Colorado Territory

[movieman1957]

Will the real Joel McCrea please stand up?

McCrea plays outlaw Wes McQueen in the first rate remake of "High Sierra." McQueen has plans for one last hold up but meets a man and daughter on his stagecoach ride to Colorado. The daughter (Dorothy Malone) seems to strike a nice streak in McQueen with thoughts of maybe settling down. he certainly is smitten with her as he buys her presents. They don't know who he really is and are happy to share his frienship. Meanwhile McQueen takes up with Colorado Carlson (Virginia Mayo) and a couple of losers for the hold up. The main part deals with the planning of the hold up, character clashes within the group. All the while McQueen still visits his friends.

It's all about greed. It undoes everyone from everybody. Interesting study of how greed affect speople. McCrea is terrific as an outlaw who has a nice guy waiting to get out. There are limitations to how far he will go but is smart about how he goes about it. Great locations and some action sequences help it along. Exciting climax. Good film and i think worth your time if you like westerns.

SPOILER

One mistake I found interesting was late in the film McCrea and Mayo want to marry but they can only find a "Brother" and not a priest. In their eyes though they are now married. At the point where McCrea is trapped up in the cliffs Mayo comes riding in to try to get the posse to let her go after him. She introduces herself as "McQueen's woman" but it clearly has been dubbed over the word "wife." Somebody in the boss's office must have thought that they never actually married so they needed to change the word. Interesting moral stand for a movie about holdups and killings and such but it was 1949 and they couldn't to everything.

[feaito]

I watched this wonderful western while on vacation thanks to Christine, who recommended it to me and I think it's one of the best I've seen.

[Ann Harding]

It's one of my very favourite westerns and probably because it's based on a film noir. It brings to western territory an element of unrest and desperation I like very much. The film should be seen side by side with its original, High Sierra, another Walsh based on a W.R. Burnett novel. I find the western remake superior thanks to the wonderful pacing and acting. One of my favourite pictures.

[mrsl]

.
This is the first movie I ever saw where Joel died at the end. I doubt if I'm letting out any secrets because from the plot itself, the finale is pretty obvious. Colorado Territory, made in 1949 with Virginia Mayo as his leading lady has Joel a stage robber throughout the whole movie. He's killing people, and stealing money and a not very nice guy. He meets Dorothy Malone who might help him go straight, but she's still in love with some guy from back East, and near the end, she tries to turn Joel in to the sheriff anyway. Mayo is the wild child in this one who becomes tamed by falling for Joel, and although they get together at the end, it's too late for them. The final scene is very reminiscent of the end of Duel in the Sun but I would venture the guess that it is probably vice-a-versa. There's a lot of shooting and a friendship with Dolores' dad, but things still work out badly. It's good enough for a rainy day though. The shocker was that I never saw Joel die before. He was always the hero. Often he did bad things, but it was because he was under cover for the Pinkertons or Wells Fargo, or something else similar, but I never saw him as a purely bad fellow. He did however, have a small spark of decency, because this movie is about what was to be his final stage coach job, and he planned to go straight after it was over and done.
.

[Western Guy]

Yeah, Joel was one ofthose actors you really didn't expect to see die at the end of a movie, though I can think of at least two other Western movies where his character ended up dead. Randy Scott, I think, had a higher screen mortality rate.