Colorado Territory (Film-study note)

Colorado Territory


"The bad movies we made twenty years ago are now regarded in altogether too many circles as important aspects of what the new illiterates want to believe is the only significant art form of the twentieth century. An entire generation has been brought up to admire the product of that era. Like so many dinosaur droppings, the old Hollywood films have petrified into something rich, strange, numinous-golden. For any survivor of the Writer’s Table (at the MGM commissary), it is astonishing to find young directors like Bertolucci, Bogdanovich, Truffaut, reverently repeating, or echoing, or paying homage to the sort of kitsch we created first-time around with a good deal of “help” from our producers, and, practically none at all from the directors – if one may quickly set aside the myth of the director as auteur. Golden age movies were the work of producer(s) and writer(s)..."
Gore Vidal “The Ashes of Hollywood” – May 17 and May 31, 1973
New York Review of Books

“(Walsh) never walshes out, but stays inside a disingenuous scriopt, accepts the inflexible requirement of at least three big stars acting out a measly story, also the stable of boisterous, bathetic Irish Soul bit players...who appear the same debilitating way every Walsh picture, and the all-purpose Warners backlot, like Nervi trying to reach the sky, with mysterious, all-white, slanted abutments that could be a brewery, Nazi munitions factory, chemical plant, or a penitentiary wall... why did up this “great action director” whose enormous progeny includes such clunkers as Saskatchewan, Distant Trumpet, whole scenes devoted to the art of spitting and to an obscenely acted, scene-hogging drunk, whole films carbonated with ironic bawdy jokers or miserably maudlin weepers? It’s a rank understatement to say that Walsh’s personality has never been properly identified...”
Manny Farber, Raoul Walsh in Artforum, November 1971.

The Spectator Assassinated

Rauol Walsh acted in movies before he directed them. In early silent film, the boundaries between directing, craft, and acting were porous. The man who arranged lights on the set might appear as an extra or, even, mugging as a character actor in a few scene or, even, a reel or two in an early movie. Making movies involved all aspects of the business. Only the technological wizards behind the cameras were exempt from this rule – photography was arduous business and required a specialist.

In 1915, Walsh appeared as John Wilkes Booth in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. Isolated by an iris effect, Walsh occupies a corner of the black screen, brooding like a fettered eagle. In a series of carefully choreographed scenes, Booth stalks Lincoln, huddles in the airless corridor outside his theater box, and, then, fires a bullet into the president’s brain. The images are stark, unforgiving, claustrophobic – there is a sense of strait-jacketed hysteria and doom played-out in tiny, dismal rooms. This sequence in Griffith’s landmark film remains powerfully vivid today, probably, the iconic representation of Lincoln’s assassination, a taut little nightmare made particularly pungent by Walsh’s Booth. Walsh is long-legged, coiled like a spring, and he brings a vivid, unsettling presence to the sequence – he looks like a cross between Edgar Alan Poe and Lord Byron. (With John Ford, Raoul Walsh is quintessentially the “man of the west”. But, in fact, his family was decayed Irish-English gentry and Walsh was born in Manhattan, learning to ride horse in Central Park.)

Walsh worked on Birth of a Nation as Griffith’s assistant director and he may have been responsible for orchestrating the assassination sequence in which he appears. Walsh had directed his first feature film The Life of General Pancho Villa in 1914. This movie was one of the most remarkable projects in film history. Walsh’s boss, Griffith negotiated a contract with Pancho Villa agreeing with the Mexican general that his cameramen would be “embedded” (to use the modern term) with Villa’s forces fighting in the field in northern Mexico. Villa agreed to conduct his battles in the daylight, during sunny weather, to accomodate the cameras and, also, contracted to allow the combat scenes to be restaged, if the actual footage wasn’t sufficient for the film maker’s purposes. Walsh was sent to Mexico to make the movie, fought alongside Villa, and appears the in the picture as the General’s kid brother. Unfortunately, this film is known only from some stills; the actual moving picture has been lost although the bizarre contract survives in a Mexican museum. (The story of this movie is told in And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself, a 2003 HBO film.) After his work on Birth of a Nation, Walsh made one of the first full-length gangster pictures, Regeneration (1915). That film can be viewed today and is extraordinary: Walsh uses a documentary-style and shoots on the Bowery using local people, some of them with indelible faces. The picture is raw and brutal and seems much more modern than the picturesque Victorian melodramas that Griffith was making at that same time.

