Colorado Territory

Colorado Territory is directed by Raoul Walsh and adapted to screenplay by Edmund H. North and John Twist from the novel "High Sierra" written by W.R. Burnett. It stars Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Dorothy Malone and Henry Hull. Music is by David Buttolph and cinematography by Sidney Hickox. Raoul Walsh remakes his own High Sierra from 1941 but supplants it into a Western genre setting - with tremendous results. McCrea plays outlaw Wes McQueen who springs from prison and vows to go straight, but with a price on his head he is coerced into one last railroad robbery. If he can escape the law then he can make a go of it as a new man, with a new name, and comforted by a new found love of a good woman, Colorado Carson (Mayo). Can he escape the law and those who would sell him out for money? A remake of a classic film noir, Colorado Territory is itself classic film noir. Whilst not reaching the dizzying star heights of Bogart's 41 version, this is a film of great strengths. Thematically it's noir gold dust, the great Walsh not pandering to anyone and ensuring the dark edges of Burnett's novel play out on screen - including the shattering finale. The photography is grade "A", both in chiaroscuro textures and sumptuous location framings. Cast can't be faulted either, McCrea a genuine horseman is firmly at home in a Western setting, Mayo and Malone positively light and sex up the screen, while classy performer Hull lends weighty support. High end Western staples are adhered to, with robbery actions, fights, stunts, villainous betrayals and back stabbers, these marry up to the noirish cement of a man unable to escape his fate, his past weighing heavy on his shoulders, all ensuring there's constantly a doom laden feel permeating the story. Rarely mentioned when talk turns to film noir Westerns, but it should be since it's one of the best. 9/10

Scathing Dialog that evokes Film-Noir (as does the Story), solid Performances by the entire Cast, Excellent and slightly askew Locations and Settings, Gunplay and Violence that doesn't Pull Punches, a Hard-Boiled tone with an Ending that is Downbeat and foreshadows the Cynical Mann, Boetticher Fifties Standouts in the Genre. Yes, the Story is a Remake of High Sierra (1941) also done by Director Raoul Walsh, but this is every bit as Powerful in its Western Setting, and in some respects even more so. Virginia Mayo melts the Screen with Her Beauty and stands by Her Man with as much Heart and Dedication that befits the Noir Anti-Heroine, and thankfully there is no Dog this time. The Script is loaded with many Quotables. Speaking of a Cemetery, the always intense but likable Joel McCrea reminisces..."It was the prettiest bone orchard you ever seen, looked over by stone Angels." There are many others. A slightly overlooked Film that is as Good as the Genre gets and is one of those that should attract Movie Buffs not usually enamored by Westerns.

This is as superb western by a director who knows his stuff. Raoul Walsh hasn't received the credit he deserves and this film is all but forgotten. It doesn't have any big stars or overacting, agreed, and perhaps people are looking for Oscar material rather than a great film. It's their loss. The film covers much territory (no pun intended) but certainly not too much and the many surprises work quite well. The characters' motives unravel as the film progresses, the way they should work. There aren't any easy answers here and the clichés are nowhere to be found, unlike so many by-the-numbers westerns. This is an action film from the beginning and keeps things going until the very end. It should be much better known. Curtis Stotlar

