Der Teufel von Colorado

In The Maverick Queen you will find the characters of Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid in support of Barbara Stanwyck. But Howard Petrie and Scott Brady aren't anything like Paul Newman and Robert Redford. You won't hear Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. And Brady as Sundance is a sexual predator as well.

The Maverick Queen was made in the last days of Republic Pictures which was the home of the B movie cowboy. Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and a bunch of others toiled there for a while. The last of them, Rex Allen, had just finished doing his series. The films that these guys did were now being made for television. Something like The Maverick Queen would never have been made at Republic ten years ago.

This movie is about sex, it concentrates on Barbara Stanwyck who operates against her own interest because of her attraction for Barry Sullivan. She's tired of the Sundance Kid as a lover, in fact she urges him to take a bath before putting the moves on her again when we first meet her.

As for Brady when it becomes obvious about her attraction to Sullivan, he tries to kill Stanwyck and later attempts to rape Mary Murphy. Rape was not something found in Republic westerns. The film is directed by Joseph Kane who directed a ton of films there with Autry, Rogers, and the rest of the cowboy stars.

The Maverick Queen boasts some nice location photography and was the first of Republic's films to be filmed for the wide screen. It's based on a Zane Grey novel and I never would have dreamed that Grey would have written anything like that. Joni James also sings the title song over the credits and I liked her rendition of it.

Unfortunately The Maverick Queen should have been done when the Code was finally done away with, a lot of plot holes might not have occurred. It also should have been in the hands of director not from the grind 'em out school of B westerns. It might have been a whole lot better.

Lucy Lee is a young and pretty cattle owner, trying to get her herd to market to sell. One night in camp her and her partner are joined by Jeff Young – a man who saves them when they are later ambushed by the Sundance Kid and his gang. Sundance reports back to Kit Banion (aka the Maverick Queen) and she in enraged by his failure. However the arrival in town of Jeff Younger gives her a new scheme to run. As she attempts to assert further power can the others stop her criminal schemes?

Starting out with the usual style of song over the usual sort of landscapes nothing gave me any doubts that this would be a fairly ordinary western adventure and indeed that is what it turned out to be. The plot offered potential because it is more than just the standard good guys/bad guys stuff – this plot is driven by betrayal, lies, jealousy and intrigue. Shame then that it doesn't all come off, it is interesting and engaging but it does struggle to keep it tight with so many things going on – I wasn't sure exactly what my focus was supposed to be. This is also seen by it taking 15 minutes before the title character actually made it onto screen, not that bad a thing but just further suggestion of the slight lack of focus that made it a bit harder to get into. The characters don't all make sense and again the lack of focus meant I was confused as to who I was following.

The cast aren't much help in this regard either because nobody really steps up and makes the film their own. Stanwyck tries hard but she was approaching the end of her long career at this point and she isn't helped by being left in the background for most of the start of the film while the much younger Murphy makes us think the film is about her. Sullivan is pretty good and has a nice easy charm. Brady, Petrie and a few others make for interesting bad guys but their performances aren't that interesting and they just accept whatever changes the script throws at them.

Overall this is an enjoyable enough western that is fairly run-of-the-mill despite having aspects of it that are more than the standard stuff. The plot is good but the lack of focus for large chunks means that it is a little difficult to get into and the solid if unspectacular directing and acting don't do anything to really remedy that. Enjoyable for genre fans but no more than that.

The Maverick Queen (1956)

Well Barbara Stanwyck made a lot of Westerns in the 1950s, and most of them are routine stuff, and in them she has often limited if still central roles. This is a great example. She's in the film much less than her co-stars, and the story is a patched together set of common problems--the cattle rancher faces trouble from the cattle rustlers and a hero has come to town, and a little love is going to cross the frontier.

The key difference in all these movies is that Stanwyck plays a strong, sometimes very very strong, woman. That alone makes them watchable. But don't expect "The Maverick Queen" to hold up critically or even hold your attention fully. The plot even has so many little confusions, on purpose. you have to pay close attention (and show some patience) to keep in on track.

For one example, without giving too much away, the main man, played well by Barry Sullivan, is new in town, and he says he's Jeff Younger, a famous gunslinger. This suite Stanwyck's character perfectly--she runs the tavern but also the general racketeering schemes for the province. But then another man arrives in town and says he's Jeff Younger. Hmmm. Along the same lines, the pretty young girl in town is another strong woman, clearly a good one, and her sidekick is a lazy loaf but a good guy, until you see him start telling people things he shouldn't. And so on. These are really great plot twists but they aren't handled with total clarity or given the impact you might expect so the movie totters a bit.

