Colorado Territory

Colorado Territory – The chief obstacle to a contemporary viewer’s appreciation of Raoul Walsh’s Colorado Territory (1949) is Virginia Mayo’s character, a part Indian floozy and former prostitute with a heart of gold. Mayo’s skin is painted a dusky shade and she wears off-the-shoulder blouses like one of those gypsy or Mexican saloon sirens featured in Shopko paintings for your basement rec-room. Walsh uses her character as the prototypical dark woman, the disreputable foil to a respectable and pallid Southern belle. Joel McCrea’s doomed outlaw falls for the respectable Southern belle and rejects the embraces of the dusky half-Indian seductress. But, in one of the many reverses in Colorado Territory, it turns out, of course, that the disreputable saloon girl is more trustworthy and loyal than the society woman, unhappily marooned in the desolate deserts of the Four Corners where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado intersect, the location of the action in this Western. Critics observe that Colorado Territory recycles High Sierra, Walsh’s earlier Humphrey Bogart vehicle – both films feature outlaws attempting to go straight, but enticed into one last, and fatal, criminal escapade. In both films, the hero is trapped in a remote locate, besieged by an army of pursuers, and ultimately dies in a hail of bullets. But Colorado Territory, an excellent and atmospheric Western, stands on its own, has its own peculiar beauties, and, certainly, deserves to be better known -- indeed, once the sexual stereotypes are overcome or accepted, the picture can be appreciated as a great, tough, and violent Western that is completely plausible on its own terms. The movie has a gloomy pictorial grandeur – it appears that much of the film was shot on location in Canyon de Chelly and features a climactic shoot-out in which the hero has taken refuge in “the City in the Moon”, an ancient cliff-dwelling hanging over the stony canyon floor. The bandit’s hide-out is ghost-town called Todos Santos, equipped with an impressive ruinous Mission, a town decimated, we learn, by Indian raids, Spanish violence, plagues and earthquakes – the hero sleeps in an abandoned kiva and the town’s church is shored-up with timber like the adit to an ancient mine. The script is written in an epigrammatic and demotic poetry, short clipped utterances that are memorably terse and beautiful. Westerns are pre-eminently films involving figures moving in vast landscapes and Walsh excels in his vistas of desert and mountain; figures scramble up huge talus slopes and snipers fire from remote, lofty pinnacles of rock. The film’s plot features a variety of backstabbing betrayals on various levels – everyone betrays everyone else except McCrea’s heroic, but ill-fated, hero and Virginia Mayo’s mixed blood whore. McCrea’s gang members, including the indelible James Mitchell, try to sell him out during a spectacular train robbery. But the gang members are, in turn, betrayed by treachery in their ranks. McCrea’s ostensible love interest, the Southern belle, is willing to trade him to the authorities for a bounty that will allow her to escape the dusty purgatory of the ranch where she labors with her sickly father. The movie is cynical but deliriously romantic at the same time. It’s also very tough and cruel – the two conspirators end up hanged from the side of a steam locomotive as a warning to other would-be train robbers and the Marshal callously lights a match, striking it across the boot of one of the corpses dangling from the engine. Virginia Mayo’s final act of devotion in fact inadvertently dooms McCrea’s Wes McQueen and there are sequences featuring amateur gunshot surgery with a wound cauterized by flaming gunpowder. Walsh stages all of this with impressive and lucid conviction – everything is big and the gestures are all sweeping and well-defined, played out against a sublime and massive landscape that structures the film’s action. When two bad guys are forced to jump off a speeding train, they don’t just pitch onto the track’s right-of-way, but instead roll down a declivity that is about 200 feet of savage looking rock and boulder. In one scene, McCrea, who has been badly wounded, mounts his steed gripping it with one hand and climbing aboard the charging animal with fantastic lyrical grace – I checked the shot several times on the DVD and verified that the sequence is done in a continuous take and that McCrea does this stunt on his own.