Joel McCrea was the western counterpart to Humphrey Bogart. As a bad man he was confident against his adversaries, delivered his lines very directly, was suspicious of women, and always died with dignity. McCrea was in his 40s and already a veteran of over 60 movies when he made 'Colorado Territory'. Virginia Mayo as 'Colorado' and Dorothy Malone as 'Julie Ann' were both in their 20s. 'Colorado Territory' is a western noir, and the story bears a strong similarity to the 1941 Bogart movie, 'High Sierra.' In both movies a career criminal is sprung from jail and expected to do a big heist, he gets involved with two other men plus a woman, he threatens to kill the two men if they don't straighten out, he at first dismisses the woman only to eventually fall in love with her, he gets seriously wounded, he is chased up a mountain by the law, he vows to never do jail time again, he holds them off with a rifle, a sniper gets to a higher position to try to capture him. SPOILERS FOLLOW. Set in the 1800s, Wes McQueen (McCrea) escapes the Missouri jail by sawing the bars with a 'gift' brought in by an old woman. By horse he heads to Colorado where he is expected to lead a big train robbery. Holes up in an abandoned town in ruins, his two accomplices are suspicious and incompetent. Their 'woman' is Colorado who they brought from an El Paso saloon. Meanwhile he also gets sweet on Julie Ann and gives her dad $900 to pay for a well he badly needs on his spread. The train heist is pulled, but the two accomplices try to cheat Wes by separating the money car from the engine, thinking Wes was guarding the engineers. But Wes is on top of the money car, cuffs the two men together and escapes with all the money. On the run he gets shot, Colorado operates and pulls the bullet out, Wes goes on the run again , she hides the money on top a confessional in a church, Wes is chased up a cliff, 'Colorado' shows up, gets the upper hand on the Marshall, heads to meet Wes with horses, but the sniper above shoots Wes. As about 20 to 30 men on horseback are charging them, 'Colorado' shots with both guns, and the horsemen gun down both Wes and Colorado, and they die holding hands. Meanwhile, the little mission church is doing fine, after finding all that money above the confessional!

This was a Western story not like the average picture we have seen over the years, it had a different message with an ending that is true to what life is all about, happiness and sadness! Joel McCrea(Wes McQueen),"Wichita Town",'59 TV Series, had his share of bad luck and wanted desperately to start a new life and forget the past and its bad memories. However, Wes got caught up in situations that tried to prevent him from becoming a happily married man with children. Virginia Mayo,(Colorado Carson),"The Girl From Jones Beach",'49, tried to give him affection along with Dorothy Malone,"Basic Instinct",'92,who offered him an entirely different life. The picture will keep you guessing just how Wes will eventually find a true HAPPINESS!

CONTAINS A LOT OF SPOILERSµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµµ Unlike the precedent user,I do think that "Colorado territory" is superior to the former "high sierra".Raoul Walsh was absolutely right to rework his screenplay and to turn it into a western.It's worth to make a comparison point by point between the two works. Humphrey Bogart is superior to Joel McCrea,who does not posess the intensity and the madness that his part demanded,and his partnership with Virginia Mayo who has shone since her first appearance in the deserted village is unbalanced.Bat all that remains outdoes the whole of "high sierra". The characters are more detailed than in the original story:Virginia Mayo's ("proof positive of Allah's existence" a sheik would have said)character has more substance than Ida Lupino's (it's not this excellent actress's fault though):a mixed-race girl,with Indian blood in her veins,she acts ,mainly in the last third as some kind of priestess of some pagan cult in this lost village whose secrets she seems to know intimately:about this subject,just compare the ominous Indian chants which are bad luck with the dog in the 1941 movie.Virginia Mayo radiates and recalls some of Jennifer Jones 's best parts (Vidor's"duel in the sun" which the ending recalls,and Powell's "gone to earth").Both are romantic actresses par excellence,but Mayo is more nervous,more rebellious (see her parts in Wyler's "best years of our lives" and chiefly Walsh's (again)"White heat") Although it's a "men" movie,it's easy to see that it's actually the female parts Walsh favors:Dorothy Malone's character is much more credible than the crippled girl of the first version who made "High sierra" verge on melodrama.Once again,admire the work of the scenarists:the equivalents are stunning;Bogarts pays for the crippled girl's surgery,McCrea saves Malone and her father's lives ,then gives them a lot of money to dig a well.Malone's character (she could be one of King Lear's daughters) will be more ungrateful than her predecessor,trying to play the obnoxious role of Judas so that she will get rich and marry a high society man -whom we never see-. The landscapes are used in a phenomenal way.The old town in ruin where MCQueen (McCrea) talks about Martha ,a dead woman he wanted to marry when he was young,where this girl,Colorado (Colorado territory!)feels from the start she won't escape anyway.Her fate is sealed:"you can escape from jail,she says,but you can't escape from yourself".These lovers are the stuff legends are made.And Walsh ,in his very last scene ,turns the tragedy in a faux happy end .The beaming monk rings the bells: the death of the couple brings life again in this silent place.'They were so happy" the monk says .People do not need to know if they still are.They became part of the legends the Indians tell by the moonlight. Try to see "high sierra" and "Colorado territory"in a row.The latter can appeal,in spite of his very clever dialogue,to the most demanding western buffs:the scenes on the train are filmed with mastery and the very first scene with the old lady,is,to quote her,"mischievous".

