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randy_byersI believe I posted a while back about Jonathan Rosenbaum's list of a dozen eccentric Westerns, and I've since watched a few more of the films, including Nicholas Ray's sublimely hysterical and operatic Johnny Guitar and William Wellman's scenery-chewing dysfuntional family art Western, Track of the Cat. The latest is one I've longed to see for years and wasn't sure I'd ever get the chance, Jacques Tourneur's Canyon Passage, which is now available on the Classic Western Round-Up Volume 1 DVD set from Universal.
Tourneur is -- everyone who knows his work will tell you -- an elusive figure from Hollywood's studio era. He is best known for the moody horror thrillers he made with Val Lewton at RKO, particularly Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and for the classic film noir, Out of the Past (1947). Fans of horror probably also know his Night of the Demon (1957), which is apparently the last great film he made before his largely unsuccessful career went completely off the rails and into television. His movies are difficult to see these days, so I was utterly thrilled to see Canyon Passage listed in the contents of this grab-bag collection.
Part of Tourneur's elusiveness -- aside from the practical matter of seeing his films -- is that his artistry rests largely on its own reticence, in things that are missing or invisible or hidden in shadow, things that we usually don't notice or find difficult to articulate. Martin Scorsese has written that "Tourneur was an artist of atmospheres. For many directors, an atmosphere is something that is 'established,' setting the stage for the action to follow. For Tourneur it is the movie, and each of his films boasts a distinctive atmosphere, with a profound sensitivity to light and shadow, and a very unusual relationship between characters and environment -- the way people move through space in Tourneur movies, the way they simply handle objects, is always special, different from other films."
Canyon Passage is an unusual Western for a number of reasons. First of all, it's set in the mountains of Oregon, so it's more of a Pacific Northwestern than a classic Western. The opening credits run over a painterly shot of a frontier city in a torrential downpour. This is Portland, a title card informs us, and the year is 1856. The setting of the movie has an enclosed feel very different from big sky Westerns, as we pass through massive old growth forests (it was shot -- in gorgeous dark Technicolor -- on location near Medford) that are occasionally interrupted by volcanic crags frequently seen in the distance looming over the puny human conflicts. The forest setting links the film to the frontier novels of James Fennimore Cooper, and perhaps it's no coincidence that Tourneur's equally great director father, Maurice, directed an adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans in 1920, although Canyon Passage is actually based on the novel by the Oregon writer (and University of Oregon grad -- go, Ducks!), Ernest Haycox.
Canyon Passage is very much a frontier story, and there's much commentary on establishing settlements in the face of Indian resistance. One of the other unusual aspects of the movie is that it is positively bristling with commentary from many different characters, including bystanders who are given a philosophical or resonant expository line in passing. The philosophizing gets very literary, although it is all very blunt and plain-spoken at the same time. Early on, the protagonist, Logan Stuart (Dana Andrews), tells a gold assayer, "A man can choose his own gods, Cornelius. What are yours?" One of the odder things about the way the characters talk to each other, however, is that it often seems that they're talking to themselves, because there's no response, or the response is only another unanswered question, as when Lucy (Susan Hayward) asks Logan, "Is that what makes you so restless and discontented, Logan? Or is it a woman?" and Logan only replies, "Must it always be a woman?"
While Logan is the protagonist, he is really only first amongst equals, and every character gets developed and gets a chance to speak his or her mind, so much so that -- again, unusually -- it feels as though no character is really the center of the story. Not only is the movie bristling with commentary, but it is just as restless and discontented as Logan, always on the move and packing an amazing amount of story into its 92 minutes. There's a kind of compression and density and richness that gives the film a very novelistic feel. At the same time, just as no character is the center, neither is there a central story or plotline. Again strangely, it's as though the center of the movie is the lack of a center, that it's about the instability and uncertainty of life and plans, "the trouble that always comes," as one character puts it.
Different events definitely seem to be commenting on each other. For example, one of the bravura set-pieces is a house-raising where all the settlers in the area come to build a log cabin for a pair of newlyweds. There is much commentary in this sequence on settling down and becoming part of a mutually-reinforcing community. Ben Dance (Andy Devine) points out that he has put two doors in the house, and jokes, "You can get out either side, in case you get in trouble with Indians or your woman." Later, the Indians themselves show up and express their unhappiness with the new homestead. Ben again explains it, "It's the same old story. They don't mind us coming here. It's like he says, Mother Earth is for all. What they don't like is the cabin. That makes the land ours." But the settlers assert their right to make a living. For them, the new couple mean another member of the group to stave off the Indians.
