Although it contains many of the characteristic elements of the American western, Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946) avoids the usual formulaic structure. It is difficult to assess the nature of this film. It is a western. It has the plots of several different kinds of westerns, not to mention other sorts of films as well. It’s about homesteaders, about a small rustic town in the old northwest, about a complicated love story, about friendship, about rivals, about Hoagy Carmichael, about Indian raids, vigilante justice, and so on. The film touches on all these subjects, interweaving some and treating others almost in isolation. It’s more like a series of interconnected vignettes than a coherent, linear story.
Acting in this film is a strength: Dana Andrews as a Gary Cooperesque entrepreneur who likes to go his own way, Ward Bond, Susan Hayward, Andy Devine, and of course Hoagy Carmichael, who hangs around throughout the film singing songs that provide an out-of-context and somewhat inexplicable soundtrack. He’s a medieval minstrel singing Tin Pan Alley tunes in the Old West—make sense of that if you can. Devine is excellent as the patriarch of a family of homesteaders. Bond’s portrayal of an increasingly disturbed and threatening rogue is convincing.
The Technicolor cinematography is beautiful. Tourneur clearly appreciated the beauty of the American northwest. Only once or twice does one sense a set. Most of the outdoor scenes seem really to have been shot outdoors. Many of the indoor scenes, and scenes shot at night (there are many) are often dark and murky. The town is placed on the side of a hill in the woods. It looks like a real place and suggests what an old northwest frontier town would really have been like—though I don’t know whether the film portrays the town accurately.
The friendship between Logan Stewart (Dana Andrews) and George Camrose (Brian Donlevy) is one of the film’s central interests. Camrose is a respected citizen of the town—a banker—but he is also a gambler who bets wildly and nearly always loses at card games. He holds gold dust for men in the town and ends up using it to cover his losses. He gets into serious trouble as a result. Logan is an old western businessman, stalwart and true, who works hard and successfully to earn his money. He is a close friend to George and somewhat blind to his faults.
Camrose is engaged to Lucy Overmire (Susan Hayward) while Logan is engaged to Caroline Marsh (Patricia Roc), a somewhat stuffy but vigorous girl with a British accent (she is attending school in England) who wants to marry and raise a family in the little town in the film. Logan always needs to be on the move, and the logic of his attraction to Caroline is doubtful from the start. Lucy is attracted to Logan, but she is faithful to Camrose. All are faithful to their intendeds. As one might expect, events ultimately allow compatible partners to find one another.
Many of the characters are compromised in some way. Although Logan is clearly the hero, he is not without fault. He lies to protect George, helps him escape the town jail after a vigilante trial convicts him, and attempts to shoots Honey Bragg (Ward Bond) who has killed an Indian girl and is suspected of other murders. The ethical and moral ambiguity in the portrayal of characters is a fascinating aspect of the film. After Camrose escapes from jail, one of the townspeople shoots him down, and no one, including his friend Logan, acts as if there were any other reasonable outcome. Logan himself is marked for hanging because of his suspected role in Camrose’s escape. There are no consequences for loose morals in this film. Only the truly criminal—Camrose and Bragg—pay for their sins. It’s easy to understand how Tourneur would succeed as a director of the film noir Out of the Past (1947). Canyon Passage doesn’t fully explore the moral ambiguities of its characters, but it also never declines into a hackneyed conflict of good vs. evil, hero vs. villain.
The film shows awareness that white settlers are displacing Indians from their native lands. In one scene, Indians come to town to express displeasure that the whites have built a cabin on their land. There is some talk about living together in harmony. The townspeople give the Indians a large basket of food to placate them. One of the Indians stares longingly at a jug of whiskey. The fragile harmony is disrupted when Bragg kills an Indian girl he discovers swimming nude in a stream. The Indians go on the warpath, brutally killing settlers of all ages. Their attacks are intense and terrifying. So the film doesn’t avoid the usual stereotypes, though there is no doubt that white settlers were often subject to attack by Indians whom they were displacing, or that Indians were victims of westward expansion. The film at least acknowledges both points of view.
Tourneur’s Canyon Passage shows the settlement of the Old West as a complicated and messy process. It’s entertaining primarily because of the well drawn characters and their assorted entanglements. It makes good use of color cinematography and the beauty of the northwestern landscape. Trying to decide why and how Hoagy Carmichael found his way into the film is well worth the time spent watching it.
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