During the next dozen years, Walsh directed many important silent films. He supervised one of the first important special effects movies, The Thief of Bagdad (1924), starring Douglas Fairbanks and Anna Mae Wong. Walsh’s 1926 version of the Maxwell Anderson play What Price Glory?, a comedy-drama about two Marines in World War One France, was probably the highest grossing of all silent pictures. The movie stars Victor McLaglen and Edwin Lowe as the rival soldiers competing for the affections of a comely French girl. The picture was briefly controversial when deaf filmgoers, trained to read lips, figured out what the two leading men were actually saying to one another in the dialogue scenes. Although the intertitles were chaste, Walsh had his soldiers talk realistically, using profanity that affronted the defenders of public morality. What Price Glory? was so successful at the box-office that it was remade many times and Walsh himself directed two sequels to the picture – The Cockeyed World (1928) and Women of the World (1931).

Sadie Thompson (1928) revived the lip reading scandal associated with What Price Glory with a vengeance. Sadie Thompson, derived from Somerset Maugham’s short story “Rain,” was controversial from the outset. The plot involved a prostitute servicing sailors on the island of Pago Pago. A clergyman attempts to reform her with predictably catastrophic results. (The story was already famous as a risque 1923 Broadway play named after the Maugham fiction. This play features in Scarface – it’s the stage show that the gangsters are watching when the Al Capone character has to leave at intermission to assassinate Boris Karloff at the bowling alley.) Gloria Swanson, Walsh’s leading lady, wrote the screenplay with the director and the picture was mostly shot on Santa Catalina island. For reports on the premiere, journalists hired deaf lip readers to scrutinize the faces of the characters as they mouthed their lines – and, of course, some scandalous dialogue was documented. (Walsh and Swanson probably inserted the obscenities as a public relations stunt.) The movie was roundly denounced by Christian groups, did boffo box office, and a good time was had by all.

Starring as the Cisco Kid, and directing himself in the film In Old Arizona (1929), Walsh sustained serious injuries that brought his acting career to an end. While driving from a location near Moab, Walsh lost his right eye when a jackrabbit lunged up from the ground and went through his car’s windshield. For the rest of his life, Walsh wore a dashing black eye-patch. (Walsh refers to this incident in High Sierra when Bogart’s character is nearly killed in a car-crash caused by a jackrabbit darting out onto the highway.)

With the advent of sound, Walsh flourished. His first important sound picture is the 1930 western, The Big Trail. It was difficult to record sound with early technology, particularly on location, and impossible to move the camera in any scene involving dialogue. Walsh decided to make the picture without moving camera, emphasizing enormous landscapes projected in a very wide aspect ratio. Although made with a huge budget, and introducing John Wayne as an actor, the film probably qualifies as a kind of experimental picture. Walsh’s strategy was to fill the vast horizontal expanses of the picture – it was shot in an early form of Cinemascope – with spectacular motion. If the camera didn’t move, the imagery shown in the wide-format image could, nonetheless, be presented in such a way as to emphasize motion – in this case, the motion of characters across the screen or zigzagging into the depths of the image. Furthermore, the panoramic vistas allowed Walsh to compose his images like great, elongated friezes with primary and secondary focal points – an image might show young lovers in the center of the screen with horsemen approaching on the left while children drive own away from the lens on the right side of the wide-screen. Walsh arranged his figures in the landscape to provide images as complex as a Brueghel image, swarms of small figure at various distances from the camera some given narrative emphasis, others appearing only to provide anecdotal or picturesque detail. Instead of using editing to create the narrative, Walsh’s big panoramas, often presented from an aerial perspective, invite the viewer to search the screen for details significant to the film’s story. The Big Trail is famous for some of its set-pieces, including awesome images of wagons being lowered down a cliff-face on ropes as well as spectacular imagery of caravans crossing broad rivers or beset by Indian attacks. John Wayne had not grown into his later stature and seems callow in the film and audience’s were confused by the film’s panoramic profusion – at times, the picture resembles some of Tintoretto’s frescos. And, although the picture is very interesting pictorially, it is unsuccessful and the dialogue seems trite and tinny, particularly in contrast with the vast and majestic landscapes displayed in the movie.