Raoul Walsh does his usual yeoman-like job of directing this mediocre Western with Joel McRae as an outlaw trying to make one last big haul by robbing a train, Dorothy Malone as the young woman he thinks he loves, and Virginia Mayo as the girl who is, as he finally realizes, made for him. Walsh also directed the original story, "High Sierra", with Humphrey Bogart, Joan Leslie, and Ida Lupino in the same roles. "Colorado Territory" absconds with the story but leaves John Huston's felicitous script behind as scraps. Walsh has never directed a dull film, and this isn't dull. What it is, is simple minded. All of the subtlety and ambiguity that made the original so fine, so artful, is discarded and instead the characters and their motives are simplified to the extent that any particularly aware third-grader can grasp them. What I mean is -- how should I put this? Maybe I can make the point by giving an example. In "High Sierra", Bogart meets a simple, kind old man with a crippled grand-daughter who needs an operation. That's the teen-aged Joan Leslie we're talking about, and, man, she looks good, though rendered sullen by her disability. Bogart comes into some loot and gives much of it to Joan Leslie's family so that she can have her operation. Meanwhile, he falls in with Ida Lupino, a * who has been kicked around, loves Bogart, and will do anything for him. Before adopting Lupino, Bogart tells her that there's no place in his life for her. (He's thinking of settling down with Joan Leslie once she's fixed up.) Leslie's operation is a success and from her recovery bed she showers Bogart with gratitude -- but not love, as she explains to Grampa. On his next visit, Bogart finds her drinking and jitterbugging frenetically with a boyfriend. Leslie is still grateful to Bogart but she rejects his possessiveness, and he leaves her forever with Ida Lupino. Huston and Walsh fill these scenes with love, ambiguity, a frantic hope and a hopeless remorse. In the remake, the Joan Leslie figure, Dorothy Malone, has nothing wrong with her except that she is greedy and treacherous. Although McRae gives the family enough money to start their farm, Malone tries to alert the sheriff to MacRae's presence in order to collect the twenty-thousand-dollar reward. The Ida Lupino character, Virginia Mayo, actually has to have a physical fight with Malone to keep her from rushing out the door. There is no ambiguity, no sense of real life. Malone is not a nice, if slightly empty-headed girl, who wants to just enjoy her new freedom. She's a bad girl. "Colorado Territory" is miscast, as well. Joel McRae is a good light comedian or light action star -- a nice guy. He's not the tough ex-con that Bogart was. And Virginia Mayo is supposed to be part Pueblo Indian, though she looks about as Indian as Jean Harlow, the heavy makeup notwithstanding. One of the most touching (because grounded) elements of the original is that Bogart had to give up the vivacious young Joan Leslie for the older, husky, used, and rather plain Ida Lupino. In the remake, the succulent Virginia Mayo of 1949 could give Dorothy Malone a run for her money any day. It's like a high-schooler having to give up his romance with the head of the girl's cheer-leading squad for the love of the Prom Queen. There's not much of a sense of loss. I've picked out just one set of relationships to compare, but any viewer could easily spot a dozen more in which the original is superior to the remake. (Humphrey Bogart, describing what a Tommy gun sounds like, taps his finger three times on the desk and says, "Tap tap tap. That's all." Nothing like that here.) Nice location shooting, but if you want to see a movie made for adult sensibilities, rent the original. This remake is pretty watered down.

