Colorado Territory

I briefly mentioned Colorado Territory back in 2015 when it was airing on TCM in honor of the birthday salute to one of its stars, Virginia Mayo. It ran again last December as part of TCM's spotlight on remakes. I recently got around to watching it, so now we get a review.

While Mayo may be the female lead, the real star is Joel McCrea, playing Wes McQueen. At the start of the movie he's in prison in Missouri in 1871, but he's sprung by friends. The first thing he does is go to the farm where his old flame lived, but he finds that she died while he was in prison. So he goes west, out to Colorado where his old friend Rickard (Basil Ruysdael) has a job for him.

Along the way to Colorado, however, on the stagecoach he meets the Winslows, father Fred (Henry Hull) and daughter Julie (Dorothy Malone), whom Dad is bringing west because they're of too low a social class to marry her beau, and he wants to start a farm. Wes takes a liking to the two of them, and even thwarts a would-be gang of robbers from taking the coach's money box. The Winslows don't know Wes' true identity.

About that job that Rickard had for Wes? It's a criminal matter, of course, involving the robbery of a payroll from the Denver and Rio Grande railroad. While preparing for the robbery, he is to hide out at an abandoned mission, where he's going to meet the two other guys in the robbery, Reno and Duke (John Archer and James Mitchell, respectively). They're bad news, as should be seen by the fact that they've brought a woman with them to the hideout, Colorado Carson (that's Virginia Mayo). They treat her like crap, and fight amongst themselves, so it's unsurprising that Colorado takes a liking to Wes and eschews the other two guys.

The day of the robbery arrives, and it doesn't go off without a hitch. Reno and Duke try to double-cross Wes, even sicking the railroad police on Wes and Colorado; they get away although Wes gets shot in the shoulder during the escape. But there's a Production Code, so you know that Wes isn't really going to be able to get away. (Not that Reno and Duke do; we see their legs dangling after their necks have been stretched.)

Colorado Territory is a remake of High Sierra, and if there's a problem with the movie, I think it's surprisingly in the casting of Joel McCrea. Humphrey Bogart is tough enough to play the part where, while still engendering a bit of sympathy, we know he deserves to die as the Production Code warrants. This is especially true because Bogart had been mostly playing bad guys at the time he made High Sierra; it was only that same year starting with The Maltese Falcon that he really began to play good guys. McCrea comes across as too nice, not having the hardened edges that Bogart's reputation brought. I think the writing doesn't quite help McCrea; nor does his reputation up until that time which involved a lot more good guys.

That doesn't mean that Colorado Territory is at all bad, however. It's a serviceable western, and a solid retelling of High Sierra moved out to the old west. It's more that the movie could have been so much better. Colorado Territory is available on DVD from the Warner Archive should you care to watch for yourself.