After The Big Trail, Walsh did hackwork, although of a high order. Me and My Gal (1931) is an early Spencer Tracy film, a comic gangster picture, that is one of Manny Farber’s favorites pictures – he claims it is Walsh’s best movie. Walsh languished for a few years, but, in 1939, seemed reinvigorated by a new contract with Warner Brothers. At that studio, he made some of his most famous and influential pictures. Walsh’s first picture for Warner was The Roaring Twenties, a powerful and well-written gangster movie starring Humphrey Bogart as a sadistic, psychopathic killer. Walsh and Bogart were simpatico and, in 1941, were together again in the famous crime film, High Sierra. Walsh worked with A-list actors and made a number of well-regarded action pictures in the next several years. One of his most famous pictures during this period was Operation Burma I (1945) with Errol Flynn, a very tough war film. Pursued is a film noir Western with Robert Mitchum, derided when it was first shown in 1947, but now highly regarded. This period in Walsh’s career included Colorado Territory, released in 1949 along with another signature gangster film, White Heat, starring Jimmy Cagney.

Walsh continued to churn out films, two or three a year until 1964, when his last picture, a routine cavalry against the Indians flick, A Distant Trumpet was released. He lived long enough to become celebrated as one of America’s greatest directors by the French critics who founded the New Wave. His films are said to have influenced Chabrol, Clouzot (particularly the Frenchman’s The Wages of Fear), and the ending of High Sierra provides the template for the last sequence in Godard’s Breathless.

One of the Cahiers du Cinema crowd once asked Walsh what he thought the three greatest virtues of film were. Walsh said: “Action, action, and, then, action.” The French critic responded: “Eh bien, you must be Aristotelian, because in the Poetics we learn that it is action, and not psychology, that drives drama forward.” Walsh replied: “Oh, yeah! Okay, if you say so.”


W. R. Burnett

William Riley Burnett was an American crime-writer, born with the century, who died in 1982. He is more renowned in Europe than the United States – sophisticated Europeans embraced American hard-boiled crime fiction after World War Two as an embodiment of certain themes prevalent in existentialism. Burnett was a leading muse to Hollywood directors and many well-known films were written by him or derive from his many novels and short stories.

Burnett was born in Springfield Ohio, worked as postal clerk in a small town, and wrote prolifically (and unsuccessfully) – he is said to have completed five novels and a hundred short stories all of them unpublished before he moved to Chicago in 1927. On his first night in the big city, the room in the cheap hotel where he was lodging was rocked by the roar of explosions. Local gangsters were shooting it out in the street below, pitching “pineapples” – that is, hand-grenades – at one another. Inspired by the gritty downtown milieu, Burnett wrote his first published novel, the best-selling and famous Little Caesar (1929). That book established Burnett’s connections with the film industry, a mutually profitable relationship that continued until the writer’s death.

Burnett worked on the script of the Edward G. Robinson film made from his book and, also, wrote several of the important scenes in Howard Hawks’ Scarface. His 1941 bestseller, High Sierra, was adapted for film three times, first as the Humphrey Bogart - Ida Lupino picture, released in the same year that the book wa published, then, re-tooled into a Western, Colorado Territory, and, finally, remade in the late fifties as I died a 1000 Deaths, a crime melodrama starring Shelley Winters and Jack Palance. Burnett’s The Asphalt Jungle (1949) was converted to a John Huston film in 1951 and, also, remade in several later versions, including a short-lived Tv series. Burnett’s 1932 The Beast of the City, about a corrupt and vicious cop, is widely cited as the source for Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry pictures produced in the late sixties and early seventies. Burnett is also credited with the script for The Great Escape.

