Purely Joyful Movie!

Good concept, poorly executed.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Best movie of this year hands down!

This was Michael Curtiz's last movie, and it was completed by John Wayne (co-starring with Stuart Whitman), and it's still a great Western.Texas Ranger Jake Cutter arrests gambler Paul Regret (wanted for murder), but soon they team for going undercover and defeat a band of army merchants and thieves known as the Comancheros. And in the meanwhile Whitman finds true love.This movie has three things that make it worth-watching: 1) The soundtrack it's so majestic that you will remember it months after watching this movie 2) The cast is one of the best ever in the history of Westerns; John Wayne and Stuart Whitman have a great chemistry (and they would have co-starred a year later in ''The Longest Day''), Ina Balin is gorgeous, and Michael Ansara and Nehemiah Persoff are good as the two main villains. But the best is LEE MARVIN! His character is only in 10 minutes of the movie, but it's superbly played even with a touch of comedy! And this is the last movie with Guinn ''Big Boy'' Williams.3) The scenery is superbly filmed in CinemaScope and it's very splendid!The Comancheros deserves to be in the first places of John Wayne's best movies and it surely deserves a better rating than 6.9! And you can't call yourself a Duke die-hard fan if you didn't saw this! 9 stars out of 10!

. . . throughout THE COMANCHEROS. As part of his Anti-Firearms Crusade, Wayne's Texas Ranger "Captain Jake" spends most of this flick riding around with 72 modern (by 1840s standards) rifles in the false bottom of his covered wagon. (Since guns provide bullies with a false Security Blanket, Jake feels false bottoms are a fitting place in which to shove your guns.) These 72 rifles suffer further outrages at the hands of Ranger Jake. At one point he buries all of them in a grave in the middle of nowhere that looks to be 10 feet deep. After their good long rust, Jake disinters these rifle bones and mutilates all of them by removing their firing pins. A shooting iron disfigured in this fashion is akin to a geezer after prostate removal: women have little to fear from the business end of either one. As THE COMANCHEROS closes, Jake sees that the 72 lethal weapons are put out of their misery through cremation. Obviously, the hard-drinking Jake is telling us that he's no more a fan of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment Armory Musket Clause than he would be of The Prohibition Amendment, thinking its silly to have either one of these on our books.

Watching "The Comancheros" is a lot easier than trying to make sense of it.Okay, so there's this gang of bad guys in the Old West, whites and Mexicans who form a secret colony from which they help renegade Comanches attack isolated ranches and steal cattle. Only Texas Ranger John Wayne can stop them, but he keeps getting sidetracked by the clever Louisiana gambler he's bent on getting hung. Fortunately, he's armed not only with anachronistic weapons but the fact the Comancheros' preferred form of attack involves riding around heavily-armed adversaries over and over until they get shot off their mounts.It's pretty silly stuff even before it works its way to a cringe-worthy slipshod ending, but in the meantime you are having fun, especially if you are a John Wayne fan, watching his Big Jake character growl and deliver the kind of comebacks you wish you could pull off in the heat of the moment."You killed him?"Seemed like the thing to do at the time."How d'ya know you killed him?"Wasn't time not to."You're all fools!"Well, it's fun sometimes.Duke's right; this is foolish stuff, but still fun most of the way. Wayne has a terrific cast working under him, led by Stuart Whitman as the gambler Regret, playing the angles while working our sympathies. Nehemiah Persoff is the Comancheros' cagey, somehow respectable leader; Guinn Williams is a gunrunner who with hilarious ineptitude tries to demonstrate how rehabilitated he's become after a couple of hours in a cell; and Lee Marvin is even more dangerous and drunk than usual, not to mention funnier than he ever was in "Cat Ballou."There's also a goodly amount of tension, much of it set around various unstable partnerships, dances of distrust and mistrust that define this film. Big Jake and Regret have a lot of stuff to work out, even beyond the fact Regret doesn't quite go along with Big Jake's plans for hanging him. Big Jake, working undercover, teams up with the evil Lee Marvin character for a while, who rightly doesn't trust Jake but can't quite catch him out. Whitman gets involved with a beautiful, mysterious woman (Ina Balin), who may reciprocate his feelings or just want a few hours' amusement before hanging him up like a butchered steer. And so on.Balin's fine, too - for the first half of the film. Then the script goes wobbly and she goes from fiery and independent to dumb as a post, forcing you to focus on the actress's lovely cleavage instead of her lines. It's not the worst trade-off, but it still leaves you wishing James Edward Grant, Wayne's usual scribe at the time working here with Clair Huffaker, had avoided his usual tendency for lazy endings. With just a little work, this could have up there with Wayne's best.Michael Curtiz called it a career here, a fitting swansong for one of Hollywood's greatest action-film directors ever. "Comancheros" gets the blood going anyway, and showcases the stars, two things that made Curtiz Curtiz. I have a feeling the horses didn't miss him, but this time at least the many wild falls seem to have been non-lethal.Overall, this is a solid crowd-pleaser with more than its share of memorable highlights to remember long after you forget the weaker moments. I just wish they weren't there.