Thus the bustling, joyous sense of community in this sequence is already counterpoised with a sense of probable conflict with another community that is literally losing ground. Later, we get yet another reading of the nature of community when the townmembers of Jacksonville, the mining town where most of the movie takes place, insist that Logan fight the resident bully, Honey Bragg (the amazing Ward Bond). (The names in the movie would be another fascinating study. Lucy's last name is Overmire, and Logan's crotchety British comptroller is named Clenchfield.) "You might as well go," says the one man Greek Chorus, Hi Linnet (Hoagy Carmichael, who also sings four songs in the film). "The town won't have it any other way." Both Logan and Bragg feel contempt for the eager, sadistic townspeople, but they are compelled by the demands of community to do their will.
There's a deep sense of fatalism running through the film. "He's not responsible for his character, and neither am I for mine," says Lucy's fiance, George Camrose (Brian Donlevy). "It's their land and we're on it and they don't forget it," says Ben Dance of the Indians, knowing it means war. "In some other country, he might have made the grade," Logan says of a man whose weakness for gambling leads to him to commit murder and then to be killed in an act of frontier justice in turn. When Logan tries to protect this weak friend despite his crimes, he explains that friendship is based on "Something deeper than reason."
It's a good description for the great sense of mystery pervading the film. Everybody has their reasons, everybody has their philosophy, but nobody has the final answer, everybody makes mistakes, and nobody has the moral highground. Underneath it all is restlessness, discontent, and change, "the trouble that always comes." "It's a thin margin between what could be and what is," Logan says with typical fatalism. Just as in another country, the weak man might have made the grade, in that country Logan's restlessness might be his undoing rather than his salvation. No matter where, death is a constant threat, and nobody can stave it off forever. All Logan can do is keep moving, whatever his reasons.
Out of the Past is a movie I never get tired of watching. Often, I revisit it just for the flow of visual imagery, not for its famously over-complicated and rambling plot. As Scorsese says of one scene, "where any other director would have pumped music into the background and cut to close-ups of a struggle, Tourneur lets us listen to the rushing water of the river below and shoots the action mostly in long shot, giving it a strange, dreamlike inevitability." I can already see, after two viewings, that Canyon Passage has a similar appeal, as it moves through the dark labyrinth of the forest and discovers here and there a pure, roaring cataract of foamy-green water bridged by fallen trees in an ancient state of decay. It's as though Tourneur has captured a dream Oregon from my childhood -- a dream of wonderment, and of resignment to love and death.
Tourneur is -- everyone who knows his work will tell you -- an elusive figure from Hollywood's studio era. He is best known for the moody horror thrillers he made with Val Lewton at RKO, particularly Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and for the classic film noir, Out of the Past (1947). Fans of horror probably also know his Night of the Demon (1957), which is apparently the last great film he made before his largely unsuccessful career went completely off the rails and into television. His movies are difficult to see these days, so I was utterly thrilled to see Canyon Passage listed in the contents of this grab-bag collection.
Part of Tourneur's elusiveness -- aside from the practical matter of seeing his films -- is that his artistry rests largely on its own reticence, in things that are missing or invisible or hidden in shadow, things that we usually don't notice or find difficult to articulate. Martin Scorsese has written that "Tourneur was an artist of atmospheres. For many directors, an atmosphere is something that is 'established,' setting the stage for the action to follow. For Tourneur it is the movie, and each of his films boasts a distinctive atmosphere, with a profound sensitivity to light and shadow, and a very unusual relationship between characters and environment -- the way people move through space in Tourneur movies, the way they simply handle objects, is always special, different from other films."
Canyon Passage is an unusual Western for a number of reasons. First of all, it's set in the mountains of Oregon, so it's more of a Pacific Northwestern than a classic Western. The opening credits run over a painterly shot of a frontier city in a torrential downpour. This is Portland, a title card informs us, and the year is 1856. The setting of the movie has an enclosed feel very different from big sky Westerns, as we pass through massive old growth forests (it was shot -- in gorgeous dark Technicolor -- on location near Medford) that are occasionally interrupted by volcanic crags frequently seen in the distance looming over the puny human conflicts. The forest setting links the film to the frontier novels of James Fennimore Cooper, and perhaps it's no coincidence that Tourneur's equally great director father, Maurice, directed an adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans in 1920, although Canyon Passage is actually based on the novel by the Oregon writer (and University of Oregon grad -- go, Ducks!), Ernest Haycox.
