Here are some of the cliches that the film invokes: the bad man dresses all in black, righteous townspeople yearn for their dismal mining camp to be transformed into a village with "schools and churches," there's a saloon girl who ultimately sacrifices herself so that the hero can romance an adoring virgin, cattle are rustled and claims get jumped, Walter Brennan plays an old codger, and, at the film's end, the townspeople take up arms to free themselves from the vicious gangsters who have seized their village. A drunk is appointed sheriff to keep him out of the way; gunmen taunt citizens into fights in which the well-meaning, if dimwitted, law-abiding men are slaughtered. Men on horseback traverse rugged county replete with towering snow-capped mountains and huge tongues of valley glacier extending between massive, impassable peaks -- the film's exteriors were shot in Jasper National Park in Alberta, making use of the vast snowfields once in that place. (Alas, much of this snow and ice has now vanished.) True to the form of a 50's Western, the interiors and night scenes are shot in the studio and there is a lot of indoor soundstage action. Night sequences are shot in very beautiful, steel-grey day-for-night process. There are a number of impressive matte sequences showing the muddy streets ending at the foot of snowy mountains that seem to have been painted on the lens. The music is suitably majestic.
Jimmy Stewart plays Jeff, a Wyoming cowboy who has somehow driven a herd of cattle to Seattle in 1896. On the way, he has killed two of his four hands when they attempted to rustle his herd. Stewart plays against type in his fifties Westerns -- here he is a blue-eyed steely killer, willing to gun down men with little provocation. He is also an archetypal loner, a man who identifies with a solitary wolf howling at the moon, someone who care only about his own interests, unwilling to identify with the common good -- everyone wants something and no one gives anything for free; this is his motto. Life is a series of zero-sum transactions exemplified by the shoot-out: one man lives and the other dies. The cattle are driven aboard a huge paddle-wheeler bound for Skagway. At the ship, Jeff meets his real love interest in the movie, Ben (Walter Brennan) -- Ben and Jeff are like a married couple; they bunk together, are inseparable, bicker incessantly, and plan to retire together to an ranchhouse, idyllically imagined as having wrap-around porches and decorated with a tiny bell that Jeff keeps with him, tinkling on his saddle-horn. The bell represents the love between the two men which is unashamedly on display in the film -- of course, overt homosexual activity is eschewed, although, at least, one gay film critic, Mark Rappaport, has enthusiastically decoded the relationship as essentially romantic and, even, erotic. The film makers clearly are anxious about the manner in which the relationship between the men is portrayed and, so, Jeff ends up in bed with the saloon proprietor, Rhonda, in the film's second reel -- but he's just hiding with the lingerie-clad bad girl as the paddle-wheeler is being searched by corrupt lawmen and the scene has no erotic charge whatsoever. In fact, the heterosexual relationships enacted in the movie aren't convincing at all. Jeff is passive, either being seduced by the bad girl, the saloon proprietress played by the rather plain and lackluster Ruth Roman, or adored by a little girl, Renee, who speaks with an inexplicable accent and has the role of the feisty virgin tom-girl. (At the end of the movie, a couple of shots imply that Jeff, who is about 50, will end up romantically involved with the little girl whom he has called "freckle-face" throughout the film -- this ostensibly "happy-ending", in fact, is more disturbing than anything else in the film. There's a strong vein of rather brutal masochism running through Mann's Westerns starringJimmy Stewart -- his protagonists are always getting maimed, mutilated, their hands torn apart, and this film is no exception: the love scenes with Ruth Roman, generally, occur when Jeff is hors de combat and incapable of even defending himself against nursing ministrations that, suddenly, become erotic.
The film explores three systems of exchange that become increasingly complex and sophisticated as the film progresses. Initially, conflicts arise from Jeff and Ben's herd of cattle. In the Yukon, conflicts arise over gold. By the end of the film, the means of exchange has become purely symbolic -- chits of paper that represent claims. Each system of value induces certain types of conflicts and requires violent measures to insure fairness. Men are killed over cattle, then, gold, and, at last, the purely symbolic currency of the paper documents by which claims are staked. The only law in the film is supplied Gannon, a crooked Judge who wears a black stovepipe hat and first threatens to hang Jeff in Skagway where he is the only law. (This is because Jeff's herd of cattle have almost knocked down his shaky timber scaffold on which Gannon is hanging two bad men to the delight of the local layabouts.) Gannon steals Jeff's cattle, taking them as a fine. Jeff rustles his own cows and sneaks them across the Canadian border where Gannon has no jurisdiction. There's a semi-comical interlude in Dawson Creek in which the saloon girl and the virgin compete for Jeff. Jeff and Ben, who have sold their cattle and made a small fortune, stake a gold claim and find sufficient ore to purchase their dream retreat, the Utah ranch for which the little saddle-bell has been reserved. (This interlude is like the long middle sequence in My Darling Clementine in which the main action is forgotten and the characters pursue romantic objectives in mildly humorous pastoral scenes -- Ford's pacing, however, is lethargic compared with Mann's peppy editing in which one adventure follows another at breakneck speed.) Then, Gannon appears with a posse of bad men who bully the miners out of their claims. This sets the stage for the final shoot-out, the violence that eliminates rivals for the affections of Jeff and leaves him with only the little girl as a potential consort. The film's most interesting innovation is to suggest that Jeff has more affinity for the cynical and, apparently, heartless saloon girl and the viciously brutal Gannon than the righteous characters in the movie. Jeff is willing to kill anyone at the drop of a hat and people are gunned down on the basis of the slightest provocation. The movie suggests that Jeff is as sexually experienced and, possibly, perverse as the saloon proprietress (who may or may not be a prostitute) and as trigger-happy as Gannon. The plot focuses on Jeff's redemption, that is, his willingness to sacrifice for others, including the community of the mining camp at Dawson Creek that aspires to be a real town with churches and schools. This is a standard plot device in Western films, the rehabilitation of the bad man into someone who uses his gun-fighting skills for good not evil -- it's almost never convincing and here Jeff is portrayed as someone who is almost psychopathically selfish and deadly; therefore, it's hard to see him as a convincing pillar of the community.
The commentary on the disk by an Australian film scholar who has specialized in Anthony Mann's movies is interesting. But the commentator doesn't know much about the Yukon gold rush. (As might be expected, his primary referent is Chaplin's The Gold Rush) At one point, he says that Gannon has set up a store and won't let anyone leave Skagway without 100 pounds of food provisions -- an example, he says, of capitalism at its most "savage and primitive" -- ascribing this requirement to the villain's avarice.. In fact, the Canadian authorities would not allow anyone to cross the border without 100 pounds of provisions. This was the avoid the necessity of the Canadian Northwestern Mounted Police having to rescue poorly provisioned Americans who had entered Canada as prospectors but without any modicum of proper preparation. The film is generally accurate as to geography and the mining camp is a convincing representation of late Victorian photographs of such places. There's an avalanche filmed from a great distance in a truly wonderful shot. Unfortunately, Mann thinks that the audience has to see the avalanche from close-up, indeed, from the perspective of those buried by it -- and this doesn't work at all.
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