Comanche Moon

I'm a big fan of the Larry McMurtry novels chronicling the Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Gus McRae, but the miniseries based on each of the four books in the series have varied in quality. Comanche Moon, which was the last book written, but the second chronologically, was adapted into a miniseries in 2008. I missed it upon first airing, but after reading Empire of the Summer Moon I thought it was a good time to watch it, with facts about the Comanches fresh in my head.

This takes place in the years before Lonesome Dove, which remains the best book and the best film adaptation of the bunch. Call and McRae are Texas Rangers in the year 1858, trying to keep the Comanches at bay. The Indians are led by Buffalo Hump and his son, Blue Duck, but the former kicks the younger out of the tribe for recklessness.

Call, (Karl Urban) a dour, humorless man, is keeping company with a whore, (Elizabeth Banks, in one of the most wholesome performances as an Old West whore you'll ever seen). She becomes pregnant by him, but he won't acknowledge the child or marry her. McRae (Steve Zahn) is a loquacious belly-acher, in love with a shopkeeper (Linda Cardellini), but he's too insecure to keep her.

The Rangers are captained by Inish Scull (Val Kilmer, in a performance that's too eccentric by half). He's a Bostoner, with esoteric knowledge, but he's also an accomplished Indian fighter. When a Comanche, Kicking  Wolf, steals his super-large horse, he sets off on foot to retrieve it. He ends up captured by a sadistic Mexican bandit, (Sal Lopez), who puts him in a cage suspended off the edge of a cliff. Scull gets treated better in the movie than in the book--in the book his eyelids are cut off, which is the thing I most remember about it.

There are some familiar Western tropes, such as an Indian raid and a few shootouts, but what makes McMurtry's books distinctive are their lack of being predictable. I couldn't believe, when reading Lonesome Dove, that Call did not end up killing Blue Duck. McMurtry avoids the showdowns we expect, and often has major characters die off-screen. This can make film adaptations less successful, and Comanche Moon often has a going-through-the-motions aspect. The director, Simon Wincer, is the same man who made Lonesome Dove, but this one is missing a joie de vivre that the first one had.

Some of the cast has an interesting problem. Call has been played by four different actors in each of the miniseries: Urban, Johnny Lee Miller, Tommie Lee Jones, and James Garner. Urban tries to make him his own, but you can see a slight imitation of Jones's style. Zahn more nakedly apes Robert Duvall in mannerisms, and at times pushes it too hard. Interestingly, Wes Studi plays Buffalo Hump, and there's a scene in which he interacts with the Kickapoo tracker, Famous Shoes (here played by David Midthunder). In the last miniseries, chronologically, Streets of Laredo, Studi plays Famous Shoes.

The film, as one would expect, plays fast and loose with the facts. Buffalo Hump talks about when Comanche leaders were ambushed by Texans, and implies he was a boy, but in fact he was in his forties at the time, and did not die as depicted here. Also, Quanah Parker is a very small character here, but he was not a leader at the same time as his father, Peta Neconah. Quanah was 12 when his father was killed.