The Wild North

Another of those movies available from the Warner Archive collection that I recorded off of TCM some time back is The Wild North. As always, I recently sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

Stewart Granger stars as Jules Vincent, a French-Canadian trapper who has wound up much farther west in Canada instead of northern Quebec. (Granger, unsurprisingly, is about as convincing a Québecois as Laurence Olivier was in 49th Parallel a decade earlier.) Vincent lives in a cabin that's really in the wilderness, but he's in one of those trading post villages that's just accessible enough that one of MGM's Old West towns on the backlot could be repurposed for it.

While in town, Jules meets an unnamed native girl (Cyd Charisse; don't ask about the ethnic casting) who is being accosted by another trapper, Max Brody (Howard Petrie). Jules rescues the young woman and heads out for her home village, which is on the way to Jules' cabin, taking her in tow. However, Brody is also on the trip because there's not much way to get around the wilderness and leaving Brody to walk would probably kill Brody. It's not an optimal solution, and when Brody creates a dangerous situation, Jules acts in such a way that accidentally leads to the death of Brody.

Enter Constable Pedley (virile, sexy action hero Wendell Corey), serving for one of the forerunners of the Mounties. He gets wind of the death of Brody, and he obviously believes that it's murder. Or at least, it's a situation that's going to require a summary trial to prove that Jules was acting in self-defense. So he heads farther into the wilderness, to get to Jules' cabin. Once he gets there, he plans to arrest Jules and bring him back to civilization for the trial.

Now, I don't think James Stewart had made The Naked Spur yet, so perhaps Constable Pedley didn't realize just how dangerous it was going to be to be alone on a long journey with a man who might well want to kill Pedley to maintain his freedom. After all, there was no form of communication so it could have been made to appear that Pedley died before getting to Jules' cabin. Worse, by the time Pedley starts out to bring Jules back from the cabin, it's already the dead of winter, but surprisingly bright outside for someplace that far north. The pair sets off by dogsled to get to town, but who knows whether they'll make it there, and how the writers are going to be able to stay within the Production Code to produce a satisfying ending.

The premise of The Wild North is a reasonably good one, although it does have the problems of having to deal with the Production Code. However, the bigger problem is that the movie is never anything more than a by-the-numbers adventure film seemingly best suited for a Saturday matinee demographic that's made with the production values of a movie with greater pretensions. It also doesn't help that some of the shots are obviously backlot shots and don't fit in with the location shooting. There's also a relatively slow pace since there are a lot of tracking shots of people crossing snowy landscapes filmed in medium-to-long shots.

Younger viewers of the early 1950s might have been thrilled by The Wild North. I have a feeling grown-ups would have been more likely to see through the film's flaws, and also wonder whether the movie holds up for younger viewers of today.