This reprehensible film aspires to be an "inconsequential romp," as one reviewer suggests, but fails to meet even that exceedingly low bar.
If a viewer could swallow the buddy-movie plot (Stuart Whitman as a New Orleans card shark and John Wayne as John Wayne), he'd still have to deal with Nehemiah Persoff as a brutal Mexican gang-and-cult leader and Ina Balin (the worst actress Brooklyn has ever produced) as his spitfire daughter. And also embrace the dubious proposition that the road from New Orleans to Galveston goes through picturesque southern Utah. And many other improbabilities.
Ok, so the film is one big joke, a comedy masquerading as a western, or vice versa.
But if the film is a "romp," then how in the world can we justify its treatment of Indians?
In The Comancheros, Indians have three functions. The first is to be constantly drunk and constantly in search of whiskey. It offers a truly horrible, inexcusable scene in which a renowned chief falls drunkenly into his soup. Amusing? Not to any person with a modicum of fellow feeling. The second purpose that Indians serve is to be cruel: they torture and scalp. Their third purpose is to be cannon-fodder. Scores, perhaps a hundred are remorselessly cut down by our white friends. Not a one of them is awarded a trace of individuality -- though, as is the custom in such films, they get to fall picturesquely from rocky overlooks or be dragged by the foot in the stirrup when they are shot off their horses.
Even worse than these atrocities is a scene in which a bedraggled, impoverished line of hollow-eyed Indians, this time including women and children, trudge dejectedly across the landscape. A mini Trail of Tears. Not to worry, says John Wayne, they're "tame Indians." "Tame" means defeated, reduced to poverty, neglected, dehumanized. Tame as cows or dogs. It's a painful image, hard to ignore or to forget.
I imagine that we're supposed to say, Oh, this was 1961, we know better now. But by 1961, John Ford had made a few movies in which Indians were depicted with not a lot, but a bit of humanity. The Comancheros was reactionary and unenlightened even it its day, we have to admit, and embodied a transparently racist ideology. It's treatment of our fellow but slightly different humans is grotesque and unforgivable.
Criminal, in fact. It is nothing less than a excuse and justification for genocide. Not inconsequential at all.
According to the story, Michael Curtiz set out to direct the film, but fell ill and withdrew. The actual direction was under the control of John Wayne himself, so it is at his feet that this appalling monster must lie.
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