles the Robert Mitchum RKO classic The Big Steal which also involves a chase through Mexico. It's not half as good though, the actors look like everything was done in one take. I'm sure they all wanted to make sure the paychecks cleared, no one more so than Sterling Hayden. He would not be seen on the big screen again until Dr. Strangelove. In the meantime his custody battles and fugitive status outside the USA got a lot of publicity as Hayden took his children to raise wherever his boat docked.
The film also has elements of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing two very stylish caper films that Hayden was part of. But Ten Days To Tulara will never be in that category.