Burnett continued to write anachronistic tough crime novels up to the date of his death in Santa Monica in 1982. His last book, Goodbye Chicago, published in 1981, is a memoir about his early career as a writer in the Windy City.


Farber on Walsh

A friend at Harvard told me that a retrospective of 18 movies directed by Raoul Walsh was presented early this spring at that college. The movies were shown from February to March 2013 and very fragile, but beautiful, 35 mm. prints. When the retrospective was finished, Martin Scorsese came to Harvard to retrieve the celluloid. The movies were, then, entrusted to the American Film Institute for restoration – that process will take six or seven years.

Revival of interest in the films made by Raoul Walsh dates to the early seventies. At that time, Manny Farber published an influential essay on Walsh’s films in 1991 in Artforum. Walsh, whom Farber sometimes calls “hog Walsh,” was best “(in the) sick compromising position of working inside a big studio monolith.” Somehow he contrives to make personal films within “the suffocating, man-under-a-toadstool relationship with Warners.” In his films, there is ‘no omnipotent kingpin character, but the bustling studio environment...recreated in a script that moves around a lot through room, cars, streets.” He “never fights his material, playing directly into the staleness.” Unlike his compatriots, directors that Farber characterizes as cynical, surrealistic, or patronizing – that is, superior to the Dreck they were required to produce, Walsh was a “natural, unsophisticated humanist” who “is often often alone is playing straight” with the threadbare genre material that he was contracted to produce. Walsh “wrote some scripts” (like Colorado Territory) “as bald copies of hit films he directed and probably directed entered each project with ‘Christ, it’s not bad. It reminds me of my last movie.” For Farber, Walsh was the consummate “factory-hand...an ostrich with his head buried deep inside the (Hollywood Studio) System,” someone who will never “crash-out” of that System and has no aspirations to do so.

Here are the characteristics that Farber locates in Walsh films:

1. A “no-shortcut style...steeped in the silent film necessity for excessive, frantic visual explication, taking nothing for granted;” Walsh is overly explicit “slyly doub(ling) and tripl(ing) every move;
2. Walsh specializes in “scrappy lower middle class wage-earners,” people who are not glamorous and “miles from the dauntless, graceful life-styles pictured in expensive, expansive dream-factory fabrications by (directors like) Cukor, Wyler, or Hitchcock”; Walsh’s films inhabit a “glum, unsunny, lower middle-class milieu...”
3. “Frenetic, boxed-in crisscrossing of paths and corrupt clamor...” – this is Farber’s account of how Walsh stages a scene;
4. Walsh does his best work in “abandoned stagnant, suspended scenes..”; famed as an action director, Farber claims Walsh is best when focusing on the inert passages between the “incredible frenzy” of his action sequences;
5. Walsh is “amazingly direct, forthright, clear, rhythmic, dedicated to folk (and a) cousin to Renoir’s Toni (and) Vigo’s L’Atlante, Brassai’s street photography with more brisk jocularity than his French counterparts...”
6. Walsh “keeps things moving,” a “great traffic cop of movies,” who “hustles actors around an intersection-like screen that is generally empty in the center;”

Farber argued that Walsh’s movies have a “double nature”– that is, they look exactly like the era in which they were made but also have “queer passages foreshadowing” the films that Farber admired in the sixties and seventies. Farber, true to his aesthetic, makes no great claims for Walsh – his work has, the critic said, “forthright crispness that occasionally vitalizes the crudest hack fiction.”

Joel McCrea and James Mitchell

Joel McCrea was a product of the Golden West. He was born in Pasadena and attended High School. As a boy, he watched Griffith filming Intolerance near his family’s home and began working in films as a wrangler, holding William S. Hart’s horse on film locations.