The director, it might be noted, is Joseph Kane, who pretty much only did Westerns, over a hundred of them, and he probably didn't distinguish one from another very well. He's not even trying to create a masterpiece on the small budget this small studio gave him. (It's a full color Republic Pictures production, and there are corners cut.)

The one other interesting side note is the presence of Sundance as a major character (and Butch Cassidy as a very minor one). Of course, history is thrown to the wind on what happens to Sundance, so never mind that . (Watch the Newman/Redford one for the classic outline.)

And Stanwyck? She's strong, and I mean physically tough, and she busts out with good acting in a few scenes. But she, too, seems to realize she's doing routine stuff.

A final note--I saw this on TCM, and for the first time in twenty years of watching movies there I saw one that was not shown full screen. Yes. A shame. It's a wide wide screen enterprise and it uses an unusual system called Naturama, and it was the first Republic movie to use it. It was really just a compatible anamorphic widescreen system like Panavision, but for some reason it was cropped (given the awful "pan and scan" treatment) for this release. That didn't help with the fluidity of the filming, or the appreciation of the big landscape of Colorado so proudly announced in the opening credits.

Should you see this? Not really. There are better Stanwyck Westerns, and better Westerns. And better movies.

Tough gal Kit Banlon opens a hotel and saloon out in frontier Colorado that soon becomes a haven of gamblers and gunfighters. With notable patrons being none other than Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Fighting off the romantic advances of Sundance, Kit's life gets more interesting when she becomes attracted to a relative of the Younger Brothers' outlaw posse. Or is he? Whispers in the shadows point to the handsome stranger perhaps being a law man on the trail of the infamous Wild Bunch. Kit could very well be jeopardising much more than a unfulfilled romance if she falls in with the stranger?

Directed by the genre prolific Joe Kane and based upon on the novel written by Zane Grey, The Maverick Queen is something of a wasted premise, with all the elements are in place for a twisty psychological Western. The story is a sound one, with the characters at first glance looking to have potential for gusto and intrigue, but it just doesn't come together as a whole, either through one dimensional male characters or through lazy writing, it ultimately ends up being a damp squib. A squib briefly sparked by Barbara Stanwyk (Kit) in one of her later career tough feminine roles, and a pretty as a picture Mary Murphy who also gets to show a bit of spunk. But the girls can't carry the picture alone...

Barry Sullivan was a safe and amiable actor, he however was far from being a leading man who was able to carry a picture up front, thus here as the leading protagonist he struggles badly as he tries to make the tepid Kenneth Gamet screenplay work. It's a surprisingly weak adaptation from the man who wrote The Flying Leathernecks and the hugely enjoyable Coroner Creek, while Kane himself has to take some of the blame for letting the film plod when it should be zippy. There's a nice kicker in the finale - something that saves the piece from rotting at the bottom of the "B" Western barrel, but sadly it's just not decent enough to warrant a second glance - rendering as fact that both Stanwyck and the audience deserved better. 4/10

When Barbara Stanwyck's era of Hollywood superstardom came to an abrupt end in the early fifties, she refused to quit and became the star of a number of feminist westerns which cast her as a tough yet sensuous aging woman in tight pants and a cowboy hat, oftentimes the leader of an outlaw gang. She'd make one minor classic of this variety, Forty Guns for Sam Fuller. The Maverick Queen has a bigger budget (and was shot in color) but lacks the energy and magnetism of that later film - both, however, co-star he with Barry Sullivan, a highly underrated leading man who enjoyed far greater success on TV (including a two year stint as Pat Garrett on The Tall Man) than in the movies. Babs struts around in tight pants and we're not supposed to notice that she could easily pass for her boyfriend's mother. And as the badguy, her former boyfriend the Sundance Kid, there's Scott Brady - who played The Dancing Kid in JOHNNY GUITAR, the very best of the odd westerns that cast visibly aging former big name female stars in cowgirl roles. (Joan Crawford, in that film's case). This is handsomely produced by strictly minor stuff. We're supposed to cry when Babs "gets it" in the end, but I can still recall kids in the Rialto theatre in Patchogue, Long Island laughing out loud at the end way back when.