Word: mccrea
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Colorado Territory (Warner) sets long-legged Joel McCrea to work on an old plot in a handsome new location. This time McCrea is an outlawed train robber with a price on his head and the hope in his heart of becoming a simple rancher. Like many a sagebrush Robin Hood, McCrea is bad only because he is good. He stakes a couple of settlers (Dorothy Malone and Henry Hull) to the cost of a new well, and, to feather the nest of a sick buddy, agrees to stick up just one more train. As helpers, he has a gang...
...offset its staleness, Territory has several passages of refreshing cinematic excitement. The train robbery has a pleasant flavor of old-style westerns. For admirers of the great outdoors, the shots of McCrea's flyspeck flight across a stupendous cliff face are alone worth the price of admission...
...hero's played by Joel McCrea...
...three Confederate-loving buckaroos who keep things moving are Joel McCrea, Zachary Scott and Douglas Kennedy, owners of the Three Bell Ranch. The complicated action is sped up-as well as made more complicated-by cattle-rustling Victor Jory who, working as a Union Army guerrilla fighter, steals their cattle, burns down their ranch, and starts cutting in on their gunrunning racket...
...gets past the threshold of the plot. But Alexis Smith, as a sultry barroom singer with her lids at half-mast and her lips provocatively ajar, weaves more prominently in & out of the all-male hubbub. Eventually, her shady morals and mascara notwithstanding, she becomes the wife of Rancher McCrea. The highly involved plot in South of St. Louis, always pretty implausible, moves along at a fast enough clip to look convincing, and most of the principals are old enough hands at this sort of thing to take the handicaps and hurdles without breaking their easy canter...