‘There’s only one way to put your faith in a Pole,’ declares the Cossack leader Taras Bulba, ‘put your faith in your sword, and your sword in the Pole.’ The titular warrior is played with great enthusiasm and energy by Yul Brynner. When he is on the screen Taras Bulba is a pretty decent time. When he is not, the quality genuinely drops a few notches.

For my generation Brynner is probably still best known for the world’s creepiest anti-smoking advertisement. For the generation before mine he will always be King Mongkut of The King and I (1956), gunslinger Chris Adams in The Magnificent Seven (1960) or the silent robotic killer in Westworld (1973). He was a hugely charismatic actor – the kind I often refer to as a ‘one-star actor’, in that they add a star to the rating of any film they grace purely by showing up. His charisma is on full display in Taras Bulba, a 1962 historical epic directed by J. Lee Thompson. It adapts a novella by Nikolai Gogol.

It is the 17th century. After coming to the aid of the Polish army, the united clans of the Ukrainian Cossacks are betrayed and overrun. Rather than submit to Polish rule, the Cossacks burn their farms and retreat to the hills. Two decades later, events transpire for clan leader Taras Bulba (Brynner) and his son Andriy (Tony Curtis) to take their revenge.

Matters are complicated when Andriy falls in love with a Polish princess – as you do – and grows conflicted over which side he should be fighting on. There is immediate dramatic potential in Andriy’s story, but the film struggles to bring it to the surface due to the terribly inappropriate casting of Tony Curtis.

Curtis, a popular romantic lead at the time, was never a particularly interesting actor. Even when he appeared in an absolute classic like Some Like It Hot (1959), those films’ success tended to come despite his presence rather than because of it. Here he sticks out garishly: a clean-cut, all-American romantic lead who looks and behaves nothing like the remainder of the Cossack characters. Where they all shave their heads, bar some elaborate ponytails, he keeps a sensible early-60s haircut. Where they all affect at least a general European accent, he remains resolutely American. Where Brynner is watchable, Curtis is tedious. For every scene in which Brynner lifts the picture, there is an equivalent one where Curtis drags it down. They effectively cancel each other out, so that all that is left is a relatively mediocre horse-and-sword adventure.

To its credit, the film’s extended climax – a Cossack siege on the Polish city of Dubno – significantly ups the stakes and brings some properly decent acting out of Curtis. Sadly it is a case of ‘too little, too late’. Despite the best of intentions, this largely forgotten epic seems destined to remain in the shadows.