Comanche Territory. 1950. USA. Directed by George Sherman. Screenplay by Oscar Brodney, Lewis Meltzer. With Maureen O’Hara, Macdonald Carey, Will Geer, Charles Drake. DCP. 76 min.
George Sherman spent most of his career at Universal turning out efficient programmers, and Comanche Territory is a solid example, a modestly budgeted Technicolor Western built around a fictionalized Jim Bowie negotiating a silver-mining treaty with the Comanche while local interests work against him. Sherman’s distinctive use of landscape runs counter to the Fordian tradition: Where John Ford opens onto horizon lines, Sherman favors canyons and enclosed valleys (here, Arizona’s Oak Creek Canyon), spaces that contain the characters rather than promise them freedom.
The film’s sympathies are genuinely with the Comanche, which is consistent with Sherman’s approach across his Westerns, and Macdonald Carey plays Bowie not as a frontier hero but as a shrewd mediator—part businessman, part politician—caught between honorable Indians and the capitalists trying to void their treaty and take a silver mine. Top-billed Maureen O’Hara plays Katie Howard—saloon owner, bank president, and the principal obstacle to Bowie’s mission until she isn’t—with her typical high Irish color, pointing the way toward The Quiet Man.