The Comancheros

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		List Price: $14.98		From: 20th Century Fox From: 20th Century Fox Salesrank: 4881 Released: 2003-05-20 Running Time: 107 Minutes
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The Comancheros Editorial Review:
John Wayne is Capt. Jake Cutter, a Texas Ranger determined to crush a powerful outlaw gang that's selling guns to the Indians. Cutter is also trying to bring in gambler Paul Regret (Whitman), who's wanted for murder. Both missions get entangled when Cut

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Very good service. I ordered a new DVD (The Comenchores") and it arrived sealed and brand new just as promised. Thank you,Vivian

One of the Duke's Most Enjoyable Films
Other than "Rio Bravo" and "El Dorado," "The Comancheros" is my favorite Wayne western. I first saw it in the movies with my father when I was eleven. I loved it then and I love it now: it is incredibly entertaining from start to finish. The basic premise is that Texas Ranger Wayne must team up with a man he was formerly sent to arrest (Stuart Whitman) to infiltrate a small army of renegades selling guns to the indians. Theres the plot.
But there is so much more to this film than that. The dialogue is some of the most entertaining and amusing in any Wayne filme. It is hard to believe that it was written by Wayne crony James Edward Grant, the same man who wrote the rather ponderous script for Wayne's "The Alamo" the year before. The dialogue in this film is priceless and has me chuckling continuously.
The cast is excellent. Wayne and Stuart Whitman work wonderfully together in this film, you get the impression that they got along well. (They would appear together to a lesser extent a year later in "The Longest Day.") Ina Balin is very attractive as Whitman's love interest who just happens to be the daughter of Comanchero leader Nehemiah Persoff. Michael Ansara is predictibly nasty as Persoff's number one stooge. Others in the cast include Wayne's friend Bruce Cabot as the Texas Ranger Captain, Joan O'Brien (who appeared with the Duke the year before in "The Alamo,") as the widow the Duke is in love with, Richard Devon as a comanchero with more loyalty to Balin, than her father and Wayne's son Patrick as a young Texas Ranger. And then theres Lee Marvin...On the audio-commentary of "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," it is mentioned that John Ford chose Marvin for the evil Liberty after seeing him as the obnoxious Tully Crowe in this film the year before, the charcters are very much alike. While posing as a gunrunner trying to infiltate the comancheros, Wayne is forced to deal with the totally dispicable Crowe. All does not end well when the Duke is forced to dispatch him after Crowe draws on him after a bad night at cards. (I love the evil manner in which Marvin, after acting like a drunken lout, tells Wayne that "I'm only as drunk as I want to be." It really doesn't help him in the end anyway.)
This film has some wonderful action scenes. The end scene with a large force of rifle-toting Rangers on horseback taking on whats left of the comancheros after Wayne and friends have created a great deal of havoc with a wagon and some dynamite is extremely exciting. The terrific Elmer Bernstein score is one of my favorites.
But, once again, to me the thing that puts this above so many others in terms of entertainment is the wonderful dialogue and the growing respect and friendship between Wayne's Texas Ranger Jake Cutter and Whitman's gambler turned fugitive turned Texas Ranger, Paul Regret.
The is an absolutely wonderful film and a great western.
Unfortunately the DVD has very few extras other than the trailer and a "movie tone news" segment regarding the film.

Take care of yourself, Big Jake. We've sort of gotten used to you
OK, let's get the worst stuff out of the way first: if historical accuracy is of even the slightest importance to you, you're going to have some problems with this 1961 entry starring John Wayne as Texas Rangers Captain Jake ("Big Jake") Cutler, on a mission to retrieve a man for murder and get him extradited to Louisiana in 1843. First of all, the guns are all wrong; now I'm not the kind of guy to notice this stuff or keep up with it generally, but even I knew that repeating rifles and Colt Peacemakers were post-Civil War weapons. Second of all, the action takes place between New Orleans and Galveston - but the terrain has nothing to do with what that area actually looks like. There are mentions made of prisons that didn't exist in 1843; Cutter and other Marshalls wear Ranger badges that didn't exist until decades later. And on and on. Seems to me the film could have been set in the mid-1870s when the actual Comanche was going on, without changing too much else, but...whatever.

