Comanche
Tags: murder

Plot synopsis:
In 1875, near Durango, Mexico, a group of renegade Comanche attack a peaceful village and kidnap the daughter of a Spanish aristocrat. They escape the Mexican Army by crossing into US territory. Jim Read (Dana Andrews), a frontier scout, is sent to investigate and ease tensions between the Mexicans and the Comanche. But long standing hatred and the profitable business of scalp-hunting does not help in resolving the conflict. Read is sent to negotiate with the Comanche chief, Quanah (Kent Smith). Whilst searching for Quanah, Read sees Art Downey (Stacy Harris), a local scalp-hunter, shoot and injure a Comanche. Read rescues him and takes him to Quanah. Read however is himself accused of the shooting by Black Cloud (Henry Brandon), the renegade leader, until the injured brave recovers enough to clear his name. Read reveals to Quanah that they are cousins and that his mother was the sister of Quanah’s mother. Quanah swears loyalty to his white friend. Read leaves to fetch government officials to a peace council, but discovers a cavalry detachment that has been massacred by Black Cloud and his renegades. The Government official, Commissioner Ward (Lowell Gilmore), has ordered the cavalry to subdue the Indians, by force if necessary. Black Cloud attacks a column of cavalry troopers and captures Ward. Quanah and a large force of loyal Comanche intervene and threaten to attack Black Cloud. Vengeful Black Cloud kills Ward. In the ensuing battle, Read kills Downey and Black Cloud and peace is restored.

Review: This colorful western has plenty of action and the beautiful landscapes of Durango, Mexico as the setting for a story of war and peace on the Texas plains between the U.S. cavalry and the Comanches.
The Indians also attack Mexican villages and take horses and captives and rampage on both sides of the Rio Grande.
Dana Andrews is the scout whose task it is to convince Quanah Parker to stop raids into Mexico and talk peace with the American soldiers.
Of course, the quest for peace is threatened by white scalp hunters and renegade Indians.
There are several good cavalry-Indian battles in this film which was the American debut of Mexican movie star Linda Cristal, who is Andrews' love interest.
It is also worth noting that several lines of dialogue in this film were lifted verbatim from Elliott Arnold's excellent work, "Blood Brother", which details the Apache wars and the friendship between Cochise and Tom Jeffords.
Many of Quanah Parker's ideas of war and peace were taken word-for-word from Arnold's novel and attributed to the Comanche chief to portray him as the sage leader of "the lords of the south plains".
One wonders if Arnold ever received credit or acknowledgment for the screenplay in this movie..
Peaceful Mexican villages were tragic victims...Comanche is directed by George Sherman and stars Dana Andrews as frontier scout Jim Read, who is sent to hopefully broker peace between Mexicans and the Comanche.
As usual conflict exists within the tribe {Quanah Parker and Black Cloud}, as it does within the cavalry.
Thus peace will be very hard to establish after years of mistreatment and mistrust.Filmed entirely in Durango, Old Mexico for authenticity and shot in deluxe colour for a Cinemascope production, Comanche is a very tidy B Western offering.
The action scenes are well constructed, with the Blanco Canyon scenes particularly eye catching; as the cavalry and divided Comanche armies form.
While the acting, although far from being great, is competent and never at any time hinders the movie.
Some misplaced jauntiness and a shoe-horned in romantic arc {Linda Cristal} threaten to derail the piece, and no doubt about it the film has over familiarity issues with Delmer Daves' far better Broken Arrow from 1950.
And since we may never get a great film that deals with the Quanah Parker {played by Kent Smith here} story, Comanche at least made the effort, and made the effort to watch it worthwhile.Solid, interesting and enjoyable.
Had this movie starred a lesser name than Dana Andrews, I probably never would have watched it or else turned it off after a while, as this was a rather dull but competently made picture.
Aside from more modern sensibilities about the American Indians (they aren't savage or bad and there is an attempt to understand their motivations), there really isn't anything different to set this apart from hundreds, if not thousands of mediocre Westerns from the 40s and 50s.Part of the problem was in casting Kent Smith as the Indian chief.
While his character was supposed to have SOME White blood, Smith looked and sounded about as much like an Indian as Shirley Temple!
