Great...

Marvin's work presages his glorious turn in Cat Ballou. I wonder if the makers of Cat had this is mind when casting him.

What bothers me about this film are two things: it is full of comedic elements but also purports to be telling a straight story, and I don't think the mixture is handled well enough here to avoid being confusing; and I can't get past the old-fashioned stereotypic treatment of Indians and Mexicans (with which I grew up, btw, and which I sat through time and time again; I perfectly understand this was the way it was usually done).

I am prepared to stand corrected by a knowledgeable source, but whoever invented the idea of the Indians riding around in circles and being shot off their horses like tenpins? At least when the wagons were circled in certain movies there was a sort of excuse for it, and sometimes it sort of worked, but not here--they just go riding by, not even circling, nor riding down our heroes, simply getting picked off one by one and three by three.

The Indian style was really to encircle their enemies from cover and to approach and attack as individuals or in small bands, gradually tightening the noose if there was a strongpoint; and that sort of thing was what took place, for example, in the days and hours preceding the huge confrontation at Little Big Horn. Again, I understand that this does not make for the kind of cinema being attempted in The Comancheros.

But I don't know what kind it is--except for a rip-roaring John Wayne movie, and on that level it's fine. (I would distinguish it from a really good John Wayne movie, like The Horse Soldiers or even The Quiet Man.) The score in Comancheros is wonderful, the photography good, Wayne is inimitably John Wayne. I thought Ina Balin was a signal failure in her supposedly fiery Latin role.

This same thing has been done better several times.

I love watching them sober. 🙂🙂🙂🙂