General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Colorado Territory

Colorado Territory is a 1949 American black-and-white Western directed by Raoul Walsh for Warner Bros., in which outlaw Wes McQueen (Joel McCrea), sprung from jail for one last train robbery, is betrayed by his associates and dies in a ghost-town last stand beside the woman who loves him. It is a remake of the studio's 1941 crime drama High Sierra, also directed by Walsh, with the story moved from contemporary California to Colorado in post-Civil War days.¹ The film belongs to the noir Westerns of the late 1940s, which fused the Western's landscapes with film noir's doomed protagonists and morally ambiguous women.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / studio	Raoul Walsh; Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.³
Release	Premiere June 3, 1949 in Denver, Colorado; U.S. release June 11, 1949; 94 minutes, black and white, RCA Sound System³^•⁴
Principal cast	Joel McCrea (Wes McQueen), Virginia Mayo (Colorado Carson), Dorothy Malone (Julie Ann Winslow), Henry Hull, John Archer, James Mitchell, Basil Ruysdael³^•⁵
Source	Remake of Walsh's 1941 High Sierra, from W. R. Burnett's novel; screenplay by John Twist and Edmund H. North¹^•³
Key crew	Producer Anthony Veiller; cinematography Sid Hickox; editing Owen Marks; music David Buttolph³
Production	Shot late August to mid-November 1948 under the working title North of the Rio Grande³
Censorship	Reported in a 26 May 1950 Los Angeles Herald Express item as the first U.S. movie banned in West Germany, deemed an example of gangster films that glorify anti-social elements³

Spoilers

Plot

Wes McQueen escapes from jail and heads for the Colorado Territory to meet his boss, Dave Rickard (Basil Ruysdael), who arranged the breakout. Before catching the stagecoach he visits his former family farm and finds that everyone he cared about is gone or dead. On the stage he meets Fred Winslow (Henry Hull) and his daughter Julie Ann (Dorothy Malone), who have bought a ranch sight unseen; when outlaws attack the stage and kill both drivers, Wes fights them off and brings it into town.³

Convinced by Rickard to do one last job, Wes joins Reno Blake (John Archer) and Duke Harris (James Mitchell) in a train robbery, along with Reno's dance-hall girlfriend Colorado Carson (Virginia Mayo).⁹ He finds his fellow henchmen cannot be trusted, and the woman he comes to love is an ex-saloon girl whom he first tells there is no room for in his plans.⁹ In the conclusion, the wounded, hunted Wes makes a last stand against a posse in the rocky outcroppings of a deserted settlement named Todos Santos, with Colorado beside him firing a gun in each hand; trapped and outnumbered, the two are shot down and clasp hands at the moment of death.⁹

From High Sierra to a Western

Walsh had directed High Sierra in 1941, written by John Huston and W. R. Burnett from Burnett's novel, with Humphrey Bogart as the pardoned convict Roy Earle.¹^•³ In the 1949 version Joel McCrea takes over the Bogart role as an outlaw released from prison for one final heist, and the setting shifts from the mountains of then-contemporary California to Colorado in the years after the Civil War.¹ The adaptation is not a scene-for-scene copy: the film is frequently described as a loose remake, but it moves the original story to a completely different era and alters significant portions of it, and the doomed trajectory of Roy Earle from the Midwest to the Sierra Nevada is rewritten as Wes McQueen's ill-fated journey in the Colorado Territory.⁶^•⁷

The change of genre also changed the ending. In High Sierra, the outlaw's companion Marie (Ida Lupino) survives him; in Colorado Territory, Mayo's Colorado Carson, described by Frank Miller as one of the toughest women in film history, stands by her man to the end, in a sort of Bonnie and Clyde conclusion.⁸ A scholarly comparison with Walsh's 1947 Western Pursued notes that Colorado Territory has no deus ex machina, so the tragedy runs to its deadly conclusion.⁷

A noir Western

Colorado Territory belongs to the cycle of noir Westerns that emerged at the end of the 1940s, beginning with Walsh's own Pursued (1947) and continuing through films such as Ramrod, Coroner Creek, Blood on the Moon, Station West, Yellow Sky, and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.⁸ The film scholar Philip Monticone identifies seven films from the 1947-8 and 1948-9 seasons as noir Westerns in recent literature, with Warner Bros.' Pursued (1947) and Colorado Territory (1949) among them; in this subgenre, characters, plots, and dialogue moved away from Western archetypes toward the morally ambiguous figures, postwar psyches, and fatalistic situations of film noir.²

The noir texture is visible in the film's craft. Cinematographer Sid Hickox piles on the black to give the picture the look of a film noir, and the screenplay builds an atmosphere of doom around McCrea and Mayo.¹⁰ The TCM essay on Western noir notes that the film keeps the noir elements of its source, including treacherous associates and enticing women, even as the setting moves to the open vistas of Colorado.¹

Production and release

The film was produced under the working title North of the Rio Grande between late August and mid-November 1948, with copyright registered to Warner Bros. on 11 June 1949 (LP2331).³ Location work used the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in Colorado.¹¹ Its estimated budget was $1,224,000.¹¹ It premiered in Denver on June 3, 1949, opened widely on June 11, and reached the United Kingdom in July, Canada in August, and Mexico in September 1949.⁴ A contemporary Warner Archive review notes that the trailer sold it as an ordinary action picture, but that it apparently did quite well on release.¹²

The West German ban reported in 1950 is the film's most cited reception event: according to the Los Angeles Herald Express item of 26 May 1950, it was the first U.S. movie banned in West Germany, which classified it among gangster films glorifying anti-social elements.³

Later standing and home media

Retrospective criticism treats the Western version as an equal of its model: the Criterion Collection's essay on High Sierra calls Colorado Territory a superb, looser remake whose genre shift deepens the elegiac tone, with a ruined ghost town as the main setting.¹³ Glenn Erickson, reviewing the Warner Archive DVD, judged that although High Sierra is the iconic classic of the three screen versions (the third being the 1955 I Died a Thousand Times), Walsh's Western is probably the better-scripted story.¹²

In 2021 the Criterion Collection issued Colorado Territory on the second disc of its High Sierra Blu-ray, remastered from the original 35mm camera negative with optional English subtitles.⁶^•¹⁴ A Slant Magazine review of the same disc describes the transfer as coming from an unrestored print but otherwise fine and stable, with only a few instances of scratches or print damage; the disc's own packaging states the 4K scan of the camera negative.¹⁵^•¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Westerns before 1980 › Released 1930 to 1960

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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