Canyon Passage is very much a frontier story, and there's much commentary on establishing settlements in the face of Indian resistance. One of the other unusual aspects of the movie is that it is positively bristling with commentary from many different characters, including bystanders who are given a philosophical or resonant expository line in passing. The philosophizing gets very literary, although it is all very blunt and plain-spoken at the same time. Early on, the protagonist, Logan Stuart (Dana Andrews), tells a gold assayer, "A man can choose his own gods, Cornelius. What are yours?" One of the odder things about the way the characters talk to each other, however, is that it often seems that they're talking to themselves, because there's no response, or the response is only another unanswered question, as when Lucy (Susan Hayward) asks Logan, "Is that what makes you so restless and discontented, Logan? Or is it a woman?" and Logan only replies, "Must it always be a woman?"
While Logan is the protagonist, he is really only first amongst equals, and every character gets developed and gets a chance to speak his or her mind, so much so that -- again, unusually -- it feels as though no character is really the center of the story. Not only is the movie bristling with commentary, but it is just as restless and discontented as Logan, always on the move and packing an amazing amount of story into its 92 minutes. There's a kind of compression and density and richness that gives the film a very novelistic feel. At the same time, just as no character is the center, neither is there a central story or plotline. Again strangely, it's as though the center of the movie is the lack of a center, that it's about the instability and uncertainty of life and plans, "the trouble that always comes," as one character puts it.
Different events definitely seem to be commenting on each other. For example, one of the bravura set-pieces is a house-raising where all the settlers in the area come to build a log cabin for a pair of newlyweds. There is much commentary in this sequence on settling down and becoming part of a mutually-reinforcing community. Ben Dance (Andy Devine) points out that he has put two doors in the house, and jokes, "You can get out either side, in case you get in trouble with Indians or your woman." Later, the Indians themselves show up and express their unhappiness with the new homestead. Ben again explains it, "It's the same old story. They don't mind us coming here. It's like he says, Mother Earth is for all. What they don't like is the cabin. That makes the land ours." But the settlers assert their right to make a living. For them, the new couple mean another member of the group to stave off the Indians.
Thus the bustling, joyous sense of community in this sequence is already counterpoised with a sense of probable conflict with another community that is literally losing ground. Later, we get yet another reading of the nature of community when the townmembers of Jacksonville, the mining town where most of the movie takes place, insist that Logan fight the resident bully, Honey Bragg (the amazing Ward Bond). (The names in the movie would be another fascinating study. Lucy's last name is Overmire, and Logan's crotchety British comptroller is named Clenchfield.) "You might as well go," says the one man Greek Chorus, Hi Linnet (Hoagy Carmichael, who also sings four songs in the film). "The town won't have it any other way." Both Logan and Bragg feel contempt for the eager, sadistic townspeople, but they are compelled by the demands of community to do their will.
There's a deep sense of fatalism running through the film. "He's not responsible for his character, and neither am I for mine," says Lucy's fiance, George Camrose (Brian Donlevy). "It's their land and we're on it and they don't forget it," says Ben Dance of the Indians, knowing it means war. "In some other country, he might have made the grade," Logan says of a man whose weakness for gambling leads to him to commit murder and then to be killed in an act of frontier justice in turn. When Logan tries to protect this weak friend despite his crimes, he explains that friendship is based on "Something deeper than reason."
It's a good description for the great sense of mystery pervading the film. Everybody has their reasons, everybody has their philosophy, but nobody has the final answer, everybody makes mistakes, and nobody has the moral highground. Underneath it all is restlessness, discontent, and change, "the trouble that always comes." "It's a thin margin between what could be and what is," Logan says with typical fatalism. Just as in another country, the weak man might have made the grade, in that country Logan's restlessness might be his undoing rather than his salvation. No matter where, death is a constant threat, and nobody can stave it off forever. All Logan can do is keep moving, whatever his reasons.
Out of the Past is a movie I never get tired of watching. Often, I revisit it just for the flow of visual imagery, not for its famously over-complicated and rambling plot. As Scorsese says of one scene, "where any other director would have pumped music into the background and cut to close-ups of a struggle, Tourneur lets us listen to the rushing water of the river below and shoots the action mostly in long shot, giving it a strange, dreamlike inevitability." I can already see, after two viewings, that Canyon Passage has a similar appeal, as it moves through the dark labyrinth of the forest and discovers here and there a pure, roaring cataract of foamy-green water bridged by fallen trees in an ancient state of decay. It's as though Tourneur has captured a dream Oregon from my childhood -- a dream of wonderment, and of resignment to love and death.