The Comancheros" , Curtiz's last film , deals with a Texas Ranger named Jake Cutter ,a big man with soft heart , (the Duke John Wayne), assigned to bring a dandy gambler named Paul Regret (Stuart Whitman) for killing . Comancheros is a word that refers to those who favored or advantaged of Comanche Indians by selling weapons and alcohol . The relationship shared between the Ranger " and his prisoner" a dandy accused for murder in a duel to the son of an officer , gets enjoyable nuances and charm enough . Along the way confront bad boy (Lee Marvin) and a gang of liquor-and-gun running nasties of the title commanded by a villain ( Nehemia Persoff) whose daughter (Ina Balin) falls in love with Paul .This actioner Western contains a wonderful friendship , thrills , adventures , rider pursuits , impressive attacks and loads of crossfire . ¨The Comancheros" Curtiz does the human touch including lots of nice moments , it is a very fine picture that could become another western worthy of any anthology. In the film "The Comancheros" the spectator enjoys because it has a lot of issues that make it agreeable . Even the female character played by attractive Ina Balin as "Pilar", reveals a woman who knows that she wishes and makes it irresistible. Large support cast formed by Western usual players as Edgar Buchanan , John Dierkes , Michael Ansara and special mention to big Lee Marvin . Breathtaking and lively musical score by Elmer Berstein , one of the best of Western genre along with ¨The Magnificent Seven¨ soundtrack. Colorful and spectacular cinematography in Cinemascope by William Clothier , John Ford's ordinary . This well-paced film is stunningly directed by Michael Curtiz . He does the human touch and full of insight that accompanied him during most of his films and the story develops pleasantly in a large frame with an interesting plot and fully adjusted to the requirements of the action, which had to be shot in long part by specialist Cliff Lyons . Even in a time of filming, Curtiz had to be briefly hospitalized and the actor John Wayne, a character who gets very nice here, had replaced on the set. He was already sick, but accepted, perhaps because they wanted to die in a movie set . Michael Curtiz concludes a great legacy that included dramas, adventures, comedies, musicals, horror, historical films, police ... and a few westerns . He was an expert in strictly American film Noir genre and in drama as proved in ¨Bright Leaf , Flaming Road , Passage Marseille¨ and of course ¨Casablanca¨ . But also was specialist on adventure genre as ¨Adventures of Robin Hood , Sea Hawk ,Charge of the light Brigade , Private lives of Elizabeth and Essex¨ and Western as ¨Proud rebel, Dodge city¨and of course ¨Los Comancheros¨ . After directing about 180 films, the Hungarian director Michael Curtiz was already 73 years old, when he was called to lead what would be his last film and among all these pictures , many of them form already part of the great classics of cinema as ¨Angel with dirty faces¨ . .Rating : Good , above average . Worthwhile watching .