McCrea began his career in Westerns and ended in them, most famously appearing in Sam Peckinpah’s great autumnal film Ride the High Country with Randolph Scott. During the thirties, McCrea was a glamor boy and appeared in a number of brittle, fast-talking screwball comedies including Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travel. McCrea was a rare kind of actor – someone who seemed just as comfortable in a tuxedo or on a dance-floor as on horseback hurtling through the purple sage. As he aged, McCrea felt that he was unsuited to playing the part of a dapper romantic lead and spent the last 25 years of his career playing cowboys.

McCrea was an excellent horseman and there are many scenes in Colorado Territory that highlight this prowess – he is particularly attractive and exciting driving his beautiful horse down perilously steep and rocky slopes at breakneck speed. McCrea owned a large ranch and, in later years, said that his profession was “ranching” and that is hobby was “acting.” There is a very beautiful scene in Jacques Tourneur’s gentle Western, Stars in my Crown, in which McCrea has to mount a horse without using his hands and, then, gallop away at high speed. I have watched this scene many times because I admire McCrea’s athleticism – and it is clear that he accomplishes this feat entirely without assistance in a single take that shows him approach the animal, mount it, and ride hellbent for leather all in a single sequence shot in which his face is clearly visible.

James Mitchell plays Reno in the film. Mitchell was an extraordinary presence in the dozen or so movies he made in the late forties and early fifties – he is also very good in Tourneur’s Stars in my Crown. Mitchell was a famous dancer and worked with Agnes DeMille in many important pieces of choreography that she devised immediately after World War Two. Mitchell was highly athletic and he was renowned for his effortless “lifts”. He was exceptionally intelligent and strangely beautiful – there is always something unsettling about him in the films in which he appears. Most Hollywood director’s didn’t know how to make use of Mitchell’s cadaverous good looks and by the mid-fifties his screen career was over. (He later surfaced in a character role in All my Children on TV and was much beloved in that part.)

Mitchell was homosexual and there is always a faint tingle implied in his interaction with other men in the films of his that I have seen. In particular, Mitchell as Reno seems to be part of a perverse menage a trois when we first meet him at Todos Santos. It is suggested, covertly but, I think with some insistence, that Reno is competing with Colorado for Duke’s affections. Certainly, the scene in which a drunken Reno pursues Duke through the ruined village suggests something like a lover’s quarrel.

Place Names and terms of Art

Colorado Territory takes place in the Four Corners region. The film was shot at Gallup, New Mexico, on the border with Arizona, about sixty miles south of the place where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico intersect. In fact, although the location information for the film specifies Gallup, I think that the canyon sequences were filmed in nearby Arizona at Canyon de Chelly – I have been to that place and the canyon where the climax occurs looks very much like the entrance to Canyon de Chelly with its characteristic wind-polished faces of soft sandstone. The so-called “City of the Moon,” the Anasazi (now “Ancestral Pueblo”) cliff-dwelling featured in the picture looks like one of the many such structures in the canyon on the Navajo reservation. (My guess is that the film crew stayed in Gallup but spent their days shooting in Canyon de Chelly nearby.) Pictographs of horses on the wall of the canyon seems to imitate a frieze of horses painted on a cliff face in that canyon (although not associated with the much older cliff dwellings).

Potrero, meaning “pasture” in Spanish, seems to be an imaginary place. There is a Potrero near Santa Fe, an old trading post to the Tewa Indians, but that is several hundred miles remote from the Four Corners area where the story takes place.

Aztec is a small village near Farmington, New Mexico. It is also the site of famous Anasazi ruins, a Chaco great house and outlier, now protected in Aztec Ruins National Monument. Aztec is a railroading town on Denver & Rio Grande line, a train that plays a role in the movie, although the actual railroad footage was shot on the Durango to Silverton narrow-gage right-of-way.

Medicine Hat is a very pretty town in Alberta, Canada, a genteel place where you expect the cowboys to take an afternoon break for English tea and crumpets. Obviously, that place has nothing to do with the movie. However, “Mexican Hat” is another village in south Utah in the Four Corners area – in fact, the gateway to Monument Valley, the location where John Ford shot many of his Westerns and, also, close to the Four Corners. Perhaps, the town mentioned is intended to be Mexican Hat.

