Director Raoul Walsh's career covered 50 of the most fertile years in film history - from his early work with D.W. Griffith at the birth of Hollywood to the golden years of the studio system. In more than 150 films, he worked in every American film genre, most notably Westerns, gangster pictures and action films. He helped make Humphrey Bogart a star, brought the talking film into the Wild West and danced a mean tango with Gloria Swanson when he directed himself in Sadie Thompson (1928). His career was so extensive, in fact, that he even got to top himself when he directed Colorado Territory, a 1949 Western remake of his own epochal gangster film High Sierra (1941), which had brought Bogart one of his first sympathetic leading roles. More than just a footnote in film history, Colorado Territory has become a cult favorite because of Walsh's combination of a Western setting, a film noir plot (helped greatly by Sid Hickox's high-contrast black-and-white photography of the New Mexico hills) and the fascinating portrayal of the female lead, one of the toughest women in film history.

In the years following World War II, Warner Bros. faced declining box-office grosses by reissuing some of its most popular films of the '30s and remaking others, often with a change in genre or setting. Errol Flynn's popular swashbucklers enjoyed a revival. The Public Enemy (1931) and Little Caesar (1930) were such a popular double bill that they brought back the gangster film for audiences tired of war stories. And the gangster drama The Petrified Forest (1936) was remade as the Nazi espionage thriller Escape in the Desert (1945), with Helmut Dantine's downed Nazi flyer taking the place of Bogie's doomed gangster.

Fortunately for film audiences, somebody got the brilliant idea of transforming High Sierra into a Western and hiring Walsh to re-make his classic gangster tale. The results were dynamic, with some contemporary critics insisting the story worked better in the Wild West than in the world of contemporary crime.

Joel McCrea was a natural for the role of an outlaw forced to pull one last heist before he can go straight. The actor radiated integrity, and whenever he played a character on the wrong side of the law, he automatically generated audience sympathy and moral complexity. Henry Hull, who had co-starred with Bogie in the original as a dying gangster, returned in a new role, as the father of the young beauty (Dorothy Malone) who betrays the outlaw.

Best of all, however, was Virginia Mayo as Colorado, the half-breed saloon singer. Ida Lupino had been tough as Bogart's moll in the original version, but Mayo was tougher, as she stood shotgun to shotgun by her man in the final shootout. Walsh was one of the few directors in Hollywood who saw Mayo's potential as a dramatic actress. Independent producer Samuel Goldwyn had brought her to Hollywood only a few years earlier to star in his lavish Technicolor musicals, usually as Danny Kaye's love interest. Director William Wyler had given a hint of her potential when he cast her as Dana Andrew's unfaithful wife in the postwar classic The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). But it was Walsh who gave her her best roles, first in Colorado Territory, then as James Cagney's murderous wife in White Heat the same year. The rare glimpses he provided of her usually wasted talents were as tragic as anything that happened to the characters in Colorado Territory.

Producer: Anthony Veiller
Director: Raoul Walsh
Screenplay: John Twist, Edmund H. North
Based on the screenplay for High Sierra by John Huston and W.R. Burnett and Burnett's novel (uncredited)
Cinematography: Sid Hickox
Art Direction: Ted Smith
Music: David Buttolph
Principal Cast: Joel McCrea (Wes McQueen), Virginia Mayo (Colorado Carson), Dorothy Malone (Julie Ann), Henry Hull (Winslow), John Archer (Reno Blake), James Mitchell (Duke Harris), Morris Ankrum (U.S. Marshall), Victor Kilian (Sheriff).
BW-95m. Closed captioning.

by Frank Miller