It's odd that although the script is quite sensitive and "politically correct" by today's standards, they still used a lot of White actors in makeup as the Indians (if you look, you'll also notice Mike Mazurki as an Indian as well).Another part of the problem is that while I like Dana Andrews a lot, I've got to admit he was pretty bland in the part--a part which would have been more convincing had it featured Randolph Scott or Jimmy Stewart.
Andrews just wasn't believable as a cavalry scout in the old West.
Andrews forte was in contemporary stories--placing him in a horse and Indian film just seemed unnatural and his performance reflects this.Aside from these complaints, I am not recommending you avoid the film--it is fairly entertaining and won't rot your brain.
Dana Andrews is called in to negotiate a peace treaty with the Comanches raiding across the border into Mexico.
There are elements on both sides who don't want peace including the Indian-hating scalphunters on the one hand, and the breakaway Comanches (led by Black Cloud) on the other.I hate to say it but Kent Smith isn't convincing as Quanah Parker.
If they were going to have this kind of robotic dialog, then they should have at least gotten Charles Bronson or Steven McNally to do it since they look more Indian-like than the blue-eyed, fair-haired Smith does.
Yeah, I know Parker was half-white and all that, but still...Plus you have Dana Andrews and the rest of the cast looking like they are sleepwalking through the whole thing.
Were they bored with it, or was it only what the script demanded?The only character who was remotely interesting was Andrews' sidekick Puffer, played by Nestor Paiva.
He looked sufficiently grizzled for the part without resorting to too much of the silliness that say, Gabby Hayes would have done if he had played the role.
It's too bad his part wasn't bigger.The battle scenes look lame even by 50s standards with the whole thing having a rushed look to it, despite the widescreen technicolor cinematography by George Stahl.
This use of color was a rarity on United Artists part since they mostly shot their westerns in b/w.And with the title music sung by The Lancers sounding all hokey and Disney-like, all it does is bring it down a couple of more notches for me.
Blasé outdoor yarn set in 1875 is based loosely on real events, with peaceful villagers near Durango, Mexico pitted against the Comanches.
Linda Cristal plays the daughter of a Spanish aristocrat who's been kidnapped; frontier scout Dana Andrews (looking weary) is working with the Calvary to bring peace between the white man and the Indians until he and his partner are also captured.
There's an amusingly upbeat theme song by The Lancers ("A man is as good as his word/as good as his word is he/and if he is as good as his word/he's good enough for me"), and the outdoor cinematography is inspiring, but this plot is so old it creaks.
For acting less wooden, watch a cigar store indian!.
From the score to the hokey storyline to the AWFUL acting and portrayals of everyone in the film.
The only way my husband and I could watch this film was to give it the MST3000 treatment.
And we had lots of fun, but at the movie's expense.We laughed out loud at the ridiculous singing that underscores several points in the film.
We could not understand why the Indian chief spoke English with no accent, but couldn't seem to put his words in the right order.But our favorite part was waiting for the Scalper guy to repeat what someone had just said, but rephrase it as a question.
Filmed in Technicolor, this was NOT a B-grade movie.
Yet I have seen many B-grade westerns that are superior to this utterly pedestrian effort at film-making.
In fact, the color film is the only thing about this movie that is decent.
The Lancers' upbeat, ersatz-folk sound is hopelessly out of sync with the story, giving the film a kind of schizophrenic quality.
The songs, with a change of lyrics, would be better suited to a Frankie and Annette film of the same era - or an upbeat Disney movie.Then there's the acting - or better stated as a question - where's the acting?
In particular, I have never been able to understand how Dana Andrews ever had a career in film.
He is absolutely the most wooden actor ever seen in Hollywood.
His delivery is the same whether he is portraying a film noir tough guy or an Indian scout.
He must have had the dope on a lot of Hollywood big-wigs to have been cast in films - even as an extra!
The rest of the cast is apparently mimicking other actors - the Gabby Hayes wannabe, the Stewart Granger wannabe, the Dolores Del Rio wannabe.
They are all pretty much on autopilot - delivering caricatures rather than portraying characters.The question I have whenever I subject myself to an abomination such as this is: Who is most to blame - the actors or the director?