Wes McQueen is called a “Big Jay.” This means a “Big Jayhawk” – that is, an outlaw from the Jayhawk state, Kansas. Clay County, Missouri, where the film begins, is immediately north of Kansas City on the border with Kansas. Clay County is the birthplace of the James gang, the home of Frank and Jesse James, as well as other infamous outlaws – the County’s violent history derives from its location as a staging place for “Jayhawker” guerilla raids from the slave state of Missouri into “bleeding Kansas” just before the Civil War. In labor parlance, a “scissorbill” is a “a foolish and contemptible person” – someone, according to the I. W. W. “Wobblies” too stupid to join a union. (I would think that using this term in 1949 in a Hollywood screenplay could get the writer “blacklisted.” My surmise is that Walsh was so right-wing that no one would have noticed this incendiary phrase in one of his pictures.)


Branded to the Bone

Colorado Territory is an unusual combination of stale, formulaic Western movie imagery and a densely wrought, intensely poetic narrative. Like many directors rooted in the silent films, Walsh viewed film assignments with equanimity. He understood that Hollywood pictures are only incidentally artistic and, necessarily, compromised by commercial necessity. Aspects of a film that don’t interest Walsh are usually given shortshrift – that is, directed in a brisk perfunctory way that allows the director to efficiently advance into elements of the movie that do interest him. Walsh, like all of the Hollywood directors that Farber admires, is a termite – he doesn’t direct self-conscious masterpieces that are coherent works of art. Instead, he proceeds through the hackneyed material provided to him, placing personal emphasis on the features of the narrative that fascinate him. This is evident in the sequence involving the raid on the stagecoach early in the film. Walsh doesn’t bother to make the interior space of the stagecoach match its exterior. Since this episode in the film bores him – I assume he didn’t want to compete with Ford’s Stagecoach – he simply cuts the wagon set in two and directs the characters to look vaguely toward the camera to simulate an exterior off-screen space. Although the episode is competently constructed, it is notably lackluster and the exteriors don’t really match the shots interior to the stagecoach. Similarly, Walsh doesn’t have much interest in Wes McQueen’s tentative courtship of the Southern belle transported to the New Mexico desert – those scenes are efficiently staged but don’t have any “sizzle” – there is no sense of the director’s personal involvement in that part of the plot.

Other elements of the picture confirm Farber’s observations about Walsh. It’s amusing to observe that someone spits within the first five minutes of the film – a sort of signature in Walsh pictures. The movie abounds with signposts and texts – it is as if Walsh doesn’t trust pictures to tell a story and requires that the narrative be presented both visually and in words. This is laughably apparent in a shot early in the picture: after Wes McQueen has escaped from the Clay County jail, we see a boy frantically ringing a bell that is marked with a sign to this effect: “To be rung only as an alarm.” Of course, the audience grasps immediately why the bell is being tolled and it is peculiar that Walsh provides a text to label an image that is pictorially clear and explicit. (The signpost does serve, however, to highlight the tolling of the bell – thus, signifying the importance of images of bells ringing throughout the film.)