In the entire history of western movies, there have been very few shot through with poetic dialog. The Wild Bunch is one of them. The dialog is in fact so poetic that it is hard to miss, and more than once its quality has been noted by various well known film critics. Colorado Territory, pound for pound is easily its equal. And why? Not Walsh, not Mc Crae, not any of the usual reasons given. In fact if you look at Walsh's other western works, and they are numerous and fine, none of them come close to this one in it's poetry. So either you chalk it up to just sheer luck, or you have to look elsewhere. Yet before I point to that reason, let's look at some of the lines...which probably will be considered a spoiler so, if you don't to hear any of the talk find a review without spoilers, and here goes: we're a couple of fools in a dead village dreaming about something that'll never happen... or earlier Mc Crae is warning two of his outlaw companions about being careful not to double cross him, and tells them about two others that tried to, and says.....they're buried outside Lawrence Kansas. Prettiest little bone orchard you'd ever want to see. Little stone angels watching over them.........or later Mc Crae is telling Pluffner, the railroad detective that has double crossed him, and now Mc Crae has found him out....robbing the dead....and the detective turns and exclaims his innocence, that the man he is robbing his died naturally, that its all part of the game, Mc Crae comes back with.... .... not this game, there's been so much bottom dealing from this deck it's dog eared..................and proceeds to shoot the detective. Yet this was not the last time that western lovers would be treated to such wonderful stuff, except they would have to go to other directors, one being Stuart Heisler, and DALLAS. Or Andre De Toth and SPRINGFIELD RIFLE. The key ingredient in all this not being the director but a writer that heretofore has gone completely unnoticed by virtually any critic. Namely John Twist. John Twist along with Borden Chase were the two finest writers of western cinema, period. Chase was, is, of course well known. Twist has for some reason been invisible. However one day, some discerning crew with get together for a retrospective of his films and the charade will be over. But trust me, western lovers, see his name on any film and you can always count on some of the best dialog ever written for westerns. Colorado Territory being his best. As for the other comments here about the movie, they are pretty right on. This film is the equal overall of any of Mann's films, Boettichers, is better than most of Ford's, in fact only slightly below Red River and My Darling Clementine. The only flaw is a rather mawkish handling of the Dorothy Malone situation: the whole business with her slows things down a bit. But anytime Mc Crae is not around her the film is about as perfect as a western can get. Don't miss is.

Colorado Territory is undoubtedly one of the best films directed by Raoul Walsh.In fact it's sort of a remake of a film Walsh directed 10 years before this one – High Sierra with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. Colorado Territory's story revolves around a very sympathetic outlaw Wes McQueen (Joel McCrea) who is finally caught and put in jail but obviously not for a very long time, cause his former companions devise a plan to rob the train and are most certainly in need of him to be able to pull it off successfully. So they help him to escape. After Wes succeeds in doing so he finds a refuge in a distant abandoned village in the mountains where he meets his partners together with a spirited and beautiful woman Colorado (Virginia Mayo) who ends up falling in love with him not knowing that his heart already belongs to another very different woman Julie Ann (Dorothy Malone) who in her turn, doesn't know about Wes McQueen being one of the most sought after outlaws in the west. The question now is not who stays with the girl, but who stays with the guy in the most fateful and poignant film's ending. 8/10

The commenters who called this "Western noir" are on the money. Just about everyone in this movie is a ratlike scheming double- or triple-crosser. Bad guys suffer fates not noticeably worse than the handful of schmo's who are honest (mostly in the relative, honor-among-thieves sense). It's all bleak for the ones who don't get out alive and also for the ones who do. The one aspect of this movie that may have lost its punch for 21st century viewers is the script's banal dialogue for the two key women characters. Virginia Mayo in particular is better than her lines and her costume, which is fashioned entirely from clichés about wanton women who aren't 100 percent Anglo. But the story arc treats the women just differently enough from the "classic" Western that it held my interest. The cast, top to bottom, is excellent. Joel McCrea does that thing he does so well *especially* well here. I'd like to see Peter Sarsgaard reprise a McCrea role some day, in either a Western or a Sturges classic.