Did the director actually want these actors to act as they did, or was he simply incapable of getting anything else out of them?
Almost A Good Western That's Let Down By The White Man. This has all the hallmarks of being what later became known as a revisionary Western .
By this I mean Hollywood woke up to the fact that the indigenous Native Americans had a raw deal from history and Hollywood movies featuring whooping injuns portrayed as violent savages weren't helping matters much hence in the late 1960s and early 70s you'd get movies like SOLDIER BLUE and LITTLE BIG MAN and later still we had DANCES WITH WOLVES that showed the wild west through the eyes of the Indians .
This 1956 film called COMANCHE pre-dates these revisionary Westerns where the poor noble misunderstood savage is set upon by the white man Actually it doesn't because from the outset we're shown it's the Mexican/Hispanic community who are all to blame .
We're given a short history lesson that when Spain conquered Mexico the Spanish held the Comanches at gunpoint and made them work down the mines gathering silver .
After Mexico gained its independence the slaughter continued with Mexicans putting a bounty on Indian scalps 100 dollars for a warrior , 50 dollars for a squaw and 25 dollars for a child" Wow Theo that is so cruel and if anyone did that today they'd be getting arrested and tried for crimes against humanity at The Hague " Undoubtedly and rightly but you have to ask yourself a rhetorical question that would the native population of the United States be getting a better deal ?
No they wouldn't this film tends to ignore this and seems to portray the United States White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as being morally superior to that of their Hispanic neighbours who are portrayed as being as untrustworthy but are very good guitar players and it's left to an American WASP to save the day This cultural arrogance is not so much offensive but a great pity because COMANCHE did have some potential to be a good Western that would have appealed to people who don't like the Western genre .
Quannah Parker gives his word.
This B film attempts to do for the great Comanche warrior chief Quannah Parker what Broken Arrow did for Cochise.
Quannah deserves better than that.Scouts Dana Andrews and Nestor Paiva are trying to get Quannah Parker to sit down and negotiate a peace.
And he's in an impregnable redoubt.Andrews and Paiva are beset by troublemakers on both sides.
Scalphunter Stacy Harris wants to keep a lucrative business going and Henry Brandon as sub-chief Black Cloud is not counting the human cost in Comanche lives.
Andrews and Paiva have their work cut out for them.This was a bad year for Henry Brandon as a Comanche.
And ironically in Two Rode Together, he got to play Quannah Parker for John Ford.The movie also introduced Linda Cristal as a Comanche captive that Andrews takes a fancy to.
She also would play another Comanche captive in Two Rode Together.Quannah Parker's story deserved an epic western and while this film is an unpretentious and good B western, one would hope that a bigger film might tell Quannah's tale and make him the central character..
"Give the word now, the White Eyes must die.".
The film offers two unique features I haven't seen in a Western before.
For starters, it utilizes Americans as intermediaries between the warring Mexicans and Comanches, involved in a years long series of revenge massacres by both sides.
The other would have to be the finale where Chief Quanah Parker (Kent Smith) doesn't interfere in the battle between the Cavalry and Black Cloud's (Henry Brandon) renegade band of Comanches.
As an aside, I would also go so far as to suggest that I've never seen as many Indians in one place at one time on the movie screen.Dana Andrews portrays cavalry scout Jim Read, by now relegated to films of lesser quality than those in which he gained his stature as a genuine Hollywood star (1944's "Laura" and 1946's "The Best Years Of Our Lives").
Andrews appeared competent here, although the role didn't call for a lot more than your typical cavalry Western.
The story matched him up with partner Nestor Paiva as an old salt frontiersman named Puffer.
Apparently it was someone's idea to have Paiva resurrect the character of Gabby Hayes, but doing a Walter Brennan impersonation.
That kept me off balance for a while, but I did get a chuckle out of Mike Mazurki calling black jack on Puffer in one scene.The other casting decision of note was the American film debut of Linda Cristal, who I would not have recognized apart from her starring role in 'The High Chapparal'.
The pace of her relationship with Read seemed a bit forced, particularly given the circumstances of her capture by the Comanches.Catching the film the other day on Turner Classics, I was impressed by the color cinematography given the era.