Walsh’s fondness for overly explicit “signs” is also apparent in his treatment of Colorado, the dance-hall girl in the film. This character is an example of Walsh’s skill in establishing a stereotyped character and, then, developing that conventional figure into a something substantial, unexpected, and, even, profound. Colorado, first seen squatting to wash her hair at Todos Santos, is an improbable and emblematic figure, a walking-talking cliche: the “soiled dove,” the fiery, half-squaw, the dusky, disreputable maiden with glistening lips, a wild mane of blonde hair, and features sooty with some sort of make-up supposed to (unrealistically) depict her as something other than a clean and sober Caucasian woman. The character flounces around in a ridiculous get-up, showing just a trace of cleavage, blouse taut over the bosom, with one shoulder always picturesquely bare. It’s bargain-basement imagery of most threadbare kind and racist to boot. But Walsh’s use of this stereotype is anything but exploitative – in fact, Colorado turns out to be the film’s heroine, dying in a blaze of gunfire defending her lover, the film’s fierce and incorruptible heart – she is the “mountain woman” from Griffith’s Intolerance transported from Babylon to Colorado, the free spirit of the great, empty West By contrast, Walsh uses similar stereotyping with respect to Colorado’s foil, the conventional “good woman” at the Rancho del Sol. We see her as the soul of domesticity, an embodiment of Victorian morality, and, as the movie progresses, as depraved and vicious as most of the other characters inhabiting the picture. Walsh similarly works against type, establishing a character as a broad caricature, and, then, deepening that portrait and reversing its fundamental colors in the case of several of the minor roles in the film – the brutal testosterone-crazed sadist, Duke is hunted “like a rabbit” by the effeminate Reno; the rancher from the old South, the figure of a loquacious, foolish, cowardly Easterner turns out to be courageous and generous. Walsh’s most startling reversal of conventions is the short, throw-away scene with the treacherous conductor’s wife – she looks like a solid, virtuous Hausfrau sweeping her porch, but gloats about her husband’s betrayal of the robbers and her share of the reward proceeds from the apprehension of the robbers.

Westerns are constructed from cliches – this is the nature of a genre film. (In fact, Farber seems to have thought that all Hollywood studio films are necessarily contrived from stereotyped and formulaic situations acted by generic types – that is, the loyal old man, the brute, the gangster, the gun moll, the good girl.) Walsh’s strength is that he betrays the cliches and turns his stock characters inside out. Colorado Territory is compelling because the entire structure of the film is based upon betrayal – nothing is what it seems to be and all of the people in the film, with the possible exception of the hero, are radically different from how they initially appear in the picture. Appearances are deceptive. This thesis is made clear in the very first scene in the film – the sweet old lady is, in fact, in league with the outlaws and acts to “bust out” McQueen from Missouri hoosegow. Walsh’s direction in the film enacts this theme of betrayal – he establishes a convention only to violate it. Film, constructed from the appearances of things, is used to call into question appearances. The mild and well-watered landscape of Missouri conceals the skeletal ribs and vertebral boulders of Death Canyon, the desolate terrain surveyed by the moving camera under the titles to the film.

What interests Walsh in Colorado Territory is the poetry of doom, the Teutonic glamor associated with bad luck and a worse fate. McQueen is a “marked man” – he is, in the film’s uniquely poetic diction, “branded to the bone.” In the picture’s demotic verse, he is bound for:
the prettiest bone orchard you ever seen
stone angels watchin’ on.
The film’s action pivots between three ruined or ruinous sites: the cliff-dweller City of the Moon, Rancho del Sol, the hardscrabble farm far from any potable water (it’s boundaries marked by the skull of a sunstruck cow), and Todos Santos. This emblematic locations import into the film a lyrical and mythic cosmography – the characters oscillate between the sun (the solar ranch), the moon (the cliff-dwelling) and Todos Santos, the Catholic “communion of Saints” – that is the community of the Dead. The terrain linking these desolate locations is the canyon of Death, stony parapets and sandy wasteland. Todos Santos, the robber’s roost, is the most blasted of these places, a town that has been thrice-destroyed: once by savages, once by pestilence, and, finally, by an earthquake that has left its evidence in all of the collapsing walls and smashed adobe brick in the village – we can see that everything is precariously supported, shorn-up by timber beams. One of the characters warns McQueen about the ghosts of the dead Indians haunting the place’s kiva.

The characters in the film long to “bust out” of this death-haunted desert but there is no place for them to go. The canyons are all dead ends. The tolling bells that ring throughout the film are funereal – ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. An alarm bell is rung at the film’s outset, announcing McQueen’s escape into the wasteland and his ultimate destination -- death. An Indian woman rings a dinner bell at the coach station, everyone eerily oblivious to the fact that the arrival of the stagecoach has cost seven men their lives. (Impassive Indians serve as emblems of death in the film.) The priest rings the damaged bell at Todos Santos alarming the robbers and, of course, at the end of the film that bell tolls again – although this time attracting a congregation of poor Mexican and Indian worshipers, a communion of Saints that are, probably, living, but may, in fact, be ghosts.