I mention all this not to be picky so much as to let you know that this is basically a fun western that plays fast and loose with facts, geography, and sometimes common sense. If you can deal with all of that, you should have some fun with it, as it's one of Wayne's better westerns not directed by John Ford or Howard Hawks. Famed studio craftsman and jack-of-all trades Michael Curtiz is in fact responsible for most of the film and is the only credited director, though Wayne apparently directed a fair chunk of the film uncredited as Curtiz was ill with the cancer that would kill him in the year after the film's release. Given the episodic, good-natured atmosphere of the film, probably only an expert could tell who directed what here, and I'm not sure how much it matters anyway, given that all the other elements of the film are quite impressive - at least up until the finale, on which more later.

We get started off with a rousing blast of music that sounds suspiciously similar to the previous year's THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, and indeed the score turns out to be by Elmer Bernstein who was responsible for that legendary theme. If anything his music for this film is even more impressive, and frankly I'm not sure why it's not better known. We have a great initial shot of a rugged western prairie and hill terrain, as the camera pans up to check out the Duke in his familiar red shirt and suspenders astride a horse, a nice moment to take in the terrific photography of William Clothier, perhaps the preeminent 60s western cinematographer, whose work here is also on quite a high level. From here the scene shifts to New Orleans, sunrise...and a duel. The victor, one Paul Regret (a terrific young Stuart Whitman) has to flee, and he does so on a riverboat, only to fall for the wiles of a young woman - and then just as quickly to be captured by the tall horseman from the first scene, Wayne's Ranger Cutter.

The next episode involves Cutter's efforts to transport Regret to Galveston, overland by horse which will take a few days. The two make uneasy travelling companions, with Cutter clearly mocking and looking down on the dandyish Regret. Wayne is at his best in these early scenes, humorous and sarcastic and very at easy yet always with a purpose lurking behind his exaggerated drawl. If I had to guess I'd say he directed some of these sequences; in any case, this section soon ends when the two come across a Comanche-raided ranch, and Regret makes an escape. Chastened not a bit by his failure, Cutter is prepared to go after his man again but is instead assigned to pretend to be an illegal gun dealer and deliver some rifles to a man believed to be dealing with the Comanches, so the Rangers can find the hideout of these "Comancheros". The man turns out to be Lee Marvin as Tully Crow in an all-too-short sequence which ends up reuniting Cutter with his wanted man Regret. This time, the two are interrupted at a farm by Comanches and Comancheros, and Regret saves the day - and wins the thanks of the Texans, and his freedom. Becoming a Marshall himself, he and Cutter try again to infiltrate the Comancheros as arms dealers, and here's where the film gets a bit problematic.

Like I said above, I can take the historical inaccuracies to some extent - but the whole final sequence, involving the two men being accepted into a camp of hundreds of armed men, and Regret's love-of-a-night from the steamboat, Pilar (Ina Balin) surfacing as the daughter of the Comanchero leader (Nehemiah Persoff) is all a bit too much to swallow. It ends up having the feeling more appropriate to something like James Bond at the end than a western, and it all wraps up a little too tidily and easily for my taste. Still, with Wayne and Whitman doing stellar work, a very fine supporting cast, and some of the best dialogue in a western this side of JOSEY WALES, plus that AMAZING Bernstein score and fine Clothier photography, I think forgiving fans of the genre should have a good time anyway. I did.

Commancheros
Another great John Wayne western. These old westerns will never be lost cause they represent the old west as most of us really want it to be. I was a stuntman in those days and was lucky eough to work on this film.

Classic
this is the complete John Wayne moive, all the way from the gun fights to the larger than life screen apperance. its a must buy

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