Offered in wide screen letterbox format, the film makers took full advantage of the natural beauty in the Durango area of Old Mexico.
Where they could have improved though was the selection of a theme song; the bouncy beat of "A man is as good as his word" kept me making an unintentional comparison to the "Bonanza" TV series, quite expecting to see the Cartwrights round the corner at any moment.
"Comanche"Shares 30% of its DNA with "The Searchers"....................
Released 6 months before John Ford's magnum opus,"Comanche" also features the same actor as the renegade Indian - Mr H.Brandon - and several scenes that are strangely similar.Whether this was happenstance,coincidence or enemy action is a matter known only to God now presumably.
Standing on its own it is a passable post - bellum Western with a bored - looking Mr D.Andrews as a Scout (kissing - cousin of a Comanche chief who is trying to wind in the more independently minded young men of his tribe led by the aforesaid Mr Brandon)and make a treaty with the U.S.Government.
Made in the days when it never occurred to most people that the Indians had every right to defend their lands against the White Eyes,the film makes a creditable attempt to present Native Americans with some dignity and humanity rather than portray them merely as howling savages as had been Hollywood's wont for the previous 40 years.
Having said that,it is packed with clichéd characters and situations that director Mr G.Sherman lacks the will or the imagination to invest with a fresh eye.
Mr Andrews and his comic sidekick ("Puffer" by name,poltroon by nature) with the help of the Cavalry eventually win through against the renegades and a Pax Americana is imposed on the Indians who will meekly buckle under to the forces of democracy thus proving once again to 1950s movie audiences that Might is Right.
Mr M.Mazurki is particularly embarrassing as an Indian brave.
Not the greatest Western,but a nice enough effort.How anyone could say it's awful must be looking for FX.Dana Andrews not at his best,but makes an honest effort.Henry Brandon is as wooden here as Black Cloud as he was as one of Maximilian's soldiers/officers in Vera Cruz.Linda Cristal and Dana show their having gotten quite close during Mexican filming.Loved the wig.Didn't realize Lowell Gilmore,one of my favorites was in this as an agent for the U.S. Government.Kent Smith again co-stars with Dana Andrews,as Indian Chief trying to keep his nemesis Black Cloud from gumming up the peace with Washington,DC.Just thought it was a decent enough film..
classic "boston tea party" Cavalry versus Indians movie.
There's nothing like seeing close-ups of actors portraying Native Americas / American Indians, who have blue eyes.
The huge "buck" who throws a man off a cliff (when he's actually at the top of a sloping hill) is somewhat familiar Austro-Hungarian actor Mike Mazurki.
The movie is really lame, just another celebration of the story of European subjugation of a continent through complete lack of respect for other cultures.
Might be worth watching by film students who want to learn how NOT to make a movie.
If you don't grasp my meaning by my summary, maybe you would like this film.
Granted, the production values are high, but the overwhelming white-bias that the film typifies should not be lost on viewers.
Quanah Parker in a headdress with bison horns is typical Hollywood fluff.
The most ethnic of actors portraying characters of any significance in this film is Nestor Paiva, whose role include such distinguished native portrayals as a Po-Ho chief and a Native Guide, on the animated series, Jonny Quest.
Comanche is worth watching if you are bored and have nothing else to do, but don't pay money to rent it!
Frontier scout befriends the Red Man..
COMANCHE is filmed in Durango, Mexico for a sense of authenticity.
It is also one of the first Hollywood films to be sympathetic toward the Native American Indian.
A Comanche attack on a Mexican village nets the capture of several woman and children including the lovely Margarita(Linda Cristal).
Black Cloud(Henry Brandon)is a hotheaded brave that have no use for the white man, let alone Mexicans, whom he can also get the pleasure of scalping.
Jim Read(Dana Andrews)is a strong willed frontier scout, who hopes to shield his Native American friends from a bigoted genocidal Gen. Miles(John Litel).
It is Read and his friendship with Chief Quanah Parker(Kent Smith)that restores trust and peace between the Indians and the white man.
This is Cristal's movie debut.
Andrews, not out of the norm, is wooden.
Others in the cast: Nestor Paiva, Tony Carbajal, Lowell Gilmore and Iron Eyes Cody.