An expert on Raoul Walsh, Tom Conley, a famous professor at Harvard, introduced a retrospective of Walsh pictures at the Harvard Film Archive early this spring. Conley has a brilliant eye and sees things in Walsh films invisible to others. (You may recall that we discussed Professor Conley’s essay on Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street several years ago.) Products of what Conley calls “ a rapacious industry of pleasure,” themes of greed and betrayal in Walsh pictures “prompt... viewers to look at the critical underside” of the Hollwood dream factory. Discussing the climax of Colorado Territory, Conley observes:
...in Colorado Territory, the law is hell-bent to get (McQueen), cornered high in the remains of a pre-Columbian culture nestled in the mountain, in a black hole – that the camera marks clearly as a rectum. They’ll get him “from behind.” Which the entitled scoundrels indeed do, but in a last flurry, wounded, having descended the slope, the hero and heroine meet and fire their six guns directly at us, who in the penultimate shot become one with the posse that levels them in a barrage of bullets (a scene clearly modeling the end of Bonnie and Clyde). At that moment, when we wish that the couple would murder the agents of the law, the film implicitly turns on the industry of capital that produced it.
An interesting feature of the City of the Moon is that there is no “back entry.” McQueen’s calamitous final shoot-out is precipitated by his erroneous belief that there is another way to enter the canyon from behind him. Someone “busting out” must breach a confining wall. As in High Sierra, the film progresses from a literal wall surrounding the protagonist to a vision in which the landscapes of the world, the freedom of the West, become all wall without any outlet. The spectral character of the Moon is that it has no backside – we see only the face of the moon, it is all “front” as far as we are concerned. At least, Mount Whitney where the hero of High Sierra dies has another face, something beyond the crest of the mountain; the City of the Moon is all facade – it’s backside is, in fact, unimaginable; hence, the sense of claustrophobic doom at the climax of Colorado Territory.

Walsh, as Farber notes, “doubles and triples” actions to underline their significance. The picture’s theme of betrayal is sounded again and again in all possible registers. Reno taunts Duke about shooting McQueen in the back and, at the picture’s climax, this theme is twisted and inverted – McQueen is told that they are going to take him “from behind” when, in fact, the plan is to launch a frontal assault. Everyone is greedy. Duke would have robbed the alms box in the wrecked church had he been aware that a few pesos had been left there. His greed rhymes with the avarice of the conductor plotting for a share of the reward money, the conductor’s wife boasting about her husband’s share of the proceeds, and, ultimately, the southern belle’s immediate and instinctive impulse to sell McQueen, who loves her, to the pursuing posse. There’s no way out for anyone. We sense this when we see the haggard outlaw boss drinking himself to death in his quaint Victorian lodging: “We’re all gonna die sometime, you and me and the whole cock-eyed world,” he tells McQueen pouring himself another poisonous glass of whiskey. (Walsh made a film about another legion of death, the Marine Corps, called The Cock-eyed World – and, of course, was missing one of his eyes.) Later, the Indians outside his house sing a death song and, when McQueen enters, he finds the villainous Pluther looting the outlaw chieftain’s room, the dead boss’ hand dangling limply from the bed in which he has just died. When McQueen guns down Pluther, he slumps to the floor his arm also slack and almost touching the dead man’s arm sprawled out from beneath the sheet covering him. The eerie chant of the Indians and the corpse in the bed – these images epitomize Death Canyon, the symbolic locale where the film takes place.

This melodramatic description of the content of Colorado Territory makes the movie seem morose, morbid, and melancholy. But the genius of Raoul Walsh is that, in fact, the film is bracing, exhilarating, a popular entertainment that is surprisingly funny and, indeed, amused by the antics of its corrupt and vicious characters. And the film contains a catfight between Virginia Mayo and Dorothy Malone. Who could ask for more?